Academia

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 […]

If you want to know more about how the current form of capitalism is undermining (a thick conception of) democracy, and what can be done about this, then you should read Lisa Herzog’s latest book The Democratic Marketplace. The book is written for a broad audience, and I suspect that anyone who regularly reads this […]

I have a piece over at the London Review of Books Blog about the UK government’s appalling changes to the way refugees are treated in the country. “After the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, announced the government’s new policies for ‘Restoring Order and Control’ in the House of Commons yesterday, one MP after another stood up […]

Death comes for us all. We are outlived, as Barkandji man Woddy Harris would have it, by Mother Nature, who holds us in something that I think he would liken to ‘eternity’. By what logic, then, must Mother Nature also die? The Barkandji in Wilcannia and nearby Menindee had been protesting and putting their effort […]

If you’ve ever been at a Dutch PhD ceremony, you’ve come across the toga – which is, unfortunately not a Greek or Roman toga as pictured here. Instead, it’s a kind of black gown, made from heavy cloth, with velvet facings, accompanied by a white collar and a velvet hat that resembles the mortarboards that […]

With another COP starting today, and the question of climate change having played no role at all in the Dutch elections recently, and, well, for a zillion different reasons – it seems like a good time to ask the question: what books can help to make people move on this topic? (or if you think […]

I’ve been visiting family in Germany, with only a phone, so I couldn’t post on Sunday. But here are some crows from Hamburg.