If you haven’t yet listened to Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story, you probably should, now. It’s brilliant, if profoundly depressing. Very brief synopsis: the methods routinely used to teach children to read in the US don’t work well for large numbers of children, and the science of reading has been clear about this for decades. […]
Academia
A few weeks ago, Cyril Hédoin responded insightfully and constructively (here) to an essay I recently published @Liberal Currents. Subsequently, he did a follow up piece in which he assimilated my stance on what I call the ‘platonic skepticism’ (more on that below) of liberalism into a larger framework about different kinds of skepticism exhibited by liberals. In the piece that triggered […]
SIGMA Moves During the pandemic, I was seduced by a charming British management consultant. A debonair James Bond-type who went from driving a Rolls Royce around his countryside estate to orchestrating the Chilean economic experiment under Allende to teaching Brian Eno about the principles of complex systems in a stone cottage in Wales. Stafford Beer lived a […]
It’s time for me to have my final say on a dispute with Matt Yglesias that has been going at a fairly slow pace. A couple of weeks ago, Matt put up a post (really a Substack newsletter, but I still think in blog terms), headlined Polarization is a choice with the subtitle, “Political elites […]
Sorry, when you are semi-retired and in France anyway, easy to forget days of the week. Here’s an iPhone photo, from when I happened to be out and about in Pézenas. The wall is actually something to do with a local sport, possibly “jeu de tambourin”, but I’m not quite sure of its function, and […]
Tomorrow morning brings the 50th anniversary of the coup in Chile and the death of Salvador Allende [Le Monde has that photo], a coup which was, of course, followed by mass incarcerations, witch-hunts and murders and by the exile as political refugees of many Chileans of the left. (In today’s climate those exiles would have […]
Our cultural excitement for the week was a visit to the spectacular Château Laurens in Agde, an art nouveau villa built at the end of the 19th century by a spectacularly rich idle opium smoker and yachtsman, sold to friends when he lost all his money, locked up for 50 years and then reopened in […]
The white house (Casa Masó) belonged to the celbrated Catalan architect Rafael Masó. I highly recommend the visit.