Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the Russia essays.

I am a contrarian by nature. When I hear anyone espouse an idea or a belief, my mind immediately floats to the opposite. “Perhaps what you are saying is in fact not true at all. I could see…

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of the Russia essays.

Several days into my trip, I had a meeting with Vladmir Zhirinovsky, one of the most famous, infamous Russian politicians of the past twenty years. In 1990 he founded the Liberal Democrat Party (LDPR), the first real independent political…

Read Part 1 of the Russia essays.

On the thirteen hour flight from Los Angeles to Moscow last month, I ignored the various entertainments that Aeroflot was offering, and concentrated on two things: finishing a book I had started on Russian history (Russia: The Once and Future Empire, by…

Almost everyone is drawn somehow to the exotic, whatever is most different to what they know. It is the root of many a seduction. In California, where I grew up, the exotic was mostly represented by Asia. In the 1970s, this meant dabbling in yoga, Buddhism, Taoism, the I…

I forgot something important that you must remember until you go six feet under…. There are only two kinds of people in the whole wide world, grifters and suckers…. let their stupid brains stay asleep in their chump world. Keep your own brain honed to razor sharpness…

A few weeks ago I gave a talk at a company convention in southern California. This company has offices worldwide, is very successful in its line of work, but on the horizon are some dangers. They brought me in to address those dangers. The specifics here do not matter…

In 1984, I spent several months in Nicaragua, trying to write several articles on the war between the U.S.-backed contras and the Sandinistas. I had been ostensibly sent there by the magazine Mother Jones, but the article–on Americans living there and working for the Sandinistas–was never published, for reasons…

In almost all board games–chess, go (wei chi), backgammon, etc. –the corners spell defeat and death. In each game, the corners are configured differently, but as someone who plays them all, I know the feeling that first hits me in the gut as I sense that I am finding…

For the past twelve years, I have this ritual in which every December I reread some work of Machiavelli. This year it was the Discourses. What struck me this time was how many ideas in the Discourses dominate my own way of thinking. I read it some twenty years…

Originally I had proposed to do my third book on the history of human stupidity. It would basically be an offshoot of the transgression part of the 48 Laws, each one of those being a form of stupidity. I had the book mapped out in an interesting way, but…