I just came back from a trip to China, during which I and two friends traveled along the section of the Silk Route that passes through PRC. We started in Luoyang, then went to Xian, made three stops in the Gansu corridor, and finally reached Turpan and Urumqi in Xinjiang. Our main int

Our recent article in Nature, Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history has been generally very well received, but this week we got slammed with two critical articles, both published as preprints on PsyArchive. It will take us some time to carefully evaluate t

“To defeat populism, America needs its own Macron–a charismatic leader who can make centrism cool” wrote Max Boot in June 2017, one month after Emmanuel Macron was elected president in France. I always felt that calling Macron a “centrist” is a remarkable misrepresentation of hi

Today is one hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia. The armed uprising against the provisional government, led by the Bolsheviks, began on the night of November 6/7, 1917 (October 24/25 according to the Old Style) and culminated in the storm of the Winter Palace th

(originally published here) A political scientist friend sent me this opinion piece in New York Times: Why China Will Reclaim Siberia. The author, unfortunately, shows little knowledge of the subject he writes about. For example, he writes: The border, all 2,738 miles of it, is the le

  Suppose there are two countries, comparable in all aspects of quality of life, except in one of them there are 13,400 intentional homicides every year, and in the other the number is 56. Which one would you prefer to live in, if you had the choice? The reason I am asking this q