How atomic doomsday experiments, fuelled by Cold War fears, shaped, then shook ecologists’ faith in self-healing nature Laura J Martin When Hurricane Fiona flooded regions of Puerto Rico with up to 30 inches of rain in September last year, the island was still recovering from hurricanes Irma and Maria, two catastrophic storms in 2017 during which nearly 3,000… Read More Disturbance
The beloved author’s books are being edited by their publisher to suit contemporary sensibilities. That robs us of the author’s vision—and any sense of history. By Katha Pollitt The United States can be a harsh place to be a child. There are guns galore and bullies in school. Suicide is on the rise, homelessness is rampant,… Read More Let Kids Read Roald Dahl’s Books the Way He Wrote Them
A kaleidoscopic journey through a divided country…The river of bile on which Sharlet fights to stay afloat courses from one end of the country to the other. By Elizabeth D. Samet The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet Jeff Sharlet’s new book, The Undertow, plunged me into a vertiginous fever-dream. It induced a physiological response… Read More The Center Cannot Hold
NB: An interesting essay. However, Heyking seems to conflate China and ‘Asia’. DS John von Heyking In order to cut through the two false alternatives – “catch up” and “social harmony” – I appeal to the original figure of Western liberal education, Socrates. Socrates indeed embodies the individual as it has been transmitted throughout the… Read More The Figure of Socrates and its Significance for Liberal Education in Asia
NB: A young friend has brought to my notice what this gizmo says about me – its a farrago of lies and half truths. This machine makes me two years older than I am (which is old enough thank you); and attributes to me new-age kind of mumbo-jumbo statements which I have never made. ChatGPT… Read More Noam Chomsky says ChatGPT is a form of High-Tech Plagiarism
John von Heyking Conversation and the “Turning Around of the Soul” One of the common criticisms of the contemporary university is that it lacks individuals unwilling or incapable of conversing. Critics such as Anthony Kronman and Stephen Miller rightly observe that there’s something about contemporary culture and the contemporary university hostile to the arts or… Read More Periagoge: Liberal Education in the Modern University
How conservatives made him their icon and distorted his ideas Kim Phillips-Fein How did Smith’s ideas become so thoroughly integrated into conservative defenses of the free market against regulation? And are these the only ways of reading his work? These are the questions at the heart of Adam Smith’s America, Glory M. Liu’s intriguing account of… Read More The Betrayal of Adam Smith
Simon Tisdall Biden’s division of the world into “for us or against us” camps carries uncomfortable echoes of George W Bush, circa 2001, and of Putin himself. That it is America’s manifest destiny (updated version) to defend and promote freedom and democracy everywhere is a message that normally plays well with US voters. At least,… Read More Outdated and out of time: Biden’s crusade for global democracy is doomed to fail
Between ageing populations, shifting attitudes and challenges to capitalist beliefs, workers have unprecedented power James Meadway As strikes and labour disputes surge around the world, we appear to be at the beginning of a period in which the balance of power in workplaces and labour markets swings in favour of workers, having long been skewed… Read More Covid reshaped the global labour market – these strikes are just the start
Arwa Mahdawi A recent Pew Research study has found that 63% of men under 30 describe themselves as single, compared with 34% of women in the same age bracket. Cue a lot of dramatic headlines about, as the Hill put it, the “larger breakdown in the social, romantic and sexual life of the American male”. I imagine the Hill… Read More Why have young men fallen out of love with romantic relationships?
