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Morris takes on theories which "suggest that there is something unique about western culture". His argument is simple: "from the Mediterranean to the Yellow Sea," there were philosophers wrestling with the same questions "and finding similar answers" as Socrates. "Socrates was part of a huge pattern, not a unique giant who sent the West down a superior path". What can I say? Does Morris, a specialized Professor of Classics, seriously believe that Indian and Chinese thinkers were reasoning in ways similar to Europeans? First of all, one of the exceptional qualities about the West is the continuous sequence of original thinkers in ancient Greece, in Rome, in Christian and in Modern Europe. The mere appearance of a Socrates at one point in time is not the issue. Find me in ancient Asia a continuous line of original thinkers

Morris brings up the Renaissance only to tell us that there were renaissances everywhere. The revivals ones sees in Asia history were always revivals of the same traditional ways of thinking; imagine Europeans for ever writing textual studies of Plato

Christianity? -- well, Morris says that all religions are the same. Christianity and Islam are fundamentally different religious traditions, and not only because the former has exhibited a far richer scholarly tradition, which is rather visible in the immediate fusion of Greek philosophy, Roman Law, and Christian theology in the first centuries AD, not to mention the Middle Ages, but because in Islam the idea that Allah has limits to his own powers, by making an everlasting covenant, with human beings, is unthinkable, in that Allah is viewed as absolutely transcendent; whereas for Christianity the authority of the earthly rulers is limited by God's law, which both grants rights to every person and holds that God is conterminous with Reason. There is no self-limitation to the sovereignty of Islamic rulers, and for this reason Islam has faced great difficulties producing a secular political order subject to constitutional checks and balances.

He's a frequent flyer who, in his power wheelchair, has traveled to 46 countries.

He also started a website called Wheelchair Travel and hosts a travel podcast.

Now a new policy from one airline could limit the ability of some people such as Morris to fly. American Airlines, the largest airline in the United States, put in place a limit on the weight of a wheelchair, and now many power wheelchairs, such as the one Morris uses, are deemed too heavy to fly on smaller regional jets.

Last March, a crowd gathered in Downtown Brooklyn to celebrate a new name for Gold Street: Ida B. Wells Place. Jacob Morris, the tireless activist behind the renaming effort, addressed the group.

A force behind the renaming of some 40 streets and monuments in New York after prominent Black New Yorkers, including the performer Paul Robeson, the civil rights activist Ella Baker and the Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, he likes to talk and he likes to nudge, both of which come in handy when dealing with community boards and city bureaucracies.

For more than 15 years, Mr. Morris has been on a mission to increase Black representation in public spaces. The end result tends to look impressive, but the work itself is tedious, requiring hundreds of hours at local government meetings that few have the patience to attend, much less engage in.

This book is different from others that I have read on the subject. Its scope is massive, for a start, covering over ten millennia of human history via painstaking analysis of archaeological records, an incredibly ambitious sweep which is essential to Morris’ thesis. At the very beginning, Morris separates the ‘East vs West’ speculators into two rival camps: the ‘long-term’ theorists (i.e. Westerners have always been preternaturally or genetically born to rule others); and the ‘short-term’ theorists (i.e. Westerners gained some breakaway advantage in the relatively recent past that allowed them to decisively break away from their Eastern competitors). He then contends that both of these theories are wrong.

Dividing the world into its ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ cores of industrial civilisation, he pits the Mediterranean-based core (encompassing the Assyrian, Persian, Roman, and ultimately British and American empires) against the Chinese core (encompassing China, Japan, Korea and other powers).

So, what about China and the West? Again, Morris puts this down to time. Agriculture first arose around 10 000 BCE in the so-called ‘hilly flanks’ of Asia; it was not invented in China until around 8500 BCE. This one and a half millennium advantage—combined with a more diverse variety of animals and crops capable of domestication—was enough to give the West its required head start. After this favourable beginning, the West has retained its small technological lead over the East (with one relatively brief exception around the first millennium AD, when China briefly grasped the lead).

