The Long Read

This week: a philosophical reckoning with Ernst Jünger's path from the trenches through Nazism and into late-century respectability, an economist erased from history whose ideas were smuggled into bestselling fiction, and a portrait of Himalayan trekking guides whose livelihoods are shifting as the glaciers they've spent decades reading disappear beneath them.

Chartbook 472 Neo-Burgundian technocracy: Ernst Jünger's reckoning with nihilism.

Adam Tooze takes on Ernst Jünger — the German writer, soldier, and aesthete of violence whose long life ran from the trenches of the First World War through complicity with Nazism to a strange, courtly late-century respectability — and uses him as a lens on how intellectuals rationalize their way through catastrophe. Tooze is interested in the texture of Jünger's thinking, the way nihilism gets dressed up as technocratic order, and how a person can watch the century's worst violence unfold and still find language sophisticated enough to obscure his own role in it. The piece rewards patience: it moves through Jünger's diaries, his shifting political commitments, and the postwar reception that turned him into an elder statesman of European letters despite everything. Dense, morally serious, and unwilling to let its subject off easy or reduce him to caricature. Anyone interested in how respectable people made peace with fascism, and what that says about the technocratic impulse now, will find this unsettling in useful ways.

Chartbook (Adam Tooze) · 30 min

As I was contemplating the lily, a thin blue ray of light flashed on the vineyard road below and groped its way over the slopes. Then I heard an automobile stop at the main gate.

"The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth": An Economist, Erased (paywall)

Maria Edgeworth was one of the best-selling novelists of her era, and she used that platform to smuggle serious economic theory — ideas about markets, incentives, and behavior — into popular fiction two centuries before "behavioral economics" had a name. This profile, built around a new book making the case for her overdue recognition, traces how she did it, why her contemporaries (many of them men who borrowed liberally from her ideas) got the credit instead, and what her erasure says about how the economics canon was constructed after the fact. A patient piece of intellectual history that doubles as an indictment of how disciplines decide who counts as a founder. The specificity is what makes it — actual passages from her novels, actual traceable lines to ideas we now attribute to Adam Smith's successors. Worth the time for anyone who enjoys watching a forgotten figure get carefully, rigorously restored to the record.

The New York Times · 20 min

As Deadly Flash Flooding Batters Nepal, Some Fear 'the Entire Himalayas Are Melting' (paywall)

A glacial flood this week killed people and reshaped the ground beneath one of the world's most storied trekking economies, and this piece sits with the trekking guides and climbers whose livelihoods — and understanding of the mountains they've spent decades reading — are being upended in real time. A disaster dispatch it isn't; a portrait of a profession watching its terrain change underfoot, told through people who have spent their lives learning to trust a landscape that no longer behaves as it used to. The reporting balances the immediate human toll with the longer arc of what glacial melt means for a region where tourism, water security, and cultural identity all depend on ice that is disappearing faster than anyone planned for. It earns its length by refusing easy climate-story shorthand, staying instead with specific guides, specific villages, specific losses.

The New York Times · 18 min