(I wrote this piece a week or so ago, meant to do a bit more work but haven’t got around to it. Hence slightly dated allusions) The culmination of Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK was a press conference at which both American and British leaders waved pieces of paper, containing an agreement that […]| Crooked Timber
I have a long-standing pet peeve about the conflation of academic freedom and freedom of speech, especially in the context of (purported) campus debate. In order to illustrate why one should not conflate academic freedom and freedom of speech, I introduce two uncontroversial theses about each. Thesis [I]: lying and deception are protected features of […]| Crooked Timber
A while back I wrote a series of posts about the 1998-9 Kosovo conflict. If you’re interested, here they are: Prelude to War, The Serbian Ascendancy, Things Fall Apart, And So To War. This post continues that story up to the unsuccessful Rambouillet peace conference of February-March 1999. So by early 1999, the Serbian province […]| Crooked Timber
I’m in the midst of doing research, teaching, and outreach activities on a set of questions around economic growth and its relationship to what we value. My research team has Tim Jackson visiting tomorrow, who will give a talk on postgrowth economics and also talk a bit about his new book, The Care Economy. The […]| Crooked Timber
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The New Press has put out a book collecting some of his writing. I contributed a short piece, as did some other people who knew him; since my contract allows me to, and since no-one conceivably wants to buy the book to see what I have to say, I’m putting it below the fold.| Crooked Timber
40 years ago today the Daily Mail carried a front page picture of police officers carrying me away from a Miners Strike rally in Whitehall. I mightn’t have known, but a friend of my sister’s told her, having recognized me, with glee, when her dad picked the paper up at the breakfast table. (I never found out what her Daily Mail-reading parents thought when their daughter squealed “That’s Harry”). There was another picture, more recognizable still, inside.| crookedtimber.org
A trolley problem, some personal stuff, a bit of Islamic jurisprudence, and then the Honda. 1) Trolley time. Let’s start with the trolley problem. People proposing trolley problems often do them in two parts. First, there’s the anodyne one with the easy answer: A trolley is rushing down the tracks towards a group of five […]| Crooked Timber
You’ve probably heard of the “Peter principle”: that employees get promoted until they reach a job they are no longer good at. And in political philosophy, there is a famous dispute between (the camps of) John Rawls and Jerry Cohen about the appropriateness of people in a just society being motivated by money. Last week, […]| Crooked Timber
This weekend has been dedicated to the “reconstitution historique” of 1653 in Pézenas, when the États generaux of Languedoc met in what is now a small town but was then the seat of the Prince de Conti. So, a capital city back then and also a place where Molière used to hang out. There have […]| Crooked Timber
I’m working on a first draft of a book arguing against pro-natalism (more precisely, that we shouldn’t be concerned about below-replacement fertility). That entails digging into lots of literature with which I’m not very familiar and I’ve started using OpenAI’s Deep Research as a tool. A typical interaction starts with me asking a question like […]| Crooked Timber
Mr Magpie has always been a bold friend. He sits at the table with us when we are outside. In the warmer months when we often leave the back door open he walks inside the house, sometimes looking for a snack, but often enough walks all the way through the house, apparently just to say […]| Crooked Timber
I seem to have become CT’s resident moderate techno-optimist. So let me push back a little: here are five things that we’re not going to see between now and 2050. 1) Nobody is going to Mars. Let me refine that a little: nobody is going to Mars and coming back alive. A one-way suicide mission […]| Crooked Timber
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I do these occasional posts about science papers. Some are just for fun. But sometimes — honest! — there’s an underlying connection to the greater Crooked Timber project. This post is one of that sort, because it’s about the limits of understanding. Unsurprisingly, it involves biology. So we all learned back in high school that […]| Crooked Timber
Looking at the facts, there’s no reasonable conclusion except that US democracy is done for. But rather than face facts, I’m turning to fiction. So, here’s a story about the collapse of Trumpism, crony capitalism and the AI/crypto bubble. Fiction is a relatively unfamilar mode of writing for me, so critique (on style and structure […]| Crooked Timber
BTW, you might want to think about joining PixelFed, a federated non-commercial alternative to Flickr and the Zuckerberg site. It’s a very welcoming community.| Crooked Timber
From the monthly archives:| crookedtimber.org
From the monthly archives:| crookedtimber.org
Thesis: in the English-speaking world, the last 50 years has seen a dramatic increase in the quantity *and quality* of text and visual mass media intended for children.| Crooked Timber