East and west have always been geopolitical constructions whose shifting cultural meanings - from the conflict between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity in the early Middle Ages to the current obsession with China - reflect changing patterns of power. A classical archaeologist by training, Ian Morris begins this highly ambitious volume by returning to prehistoric times, when east and west were geographical expressions. For Morris, "the west" means the societies that expanded "from the original core in south-west Asia to encompass the Mediterranean Basin and Europe, and in the last few centuries America and Australasia, too", while "the east expanded from its original core between China's Yellow and Yangtze rivers, and today stretches from Japan in the north into the countries of Indochina in the south".

he offers a materialist explanation, with the aim of developing nothing less than a law-governed science of history.

In Morris's account, the ultimate origin of the west's primacy is to be found in the domestication of plants and animals that occurred in the western core around 9500BC, some 2,000 years before it did in the east. He is far from claiming that geography is destiny in any simple sense. As he points out, the meaning of geography changes along with technological and social development. Five thousand years ago, society was developing most rapidly in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and the geographical location of Portugal, Spain, France and Britain - "stuck out from Europe into the Atlantic" - was a great disadvantage. But when, 500 years ago, new kinds of ships appeared that could cross what had always been impassable oceans, sticking out into the Atlantic became highly advantageous

There are two broad schools of thought on why the West rules. Proponents of ‘Long-Term Lock-In’ theories such as Jared Diamond suggest that from time immemorial, some critical factor – geography, climate, or culture perhaps – made East and West unalterably different, and determined that the industrial revolution would happen in the West and push it further ahead of the East. But the East led the West between 500 and 1600, so this development can’t have been inevitable; and so proponents of ‘Short-Term Accident’ theories argue that Western rule was a temporary aberration that is now coming to an end, with Japan, China, and India resuming their rightful places on the world stage. However, as the West led for 9,000 of the previous 10,000 years, it wasn’t just a temporary aberration. So, if we want to know why the West rules, we need a whole new theory. Ian Morris, boldly entering the turf of Jared Diamond and Niall Ferguson, provides the broader approach that is necessary, combining the textual historian’s focus on context, the anthropological archaeologist’s awareness of the deep past, and the social scientist’s comparative methods to make sense of the past, present and future – in a way no one has ever done before.

“The nearest thing to a unified field theory of history we are ever likely to get. With wit and wisdom, Ian Morris deploys the techniques and insights of the new ancient history to address the biggest of all historical questions: Why on earth did the West beat the Rest?

It is not, he reveals, differences of race or culture, or even the strivings of great individuals, that explain Western dominance. It is the effects of geography on the everyday efforts of ordinary people as they deal with crises of resources, disease, migration, and climate.

This book could have been titled The Measure of History because that is the seminal new idea in the book. Morris creates an objective measure for comparing civilizations’ ability to get things done. He attempts to make his rules for measuring civilizations as simple as possible, but no simpler. He seeks objective qualities for measuring social development, and after analyzing several of these  qualities he settles on: 1. Energy capture per person, 2. Size of the largest city, 3. War-making potential, 4. Information technology. Morris sums these qualities together equally, year by year, over a 16,000-year period; then he charts and compares them.

His objective method tracks the total power of civilizations. There will be endless quibbling over the details, which are perforce a little vague, but the overall charts would probably change very little even if a perfect measure were found.

The importance of the ability of humans to extract power from natural resources becomes apparent with these charts. Throughout all but the last few hundred years of history people were dependent upon muscle power to create the goods and services they needed; but with the advent of coal-powered steam engines humans were able to multiply their energy production and consumption at any location, which was then converted into more and better things. This has created tremendous abundance for a vastly larger human population.

For Ian Morris, an archeologist by training, "maps versus chaps" is what it's about, and if we accept his perkily scientistic premise that "chaps" are the same the world over, "maps" – geography – is all that is left.

