Academia

I am at the airport in Melbourne (again). I’m sitting in the window eating one of those excellent boxes of kale, broccoli, beans, seeds, peas and a boiled egg that I am grateful are now available at airports. Next to me a father and daughter are observing the world – look at how that plane […]

I’ve long been interested in the topic of housework, as you can see from this CT post, which produced a long and unusually productive discussion thread [fn1]. The issue came up again in relation to the prospects for humanoid robots. It’s also at the edge of bunch of debates going on (mostly on Substack) about […]

My last post described my attempt to generate a report on housework using Deep Research, and the way it came to a crashing halt. Over the fold, I’ve given the summary from the last version before the crash. You can read the whole report here, bearing in mind that it’s only partly done. As I […]

I spent a good chunk of the afternoon watching l’Etabli, the film of Robert Linhart’s book (which I own but have never read). It is an arresting depiction of the brutality of the assembly-line and the racalialised hierarchies at work in the factory. The theme of the film is of a Maoist cadre from an […]

I heard a rumour that London IT professionals have selected the pub where they will meet when the internet goes down. It is apocalyptic thinking, perhaps, but it also feels plausible. Though the internet feels permanent, stable and sufficiently distributed to seem impervious to target, this infrastructure that underpins our daily work and life is […]

I’ve been seeing more and more alarmism about the idea that, on current demographic trends, the world’s population might shrink to a billion in a century or two. That distant prospect is producing lots of advocacy for policies to increase birth rates right now. One of the big claims is that a smaller population will […]