history

Created
Wed, 25/02/2026 - 10:54
Some Americans have been talking about our shared European culture lately!  As CT’s resident American-in-Europe, I feel I must respond.  So, here’s a European culture story.  (This is Part 2,  You can find Part 1 here.) Okay, so Imperia!  Big concrete statue on the shore of Lake Constance.  Medieval sex worker.  9 meters tall, weighs […]
Created
Fri, 06/03/2026 - 23:05
Mar 05, 2026 I. What is happening to the ‘rules-based international order’ despairingly invoked by bewildered European leaders? The broad answer is that we are living through the retreat of American hegemony, masked by bluster and marked by contradictions. The retreat has two aspects, economic and geopolitical. Economists talk about Trump’s tariffs breaking up the … Continue reading What comes after America’s retreat?
Created
Mon, 23/02/2026 - 14:48
Unassuming as he is, in person and in prose, Carl Benedikt Frey will forever be associated with the great efflorescence of ‘crisis writing’ that emerged in the mid-2010s, in the long wake of the GFC. Though no proselytiser for radical change in the mould of Wolfgang Streeck or David Harvey, his 2013 paper ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?’, authored with his Oxford colleague Michael Osborne, became part of the mood music of ‘the long interregnum’ – the sense that capitalism was either breaking down completely or approaching an inflection point whose navigation would mean untold disruption.
Created
Mon, 23/02/2026 - 14:30
As far as I can recall, the audience laughed just three times at the Perth preview of Raoul Peck’s new documentary, Orwell: 2+2=5: once when the cinema manager, introducing the film, almost said ‘Enjoy!’, before correcting course and wishing us ‘a meaningful experience’; once on hearing Orwell confess his desire to give Sartre ‘a kick up the arse’ in his review of Antisemite and Jew; and once at some footage of a Trump supporter batting away a reporter’s questions on the basis that any criticism of her President was fake news.