Don't miss our latest articles and interviews. Sign up with your email address below to receive our newsletter, bi-weekly.
NATO & the Global Enduring Disorder
This project examines the coordination failures surrounding international approaches to climate change, tax havens, cryptocurrency, the crises in Ukraine, Syria, and Afghanistan, and more—seeking to move past merely problematizing failures—to proposing solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.
Erich J. Prince is the editor of Merion West. Erich has contributed to a variety of publications including The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Hartford Courant, The News & Observer, the Orlando Sentinel, and The Hill. He studied political science at Yale, completing his thesis on polarization in the United States Congress.
“There really hasn’t been anybody like him since he passed…This is why there are these long compilations of ‘Hitchslaps’ on YouTube. It’s why most of the tributes to him focus on his rhetorical prowess—and just his brilliance on the debate stage.”
“Regulating your own emotions is something most people are capable of doing…It doesn’t require you constantly expressing [a problem], thinking about it, [and] sharing it with everyone…There’s something about not fixating too much on your own problems and really dwelling on them but, instead, doing something.”
“We will be nothing like the way we are now. It will be like a night and day transformation. And it always does require violence because, as you said, that class or race enemy that stands in the way of future bliss simply has to be gotten rid of.”
“There is a lot of hope. Every time I go there and meet with the new generation, I think that they definitely want for their country to be a successful one. And that’s the conversation in Iraq. Most people have now forgotten about the war.”
“I’d be very surprised if a super intelligent AI a thousand years from now cannot recreate everything. Also, like so many other people, including Elon, I believe there’s probably a 50% chance we’re in a simulation. So, that would defeat the idea of death as well.”
“All of the sudden, I was on the phone with Mike Pence… ‘I just finished Old Abe last night, and I had to track you down and tell you how much I loved it, and it’s the best book about Lincoln I’ve ever read.’ And, for ten minutes, he just wanted to talk about Lincoln.”
“And my argument is that freedom and progress in the context of the cyborg era are actually inimical to women’s interests. They don’t make things better for any women, except [for] a very small, elite subset.”
“I’m not optimistic at all that campuses can be reformed. They certainly cannot be reformed from within…Academia is gone. It is a monoculture. It is a hermetically sealed bubble.”
“Scientific conferences are being determined based on sex and race. It’s going to slow down medical progress, and it is also going to put physicians in the ER and the operating room who are not the top qualified.”
“And, later in life, when I was dealing with my father coming out of prison and perhaps rekindling that relationship, I started to look at my experience slightly differently. I started sharing bits and pieces of my story with people and, to my surprise, found that some of the reactions were positive and even inspiring.”
“Sometimes, I would even dream about some of the people I had interviewed on the stories. And, so through the years, I had the idea to write a book and put it all together and try to return to some of the stories.”
“At the end of the day, it’s a pretty simple business that we’re in: We want to understand culture, we want to understand consumers’ thinking, and we’re just trying to answer why’s.”
“Every generation, we need to learn and relearn how thin the line can be between having a basically liberal society and a basically authoritarian society.”