July 8, 2026

In February 1900, the presidents of Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, Yale, Clark, Catholic University, Princeton, Stanford, and the Universities of Chicago, Pennsylvania, California, Michigan, and Wisconsin met in Chicago to create the American Association of Universities (AAU), an organization dictated to “matters of common interest relating to graduate study.” [1]

Graduate education had been maturing in the United States over the previous four decades, as students, professors, and administrators began adopting “scientific” educational models pioneered in Germany, though adapting them to a far less centralized and state-controlled environment. [2]

Columbia was an early entrant. Its School of Political Science was founded in 1880 by John W. Burgess, a pioneering academic (and proud white supremacist). [3] Among its first students was William Archibald Dunning, who earned his B.A. (1881), M.A. (1884), and Ph.D. (1885) from the institution. Dunning went on to serve as a professor at Columbia for forty years. He also served as president of the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association. [4] Influenced by Burgess, Dunning’s graduate work, and later his professional work, were almost exclusively devoted to the study of Reconstruction, [5] with Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-1877 (1907) his central document. But Dunning’s most significant contribution was as mentor and guide to a generation of scholars on the topic, including U.B. Phillips, Walter Lynwood Fleming, [6] Charles W. Ramsdell, James W. Garner, Joseph G. deRoulhac Hamilton, and a further focus of this study, C. Mildred Thompson, who would go on to serve as dean of Vassar College. This group is today known collectively as The Dunning School. According to W. E. B. Du Bois’ accounting and description, the Dunning scholars were responsible for 16 studies of Reconstruction in former Confederate states published between 1895 and 1935, all produced using the same methods and carrying the same thesis: “first, endless sympathy with the South; second, ridicule, contempt or silence for the Negro; third, a judicial attitude towards the North … [which] eventually saw its mistake and retreated.” [7]

AS OF THIS WRITING, the storied East Wing of the White House is 10 days demolished. Without reviews or permissions, President Donald Trump ordered the demolition to make way for a 90,000 square foot gilded ballroom. To many, this action, taken without consultation or the permission of any authorizing agency, felt like a physical assault. Most criticism has been directed toward its Versailles-by-Hobby-Lobby interior, a gold-encrusted space intended for little else but to impress a rotating list of 999 high-rolling guests, who will then be impressed to pay tribute to the ballroom’s master. But let’s not let the interior’s tackiness, or its intent as a grift machine, distract us from the addition’s completely out-of-scale Imperial Rome-inspired exterior, for it is the exterior that provides a good example of how Trump and his minions so generously apply the lube of racism to allow the administration’s con to slide.

How is the exterior racist? In a word, eugenics, an ideology spawned at the end of the nineteenth century, nurtured in the first decades of the twentieth, and on full display in biology textbooks into the 1970s.

June 17, 2025

This is the story of Physical Culture, the pioneering health and prosperity pulp magazine, the advertisers who supported it, the messianic self-promoter who founded it, and the metastasizing exploitation culture it helped spawn.

Bernarr MacFadden (1868-1955) loved few bodies more than his own. Here he serves as the model in an ad for his idiosyncratic hair treatment plan from a 1901 edition of Physical Culture, the founding magazine of his publishing empire.

A cleaned-out colon, a lustrous head of hair, a Caruso-like voice? Whatever you needed to clear your way to success and acceptance among the select, you’d find it for sale in the pages of Physical Culture, a monthly health and prosperity pulp foundational to a publishing empire that, across the first decades of the twentieth century, rivaled that of Henry Luce and William Randolf Hearst.

Physical Culture was the creation of Bernarr MacFadden, a man who, after withstanding a childhood of poverty, orphanhood, and a vaccination-gone-wrong case of measles, had, through a self-directed program of exercise, fresh air, and dietary experimentation, fashioned himself into a leaner variant of the strongmen then wowing circus sideshows and international exhibitions. Educated in salesmanship and sexual spectacle through a 6-month gig at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, MacFadden, after flailing through several failed business efforts, trailed through Great Britain on the heels of pioneering bodybuilder Eugen Sandow, then, at around age 30, returned to New York, rented an office, copied Sandow’s schtick, and set to work on his pioneering magazine.

February 2, 2025 [updated April 12, 2025]

Seeking to cement their status, a new generation of “super geniuses” is reanimating a pseudoscience that, when last deployed, helped pave a path to the Holocaust.

After co-authoring the Mosaic web browser and co-founding and flipping Netscape, Marc Andreessen converted millions into billions through the investment firm Andreessen Horowitz. In that time, he also became a super genius, consuming vast quantities of popular science and Ayn Rand-adjacent sociopathy and transmuting it into a power-justifying philosophy. Joining with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and a host of other wealthy secondary-source thinkers, Andreessen, along with his TESCREAL [1] brothers, believes a transhuman utopia, [2] or, more accurately, a near utopia, [3] is the destiny of our species, and that AI is our vehicle. [4] But this will only happen, Andreessen warns, if progress is not limited by bureaucratic constraints, particularly those imposed by environmentalists. Oh, also, only if smart people like him start having more children.

It’s all old wine in new bottles.

February 6, 2025: Includes index of related articles

Eugenics has come out of the conservative closet. In retreat for nearly 60 years (though never so far away as to be out of shouting distance), the ideology is roaring back. Today, arguably, eugenic thinking propels many of the right’s current obsessions, from DEI, to the dismantling of USAID, to vaccine skepticism, to immigration restriction, to pronatalism.

As Omar Wasow wrote on BlueSky, “eugenics is the Rosetta Stone for so much of Trump’s agenda.”

October 21, 2023

Evidently, the “new” cause of tech millionaires and billionaires like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk is the survival of our species, at any cost, until it reaches a “transhuman” plane. Once reached, humans, or I guess post-humans, will push out into the universe physically and virtually for the next 10e100 years, and perhaps beyond.

Yes, it sounds like bad science fiction, but this idea, labeled “longtermism,” is being lustily promoted by a few very serious thinkers, including Oxford philosopher William MacAskill, research fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, and Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute, and has managed to attract, as of 2023, at least $46 billion in committed funding.

Émile P. Torres, a one-time acolyte and now very public critic, calls longtermism “quite possibly the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today.” According to Torres, longtermism is “straight out of the playbook” of Julian Huxley, who carried his thinly veiled faith in eugenics to his death in 1975. And longtermerists are not even veiled.