By Kyle Chayka “The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark,” James Salter wrote in his 1975 novel, “Light Years.” An encounter with a single “slender” line of writing, as he put it, can send a reader spinning off on a new trajectory; her life becomes divided into a before and… Read More The Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher
By Nathan Robinson Jordan Peterson’s popularity is the sign of a deeply impoverished political and intellectual landscape… NB: On October 7, 2023, Peterson asked the Israeli prime minister to give ’em hell, Netanyahu! This exhortation to indiscriminate violence has had nearly 37 million views. One would think that someone with a vast following would be… Read More The Intellectual We Deserve (2018)
I did see “the debate of the century”, the debate of our century. It was full of the stench of burning strawmen. A big deal, with huge numbers, and really very little underneath. First posted April 20, 2019 Stephen Marche The controversial thinkers debated happiness, capitalism and Marxism in Toronto. It was billed as a… Read More The ‘debate of the century’: what happened when Jordan Peterson debated Slavoj Žižek
First posted June 19, 2016 Reviewed by Edward Mendelson Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism – by Judy Wajcman Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age – by Bernard E. Harcourt Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art – by Virginia Heffernan Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media… Read More In the Depths of the Digital Age: Five books on psychological life in the internet age / We Are Hopelessly Hooked by Jacob Weisberg
“I’m very excited and honoured to serve as the editor-in-chief of openDemocracy. I’ve long been a fan of openDemocracy’s global footprint and editorial commitment to rigorous investigations and incisive coverage of the biggest stories of our time. As newsrooms around the world are threatened by censorship, intimidation and economic disruption, the cause of independent media… Read More openDemocracy appoints Aman Sethi as editor-in-chief
NB: The rebellion against reason, the cults of nostalgia or particularity are not new, these ways of thought have been with us a long time; and are a consequence of the divorce of reason from goodness, virtue, beauty and justice. Romanticism is a consequence of the elevation of scientific reason to a status above the… Read More The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms
NB: I rarely comment on YouTube channels, but recently I did. They referred to the ongoing Palestine and Israel conflict. I enclose the links to both and the content of my observations. I used to enjoy watching Maher now and then; but after he (recently, not in this video) used the term ‘collateral damage’ to… Read More My comments on Piers Morgan and Bill Maher
Yanis Varoufakis On 7th February 2023, I returned to the Chamber to discuss a wide variety of issues, beginning with a Europe-at-war, post-Brexit Britain, the New Cold War that marks capitalism’s global transition to (what I call Technofeudalism), the state of the Left in Eastern Europe and more. Thanks Cambridge Union! https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2023/03/24/britain-europe-the-new-cold-war-finance-technofeudalism-at-the-cambridge-union/
We’re now in servitude to the fiefdoms of our new global masters, Lord Zuckerberg of Facelandia and Sir Musk of the rotten borough of X… Technofeudalism feels like an important new book. It’s a big-picture hypothesis rooted in a historical account of how capitalism came into being that describes what is happening in terms of an… Read More ‘Capitalism is dead. Now we have something much worse’: Yanis Varoufakis on extremism, Starmer, and the tyranny of big tech
Please let’s put much, much more of our future security in the hands of people who treat war and the fallout from invasion like a broadband contract… it remains one of the more pathetic tragedies of our age that Musk is seen as a superhero analogue – but perhaps also an inevitable one, given that… Read More And then Elon Musk said there’ll be no more war – not via his satellite. Aren’t we lucky to have the world in his hands?
After the truth-shower 