Emmanuel Todd

The Demographic Shadow

In my 2022 post on Soylent Green, I traced how the film’s revelation, “Soylent Green is people,” dramatically literalized overpopulation as self‑consumption, a horror that lingers because it feels both absurd and, from an ecological perspective, plausible. That image was a cultural zygote: mutating into other forms of demographic dread across decades. In 2025, weContinue reading “The Demographic Shadow”

Elite Competition

Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage,Black and murderous, that cost the GreeksIncalculable pain, pitched countless soulsOf heroes into Hades’ dark,And left their bodies to rot as feastsFor dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done. Begin with the clash between Agamemnon–The Greek warlord–and godlike Achilles. So opens the Illiad. Homer focuses our attention on the combatants: this isContinue reading “Elite Competition”

Gail Kelly had us read Emmanuel Todd’s, The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems, shortly after it was first released in 1985. She loved the breadth of the work and I recall her musing, “Mr. Barker, wouldn’t it be wonderful to be French? To be so certain you were right?” That Gallic confidence – nay,Continue reading “Emmanuel Todd”