The history of Post-Soviet Russia provides one of the best study grounds to explore what can go wrong in democratisation. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West was confident that former communist countries could easily become liberal democracies by giving them free market capitalism, the rest would follow…

The psychological assessment designed by Meyers Briggs (MBTI) has become the single most talked about thing in Korea. One of the lures of MBTI is certainly that most people find the description quite accurate and the excitement of finding out that your best friend has the same or a similar…

In my research regarding the evolutionary origins of personality, I have come across the work of Peter J. Rentfrow again and again. “ Divided We Stand: Three Psychological Regions of the United States and Their Political, Economic, Social, and Health Correlates “ is a 2013 article of his and his…

How Civil Wars Start (2022), a recent book by Barbara F. Walter has been criticised by mainstream media that an alarmist approach is not helpful to an America in crisis. However, the Jan. 6 insurrection showed that what had been unthinkable before may come true. In any case, it’s a…

Many historians and anthropologists have noted that the biblical fall of man and expulsion from paradise reflects the transition from foraging to farming. God tells Adam that from now on he has to toil the earth in order to eat bread. Adam and Eve, rather than being the first people…

History is mostly about settled people, and when it’s about nomads it’s usually about them from the perspective of settled people who typically describe them as barbarians or savages. The reason is simple: nomads don’t have writing systems. Anthony Sattin in Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World (2022)…

The Coming Civil War (2018) by Tom Kawczynski is a challenging read any liberal like me, as it is full of conservative clichés about liberals, facts that clearly are none (Republicans are more eager to end wars abroad than Democrats), psychotic ideas (Clinton would have won the presidency if she…

Childhood living is easy to do, sang the Rolling Stones. Looking back in history with the abolishment of child labour, physical punishment and huge other improvements in children’s rights this may seem more true than ever before in history. Often it seems that we are spoiling our children too much…

If you want to get an idea of what it is like to be an orchid child, look no further than Loners: The Life Path of Unusual Children (1995) by Sula Wolff written some 20 years before the term became widespread. The book reports on a longitudinal study of schizoid…