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The Ancient City - Erik Torenberg

eriktorenberg.substack.com · 1,764 words · saved by 1 readers

Housekeeping: This week on Moment of Zen, we spoke to Noah Smith about YIMBYism, California Land Use, and The best run city. For Econ 102, Noah and I did a deep dive on China. On Media Empires, I spoke with Sahil Bloom about scaling a newsletter to ten different businesses. And on In the Arena, we turned the tables on our host Jesse Genet and asked her about her crisis when selling her company. So far the most insightful book I've read on the deep history of how we’ve operated for 99.9% of human civilization is "The Ancient City" by Fustel de Coulanges. Turns out that the original form of Western society was a fascist-communist cult that joined ethnicity, religion, culture, and space. Every form of Western society since is a heavily diluted version of that. Who knew? What Fustel describes is a pattern of emergent three-layer societies, from family to tribe to city. Each grouping was a conjoined phenomenon of religion, culture, polity, place, and ethnicity. There was no concept of indiv

The Ancient City A scattered book review Erik Torenberg Jul 29, 2023 30 6 1 Share Housekeeping: This week on Moment of Zen, we spoke to Noah Smith about YIMBYism, California Land Use, and The best run city. For Econ 102, Noah and I did a deep dive on China. On Media Empires, I spoke with Sahil Bloom about scaling a newsletter to ten different businesses . And on In the Arena, we turned the tables on our host Jesse Genet and asked her about her crisis when selling her company. So far the most insightful book I've read on the deep history of how we’ve operated for 99.9% of human civilization is

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