Academia

Around a decade ago when I was fairly new to my academic job, I made an uncharacteristically politic decision to attend the annual Politics Dinner, which each year featured a lecture from an Australian politician. That year it was my (then) least favourite politician. Christopher Pyne was then the government minister responsible for higher education […]

This is a follow-up to my previous post on the end of US democracy and its implications. I argued that there is no choice but to dispense with the idea of the US as the central actor in a democratic and stable world system [1]Here I will discuss how what’s left of the democratic world […]

A privately funded, ‘anti-woke’ lobbying company has been in the forefront of the attacks, reports Alan Lester

Anyone that has read chunks of Marx’s Capital will know that he often explicitly and not trivially implicitly draws on data and evidence gathered and published in reports by select committees of the British Parliament. Most of these reports he draws on were written before the great expansions of the franchise, and so are effectively produced […]

One good side-effect of contemporary politics is that a more sober look at the merits and demerits of the US Founders’ legacy is possible again. (Of course, here at CrookedTimber we pride ourselves on our sobriety in such matters; it helps many of us reside in distant shores.) The current US President has contempt for […]

“The cemeteries are full of indispensable people.” In one form or another, this observation has been made many times over the last century or more. What is true of people is true of nations. In the past 25 years or so it was often claimed (and , admittedly, often denied) that, in the modern world, […]

The other day I received an email from what might be one the few colleagues still checking into Twitter (most seem to have moved to Bluesky, as have I). The email was just a link with the subject title Did you see? I hadn’t. Gosh, I wrote in response (which I gather they found a little understated). My […]

Crooked Timber has survived more than 20 years by continuously refreshing our group. Members have left because they have said what they want to say, or just because life happens, and others have joined to add to the conversation. Today, we are welcoming Hannah Forsyth and Lisa Herzog. Hannah is an Australian historian of capitalism, […]

Politics has returned to Europe’s wealthy protectorates, which, after the phone-call on Jan. 20, 2025, between the then-President-elect and the Danish prime minister, suddenly find themselves faced with an open-ended era of shakedowns by its guardians and an unreliable big neighbor to the East. Neither its political class nor its aging, nostalgic population is prepared […]