The white house (Casa Masó) belonged to the celbrated Catalan architect Rafael Masó. I highly recommend the visit.
Academia
Michela Murgia – a very fine writer, and probably the most widely known feminist public intellectual within the Italian cultural landscape of the last couple of decades – died at the beginning of last month. She wasn’t very well known abroad, not even simply as a writer (her most widely acclaimed and awarded novel, […]
Quick round-up of books I read for fun over the summer. I’m mostly reading books about ecology and network design for other things, so perhaps my fiction brain isn’t quite optimised for full immersion at the moment, but I’ve not really sunk deep into anything I’ve read for some time. ‘You made a fool of […]
(This is another post in my series on Michigan politics, broadly construed.) Why am I thinking about 1961? Because that was one year before University of Michigan students published the Port Huron Statement, a pivotal document that laid out the intellectual foundations of New Left student activism. (Excellent UM exhibit on the statement here.) I […]
Over the last year, I’ve been working on a trade book on limitarianism (USA, UK, NL), on an edited volume on pluralism in political philosophy by bringing various (including ‘non-western’) perspectives together around questions of economic and ecological inequalities (forthcoming with OUP but not quite there yet), and on an edited academic volume with political […]
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how society, and people in my profession (academics), think about activism. It seems to me that there is a widespread insufficient appreciation for the importance of activists in the world; often that attitude is even plainly dismissive. If this is true, then why is this the case, and […]
A few weeks ago I read Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston by Ernest Callenbach (1975) for the first time. It is worth doing so if you are one of the few who have not because it very neat to see how ideas around ecological sustainability were conceived back then. In what follows, I will […]
In my first post (here) on Mary Harrington’s (2023) Feminism Against Progress, I focused on her views on the family and suggested that not unlike Yoram Hazony (in his (2022) book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery), she rejects the patriarchic ‘nuclear family’ embraced by American, Christian-ethno-nationalists. Instead they both defend what they call the ‘traditional family,’ which in Harrington’s argument […]