The Australian parliament has legislated what’s commonly described as as “social media ban” for people under 16. More precisely, it will require selected social media platforms to implement (unspecified) age verification technology for people wishing to create accounts. This measure was rushed through at the end of last year, at the expense of proposed legislation […]
Academia
Inspired by Chris’s recent photo-blogging post, I thought I’d share a less well known little gem about (the original) Ravenna: not a byzantine church interior full of mosaics, but the submerged crypt of an early medieval Church (the Basilica of San Francesco), populated by goldfish (and the inevitable coins thrown in for good luck). Incidentally, […]
Recently I learned that at Yale University a “Report of the Committee on Institutional Voice” was published a few months ago. The committee was chaired by professors “Della Rocca & Rodríguez” and so hereafter, I refer to the report as “Della Rocca & Rodríguez.” According to an accompanying editorial by these two lead authors in the Yale News, The […]
I’ve already said all I plan to (for now) about what’s happening in the US. But if others want to discuss it, here’s an open thread.
There’s been a recent fuss in various media arising from a tweet from economist Ben Golub regarding astonishment that economists haven’t “worked through” Smith and Marx. English professor Alex Moskowitz chimed in with a claim that economics can’t be a real discipline because economists don’t know the history of their own discipline. {long and somewhat […]
Commentators in Europe are understandably agog about Trump’s rumblings that the US might somehow, possibly, annex Greenland at some point in the future. One would think asking Greenlanders how they see their future might have been a better idea. But I’m curious about how we should take these rumblings. Several possibilities suggest themselves, which are […]
A curious one, this. We were looking through some old postcards (from the 1930s) and came across one with a picture of this church interior. Where’s that? Well, it turns out that it is just off the motorway on our journey between Bristol and Liverpool. A remarkable mosaic interior from the 1920s, modelled on originals […]