It’s more than 5 years since Erik died which, for those who knew him, is quite hard to believe, as he is still a strong voice in many of our heads. Because I know many of our readers knew and admired him or his work (or both!) I thought I’d let you know that a […]
Academia
Brad DeLong (in a recent post summarising a joint podcast with Noah Smith) walks back his previous suggestion that it was time for neoliberals, among whom he had numbered himself, to pass the baton to “the Left”. The political basis for this is that 20 or so Senate Republicans have been willing to pass legislation […]
Something that’s bothered me for a while is the relationship between politics and friendship. Not just close friendship but also people who you are happy to hang out with socially. Some topics – I’d include Brexit, trans rights and Israel/Palestine – are especially divisive in that people who disagree on these seem to find it […]
I believe that no-one deserves to be a billionaire. In the public realm, defenders of wealth concentration often come up with an example of a person who has created all their wealth themselves – the selfmade billionaire. They didn’t get their money from inheritance or some other form of luck, but from entrepreneurial instincts and […]
This text is not about Baby Reindeer, Netflix’s latest hit. It’s about one of the most perverse dimensions of sanism and anti-madness: the exploitation of madness as an edifying aesthetic resource. It is also about the obsolescence of narratives centered on the uncritical perspective of the traditional agent of the banality of evil, the mediocre […]
Later this month it will be World Biodiversity Day, and we will again celebrate the remarkable contributions that biodiversity makes to the resilience and productivity of the earth’s ecosystems. But it will also be a fitting time to face the continued failure of our institutions to grasp the scale of biodiversity loss. Or, if not […]