Academia

Commentators in Europe are understandably agog about Trump’s rumblings that the US might somehow, possibly, annex Greenland at some point in the future. One would think asking Greenlanders how they see their future might have been a better idea. But I’m curious about how we should take these rumblings. Several possibilities suggest themselves, which are […]

A curious one, this. We were looking through some old postcards (from the 1930s) and came across one with a picture of this church interior. Where’s that? Well, it turns out that it is just off the motorway on our journey between Bristol and Liverpool. A remarkable mosaic interior from the 1920s, modelled on originals […]

Cabo Verde is not a rich country. To have an idea, the minimum wage is €130 a month and a meal in a restaurant costs around €10. The IMF classifies Cabo Verde as a developing country. Development has long ceased to be defined in exclusively economic terms. In 1990, a “human development index” was introduced, […]

I’ve avoided post-mortems on the US election disaster for two reasons. First, they are useless as a guide to the future. The next US election, if there is one [1], will be a referendum on the Trump regime. Campaign strategies that might have gained the Democrats a few percentage points in November 2024 won’t be […]

Curtis Yarvin, darling authoritarian ideologue of many tech billionaires, is back in the news, along with his deep links to J.D. Vance, via Peter Thiel. It’s no secret that plutocrats tend to be off-the-charts economic libertarians, with extreme hostility even to wildly popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which cost them nothing. So, […]

I knew when my most recent book was assigned an end-of-October publication date that I would spend much of my book tour processing the election and its aftermath. As the title suggests, Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop is partly a meditation on the future of feminism. The book […]

A post I wrote last week sparked a lively debate, and one strand of that debate was whether it is appropriate to use the term “privilege” (“cis privilege” in particular) to describe the phenomena I was talking about. I identified mainly two clusters of objections, but please do let me know in the comments if […]