As with a lot of these guys, if a story was popular, he’d quickly write more with the same protagonist or setting. So before long he had a whole stable of characters (Jim Cardigan, Sergeant Brinkhaus) and settings (the “Northwest Stories”). You can find a *very partial and incomplete* list here — it’s just recent collections of his more popular stuff, doesn’t include his novels or romance stories. | Crooked Timber
I posted this piece in RenewEconomy a couple of months ago. It didn’t convince the commenters then, and I don’t expect it to be any different here, but I’m putting it on the record anyway.| crookedtimber.org
One evening last week, having woken up earlier and, as usual, turned on the Jeremy Vine show (with guest host), I turned, again, to BBC Sounds to find… nothing. They’ve been threatening to turn it off for non-UK listeners for months, pretty much without explanation, and telling users that there is an exciting new and utterly inferior service in which you can just stream Radio 4 and the World Service live. I texted my friend to say it had finally happened, and she said “I know. I immedia...| crookedtimber.org
One evening last week, having woken up earlier and, as usual, turned on the Jeremy Vine show (with guest host), I turned, again, to BBC Sounds to find… nothing. They’ve been threatening to turn it off for non-UK listeners for months, pretty much without explanation, and telling users that there is an exciting new and utterly inferior service in which you can just stream Radio 4 and the World Service live. I texted my friend to say it had finally happened, and she said “I know. I immedia...| Crooked Timber
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I’ve just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s great, fun novel, Red Team Blues, and I’ve been thinking about how well it exemplifies one of the strengths of good science fiction. Back when we ran our seminar on Francis Spufford’s novel, Red Plenty, there was a back-and-forth between Francis and Felix Gilman. As Francis described it post-hoc, he wanted to write the novel of the socialist calculation debate, in part because of the challenge:| Crooked Timber
Tech regulation raises some of the thorniest questions of our time — about free speech versus hate speech, copyright versus fair use, truth versus manipulation. Yet these debates are increasingly irrelevant unless states can first establish digital sovereignty. Without the will to enforce laws on multinational corporations, “tech regulation” is a dead letter.| Crooked Timber
From the monthly archives:| crookedtimber.org
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… as long as they are healthy, well fed and well educated| Crooked Timber
From the monthly archives:| crookedtimber.org
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A cursory glance at the Jeffrey Epstein’s biography (1953 – 2019) shows it can be treated as a modern adaptation (and so adjustment) of Horatio Alger Jr.’s framework: Epstein’s life moves from (lower) middle-class respectability to incredible wealth and luxury (and associated criminal sordidness). Epstein was an immensely successful social climber, who didn’t just manage the wealth of the ultra-wealthy, but also used his own wealth and his access to the very wealthy to position...| Crooked Timber
As President Trump continues to amass authoritarian power, we should consider the shocking role of the Supreme Court in facilitating his power grab. Trump v. United States declared the President immune from prosecution for breaking any criminal law as long as he uses his Presidential powers to commit his crimes. It allowed Trump to get away with gross violations of the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause. It foreclosed all feasible paths for enforcing the 14th Amendment’s Insurrectio...| Crooked Timber
by Chris Bertram on July 20, 2025| Crooked Timber
One of my foundational theoretical commitments is that the technology of reading and writing is neither natural nor innocuous. Media theorists McLuhan, Postman, Ong and Flusser all agree on this point: the technology of writing is a necessary condition for the emerge of liberal/democratic/Enlightenment/rationalist culture; mass literacy and the proliferation of cheap books/newspapers is necessary for this culture to spread beyond the elite to the whole of society.| Crooked Timber
Sunday photoblogging: Street art at the Puces St Ouen| Crooked Timber
There’s a great anecdote about Roman Jakobson, the structuralist theorist of language, in Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s book, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory. For Jakobson, and for other early structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers, language, cybernetic theories of information, and economists’ efforts to understand how the economy worked all went together :| Crooked Timber
Now that the Trump government is relentlessly attacking higher education and abusing its power at the border to arbitrarily refuse entry to scholars, many academics wonder whether it’s still possible to travel to the US for conferences or other research purposes, especially if they have publicly criticized the Trump government or its allies. But where you can travel, under what conditions, for your academic work, has long been an issue for scholars who come from countries with “weak passp...| Crooked Timber
