Academia

Over the fold, a piece I wrote for The Conversation. It’s focused on Australia, but includes a swipe at European advocates of a “nuclear renaissance”, the most notable of whom are Macron and (at least until his defenstration) Boris Johnson Last week, opposition leader Peter Dutton called for Australia to join what he dubbed the […]

What’s wrong with the world wide web today? I am. (To adapt a Chesterton line of uncertain authenticity.) Don’t get me wrong. It’s great! – it’s hopeful! – we are gathered here today to celebrate 20 years of Crooked Timber; meanwhile Twitter seems to be splintering. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, we […]

Crooked Timber is twenty years old today, which is an awfully long time for a website, never mind a blog, never mind one that is strictly non-commercial and run on volunteer labour. So here’s to us, and here’s to all those who have been on board at various times during our journey. To quote the […]

Twenty years and a few months ago Chris asked me to join a group of bloggers who were going to create a group blog so as to reduce the pressure on each to post frequently and combine audiences. First I asked him what a blog was. After he explained I told him that I, a […]

Wow. Twenty years. I’ve recently (perhaps not so recently) aged into the demographic who recall events from twenty years back, even though those events occurred in an already reasonably established professional life. That still seems wild to me. I learnt quickly that saying things to the youth like ‘Well, I’m old’ doesn’t yield reassuring denials. […]

Crooked Timber was inaccessible yesterday, due to a dns issue, but here’s another picture of Alexanderplatz:

When I wrote about Vilém Flusser earlier, some commenters here at Crooked Timber weren’t happy: why am I spouting off about this obscure Czech-Brazilian media theorist? At first I despaired at the lack of intellectual curiosity, but then I realized that they were right: Vilém Flusser isn’t famous enough to write about, given the inexorable […]

I’ve been largely absent here – wrapping up my editorial work on two academic volumes and the various rounds of edits on the popular book on limitarianism. I promise I’ll be back with substantive posts by late August (after resting and travelling). In the meantime, I thought I might share this 45 minutes podcast episode […]