Third and last part of an article discussing Imperia, the large concrete statue of a semi-fictional medieval sex worker. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here. A Clandestine Erection Imperia went up in April 1993, and I won’t even try to explain the insane backstory. Short version: some people in Constance wanted a […]
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12th of March 2026 The vexed question of the place of politics in sport has surfaced yet again at the Winter Olympics in Milan. The Ukrainian skeleton skier Vladyslav Heraskevych wanted to wear a “helmet of remembrance” displaying the names of 24 fellow athletes killed during the Russian invasion of his country. The International Olympic … Continue reading More Sport, Less War by Robert Skidelsky. Published in The American Conservative.
THERE WAS A popular gotcha back in the day for which tech utopians showed a special fondness. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, with conservative critics still noisily alarmed at the internet and social media, proselytisers for the new technology would dip back into history and unearth some comparable commentator whose own example was comically self-defeating.
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 […]
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?
A top-secret 1960s project tasked physics postdocs with building The Bomb
The post How Three Students Designed an Atomic Bomb appeared first on Nautilus.
A memoir interwoven with historical research that might leave you wondering if anything really changes in these United States.
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.
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.
The Doomsday Clock was effective Cold War theatre, but does it fail to convey the threat of today’s slowly unfolding existential crises?