Latest News Politics , Business , Finance , Technology , World News & Opinion & Tracking & Analysis.
Crooked Timber
Primary focus: Politics
I love Rory Stewart’s memoir about being a politician; its one of the best books I’ve read about British politics. Among his many observations about the dysfunctionality of government is that ministers typically know nothing about their briefs prior to taking their jobs, and don’t stay in post long enough to get any command. There []
I just learned about The Fandom and Social Connection Initiative and I’m intrigued. The idea is to study the possibility that sports fandom can be an antidote to the “connection recession,” as traditional “third places”—like churches, civic organizations, and bowling leagues—play a diminishing role in our lives. The researchers think their early findings suggest that []
to CT reader and commenter Dr Memory, who has cleaned up our database, eliminating many of the badly rendered quotation marks and similar problems. Those problems reflect the fact that the blog is now more than 20 years old, and has gone through multiple formatting systems. An unexpected side benefit is that commenters can []
In the UK as elsewhere, we’ve recently seen the far right orchestrate a campaign against refugees, presenting them as dangerous to women and girls and the vanguard of an invasion aimed at destroying Britain. Asylum seekers, forced by the goverment into hotels pending the examination of their claims, have found themselves surrounded by angry mobs, []
As I observed last year, the statement that “The cemeteries are full of indispensable people.” is just as true of nations, and in particular the US. That was a little controversial at the time, but now it’s become sufficiently conventional wisdom to be restated in the New York Times. I’ve been working on an update. []
Academic publishing has long been dominated by commercial players. That fact is well-known, as are many of the problems. But there is a growing movement towards new models, under the labels of “open access” and “open science.” Until two weeks ago, I’ve held a role as co-editor of an interdisciplinary journal, which allowed me to []
Here’s another episode in my memoirs of being an activist. You can read it at substack, or here!: Between school and college I decided to take a ‘year off’ (what they now call a ‘gap year’). I didn’t have much of a plan, except that I wanted to travel, but not really to earn money []
Well, that was interesting. Some quick thoughts below the cut. So I’ve recently become much more aware of the Discourse about air conditioning that is common to much of northern Europe. There’s a lot of weirdness generally, but there are certain strains that pop up regularly. One is Left / green concern about emissions. Unlike []
