Unemployed, I spent a week in April digging a small pond in our back yard. At the time, it was a distraction. Now it is… actually, a different sort of distraction. | crookedtimber.org
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How far can a government go in harming its own people before it loses support? And what does it mean if this form of harm happens via an attack on public knowledge institutions, from universities to meteorological services, in which expert knowledge is hosted? Even if you are not a friend of such institutions (and one could write many blogposts about what they could do better), isn’t there a basic sense in which they fulfill public functions in modern societies that should receive cross-par...| Crooked Timber
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A few weeks ago the historian Perry Anderson published an essay “Regime Change in the West?” in the London Review of Books. Like many of Anderson’s essays this is a wide-ranging splurge full of bon mots and *apercus” delivered from some quasi-Olympian height. My attention was caught, though, by the following couple of sentences which both expressed a widely-held belief, even a cliché, but one which I knew to be false despite the lazy “of course” which Anderson interjects:| Crooked Timber
More than a month ago, I agreed to an offer to be a visiting scholar at a private US university next year. This was no simple matter because of obligations to my own family and (somewhat more unexpectedly) my department. I have made no public announcement on it yet not because I am especially personally worried by the Trump administration’s policies toward higher education, but rather because I am still completing (electronic) paperwork and background-checks from the host institution. (It w...| Crooked Timber
Over the last years, I have edited a volume of papers on the question how to make analytical political philosophy more inclusive, with a particular focus on the debates on economic and ecological inequalities. The starting point was the observation that analytical political philosophy has for a long time been criticised for marginalizing (to a greater or lesser extent) certain voices and perspectives. Some of these voices and perspectives are internal critics of the liberal tradition – thin...| Crooked Timber
That’s amazing. That cathedral took so much work for so many people for so long.| crookedtimber.org
I watched Attenborough’s latest blockbuster at the cinema last night with my family, and thought I’d collect some thoughts here. First off, it’s wonderfully put together. That’s hardly news with Attenborough. Of course, it’s beautifully shot, and captures marine animals doing things we haven’t seen them do before. Much of it is really entrancing.| Crooked Timber