America Is a Pacific Power — You Just Need the Right Map
Americans don’t usually think of the United States as a Pacific country. California is where the country seems to stop, Hawaii floats in a little box somewhere off […]
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Japan’s Oil Bunker
Japan spent the first decades of the twentieth century becoming extraordinarily good at carrying bunkers. The country that entered the twentieth century was dramatically different from the Japan […]
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The Era of Information Junk
Anyone who has cleaned out the house of an elderly relative knows that finding something and learning something are not necessarily the same thing. You open a closet […]
Putin Goes to the Kurils
On August 13, 2026, Vladimir Putin traveled to Iturup, called Etorofu by Japan, becoming the first Russian president to visit the disputed Kuril Islands. He toured a school, […]
Why Does Everybody Keep Caring About Yap?
Every few decades, somebody looks at a map of the Pacific Ocean and remembers Yap exists. Yap is a small group of islands in the western Pacific, today […]
How the Washington Naval Conference Turned Into a Poker Game
In November 1921, representatives of the world’s major naval powers arrived in Washington to negotiate what amounted to one of the most expensive games on Earth. The United […]
John Daly and the Bunker Problem
Robin Williams famously made one of the funniest observations about the game of golf by reducing it down to it’s absurd fundamentals. Someone took a perfectly good landscape […]
Your North Star Comes Before AI
Many discussions about artificial intelligence begin with the wrong question. People ask, What can AI do? The more important question is, What is the human trying to accomplish? […]
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