As a work of synthesis the book is phenomenal, but breadth isn't everything, and the closer we get to modernity the more insecure Morris's expertise, and the weaker his theory. Any suggestion that the west may have entrenched its lead for anything other than material reasons is studiously avoided.

His theorem runs as follows. There is no biological reason why the West came to dominate. People in large groups are much the same everywhere – lazy, greedy and scared, and always looking for easier, more profitable and safer ways to do things, “in the process building stronger states, trading further afield, settling in greater cities”. He portrays the rise and fall of empires as amoeba-like movements, in which individuals have little long-term influence. Collapses follow the same cruel pattern: conquest, riches, babies, competition, starvation. The struggle to control the core brings in people from the margin, who then take over – viz the Phoenicians, the Mongols, the Goths, the Huns.

Geography, Morris argues, is the main reason why the West rules. An early lead was established at the end of the last Ice Age by nomadic hunter-gatherers from Africa who settled in an agriculturally benign area known as the Hilly Flanks (modern Israel, Syria, Iraq). Farming replaced foraging; from then on, Western rule by 2000 was “a long-term probability”. Not that China didn’t catch up. In fact, for 1,200 years (between 550 to 1776), China pulled ahead of the West. Marco Polo described China’s commerce as being “on such a stupendous scale that no one who hears tell of it without seeing it for himself can possibly credit it”. Sound familiar? Long before we did, the Chinese had compasses, paper, guns – and maritime superiority. Between 1405 and 1433 a fleet of 300 ships sailed as far afield as East Africa. So why weren’t there Chinese conquistadors? Geography again. America was twice as far away as from Europe – and in 1424 long-distance voyages were banned.

So gun production, in fact, didn’t herald the start of the industrial revolution? The process did give rise to some important technology, but in terms of impact on the growth of the economy it was tiny. The real secret of American growth was its mass-produced natural goods such as meat, grain, oil and timber. We had portable steam-turbine sawmills that could saw logs into rough planks as the trees came down. Everything that we did became mass-produced.

We are now producing shale gas. The output, in terms of energy, will soon be as great as Saudi Arabia’s oil output is right now. In the 2020s all of North America will be energy independent and America will probably be a net exporter. We are seeing steel and chemical companies moving back from overseas. I

one reasonable forecast shows a million manufacturing-related jobs out of the gas boom by 2017. That’s $350 billion of economic activity driven by this, a 2% addition to annual GDP. I think there’s a good case for optimism.

Scholars have been applying these source critical tools to the origins of Christianity and Judaism for going on two centuries. But it only within the last couple decades that scholars have begun to apply them to the origins of Islam

Many still believe that Islam was, as the historian Ernest Renan once put it, “born in the full light of history.” But this is far from the case. Montgomery Watt’s standard short biography of Muhammad is the product of deep scholarship but operates largely within the canonical historiography of the Islamic tradition

The level of detail we seem to know about Muhammad’s life in Mecca and Medina, his prophetic call and early battles is astonishing. But there is a big problem. This level of detail is based on source traditions that don’t meet any kind of modern historical muste

our Constitution has at least one radical feature: It isn’t designed for a society with economic inequality.

Our Constitution was not built for a country with so much wealth concentrated at the very top nor for the threats that invariably accompany it: oligarchs and populist demagogues.

From the ancient Greeks to the American founders, statesmen and political philosophers were obsessed with the problem of economic inequality. Unequal societies were subject to constant strife — even revolution. The rich would tyrannize the poor, and the poor would revolt against the rich.

You probably use a device with a chip made by TSMC every day, but TSMC does not actually design or market those chips. That would have sounded completely absurd before the existence of TSMC. Back then, companies designed chips that they manufactured themselves. Chang’s radical idea for a great semiconductor company was one that would exclusively manufacture chips that its customers designed. By not designing or selling its own chips, TSMC never competed with its own clients. In exchange, they wouldn’t have to bother running their own fabrication plants, or fabs, the expensive and dizzyingly sophisticated facilities where circuits are carved on silicon wafers.

