While in Tokyo for the Summer Olympics, I instead saw the spectacle of Japan’s aspiring new elites.

The Japanese Empire founded Kenkoku University to create new pan-Asian elites. Despite their own defeat, they succeeded.

In the midst of Japan’s chaotic Sengoku era, a radical Buddhist sect carved out a new regime. Then came the real test.

Fundamental change only comes from outside established paradigms. Without room for new founders, progress is impossible.

In postwar France, Charles de Gaulle unified executive power with a technocratic state and a national story. His model still endures around the world.

The threat of mass panic lurks behind our mechanisms of political control. What if we were allowed to fear?

Reject the marginal gains. Change the balance of power.

To understand the return of China’s party-state, look no further than its love affair with ketamine.

Science has become a bank for political legitimacy. It hasn’t survived intact.

New discoveries are adding millennia to our past. The implications should change our future.

Reforming America’s vanguard city is a national imperative.

They came from the internet in their war-memes and none could stand against them.

China’s talented message board theorists crafted an industrial vision now embraced by Xi. Will their successors tear it all down?

The Industrial Revolution stopped before it was ever completed. The aftermath is not a clean and developed world, but lost knowledge and civilizational decline.

Atomic physicist Leo Szilard thought that scientists could rule the world better. The insiders who pushed him aside demonstrate what it actually takes to run the show.

Existential problems confront our society. Our response will be the foundation of a new golden age of governance.

Our governments will fail to respond effectively to climate change. A new world order will arise through the coming period of climate chaos.

The late Qing scholar Yan Fu saw liberalism as a grand project to create virtuous people and a dynamic society. His ideas failed in China, but could succeed in America.