The innovative business model behind his chip foundry would transform the industry and make TSMC indispensable to the global economy. Now it’s the company that Americans rely on the most but know the least about

I wanted to know more about his decision to start a new company when he could have stopped working altogether. What I discovered was that his age was one of his assets. Only someone with his experience and expertise could have possibly executed his plan for TSMC. 

Political correctness has become a major bugaboo of the right in the past decade, a rallying cry against all that has gone wrong with liberalism and America. Conservative writers fill volumes complaining how political correctness stifles free expression and promotes bunk social theories about “power structures” based on patriarchy, race and mass victimhood. Forbes charged that it “stifles freedom of speech.” The Daily Caller has gone so far as to claim that political correctness “kills Americans.”

But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.

Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn’t support the war effort enough.

Everyone wants to be at the trough for this one because Hillary is likely to raise, and more important, spend more than $1 billion on her campaign.

The Clintons appreciate the fact that Brock, like Morris, is a take-no-prisoners type with the ethical compass of a jackal. Baked in the tactics of the right, Brock will never believe that negative coverage results from legitimate shortcomings. Instead, it’s all personal, all false, and all a war.

Hillary’s inability to dispense with brass-knuckle, fanatical acolytes like Brock shows that she still has an insecure streak that requires Borgia-like blind loyalty, and can’t distinguish between the real vast right-wing conspiracy and the voices of legitimate concern.

Powerful and damning accounts of the Bush administration’s determination to work what Vice President Dick Cheney called “the dark side” and its elaborate efforts to legalize torture (including arduous attempts to narrowly define torture as leading to “serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage” is likely to result) can be found in two essential books, “The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib,” edited by Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, and “Standard Operating Procedure,” by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris

An important personal perspective is now provided by Eric Fair’s candid and chilling new book, “Consequence,” which is at once an agonized confession of his own complicity as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib and an indictment of the system that enabled and tried to justify torture.

In 2007, Mr. Fair says, he confessed everything to a lawyer from the Department of Justice and two agents from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, providing pictures, letters, names, firsthand accounts, locations and techniques. He was not prosecuted. “We tortured people the right way,” he writes, “following the right procedures, and used the approved techniques.”

the slaveholders did not need to invent the Electoral College to fend off direct popular election of the president. Direct election did have some influential supporters, including Gouverneur Morris of New York, author of the Constitution’s preamble. But the convention, deeply suspicious of what one Virginian in another context called “the fury of democracy,” crushed the proposal on two separate occasions.

how much did the slaveholding states rush to support the concept of presidential electors? Not at all. In the initial vote over having electors select the president, the only states voting “nay” were North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia — the three most ardently proslavery states in the convention.

outherners didn’t embrace the idea of electors because it might enlarge slavery’s power; they feared, as the North Carolinian Hugh Williamson, who was not a slaveholder, remarked, that the men chosen as electors would be corruptible “persons not occupied in the high offices of government.” Pro-elite concerns were on their minds

At issue are essential questions of how Hollywood should operate in a world of massive global entertainment conglomerates. Are the middlemen who unite the creative and business communities increasingly central to the birthing of ideas, and should they thus be allowed — even encouraged — to expand their role?

Or does such expansion amount to profiteering in contradiction of their purpose, and tasks should be limited to the specific goal of landing clients jobs?

the writers say agencies are sharing revenue in a highly inequitable way, leaving many creative people to fight for scraps

War is mass murder, and yet, in perhaps the greatest paradox in history, war has nevertheless been the undertaker’s worst enemy. Contrary to what the song says, war has been good for something: over the long run, it has made humanity safer and richer.

There are four parts to the case I will make.

The first is that by fighting wars, people have created larger, more organized societies that have reduced the risk that their members will die violently.