I’ve owned this mug for twenty-five years now. Bought in the gift shop of the Metropolitan Opera in New York on my first ever trip to America, which I doubt I shall ever visit again. The mug, in art nouveau style, celebrates Pucchini’s La Bohème, which we might have seen there. I forget what we saw from the cheap seats, high up. The colours are badly faded after a quarter-century of machine washing, which suggests that its manufacture was cheap, though it has served me well through diffe...| Crooked Timber
Have they changed, or just become their worst selves| Crooked Timber
Thursday afternoon I belatedly fulfilled a promise to post a book to Wilcannia. The school day was just finishing and as I left the Post Office I overheard a child around eight years old:| Crooked Timber
A cursory glance at the Jeffrey Epstein’s biography (1953 – 2019) shows it can be treated as a modern adaptation (and so adjustment) of Horatio Alger Jr.’s framework: Epstein’s life moves from (lower) middle-class respectability to incredible wealth and luxury (and associated criminal sordidness). Epstein was an immensely successful social climber, who didn’t just manage the wealth of the ultra-wealthy, but also used his own wealth and his access to the very wealthy to position...| crookedtimber.org
One good side-effect of contemporary politics is that a more sober look at the merits and demerits of the US Founders’ legacy is possible again. (Of course, here at CrookedTimber we pride ourselves on our sobriety in such matters; it helps many of us reside in distant shores.) The current US President has contempt for reverence toward the past; and his opponents have no time for reflection.| Crooked Timber
Today’s post focuses on the contribution of elite higher education to the rise of Trump. This may seem in bad taste because it is also clearly targeted by MAGA, and so our impulse is to circle the wagons. But if you wish to develop a defensive posture you must understand the territory.| Crooked Timber
“When diversity, equity and inclusion become ‘threats’ to the order of society,” Judith Butler wrote recently, “progressive politics in general is held responsible for every social ill.” Authoritarians are empowered to oppress vulnerable people in the name of “the nation, the natural order, the family, society or civilization itself”.| Crooked Timber
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. | Crooked Timber
One thing to keep in mind is that nothing in nature is free. The newt’s toxicity comes with a cost: the metabolic load of supporting all those bacteria. More toxicity means more bacteria means more load. A very toxic newt has to consume more calories than its less-toxic cousin.| Crooked Timber
A few weeks ago, I drew up a flowchart to estimate the probability that Trump would establish a dictatorship in the US, which looked, at the time, like an even money bet.| Crooked Timber
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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.| Crooked Timber
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
One big driver of this was the Disney Renaissance. This is well known — there are books about it — but the TLDR is that, for reasons beyond the scope of this blog post, Disney suddenly went from making mediocre animated films that nobody much cared about and that didn’t make much money (Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Fox And The Hound, The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective, Oliver And Company) to making animated films that were good to excellent, hugely successful, and in some ...| Crooked Timber
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Update The Trump regime has been stopped, or at least stalled, on all three fronts discussed below. In particular, the Hegseth-Noem report on the Insurrection Act seems to have been quietly buried. That doesn’t mean US democracy is safe by any means, but at least it has some chance of survival. More on this at my Substack| Crooked Timber
But anyway: all the metals in the universe (other than a tiny wisp of lithium, never mind that) were created by dying stars. In the earliest days of the Universe, before there were any stars, there were no elements heavier than helium — no metals.| Crooked Timber
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Thanks to James Wimberley for prompting me to write this, and alerting me to the data on China’s emissions| Crooked Timber
With collapsing stock markets, retirement portfolios, and consumer confidence, there is an all-too-human tendency to focus on the economic effects of tariffs by their critics: they are a tax on consumption, they will raise inflation, reduce efficiency, and reduce take-home income, etc. This is familiar.| Crooked Timber
Good composition for color–zooming in shows great detail.| Crooked Timber
The blue-ringed octopus! An elegant little creature, native to the southwest Pacific, particularly the waters around Australia. Pretty to look at… but mostly famous for being very, very venomous. The blue-ring’s bite is deadly. A single sharp nip can kill an adult human in minutes.| Crooked Timber
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In an earlier post (here), prompted by some writings by Jacob T. Levy, I defended the idea that student protests can fall under academic freedom. My argument for this starts from the fact that while many universities can have mission specific interpretations of the latitude and constraints on how they interpret academic freedom (non-trivially constrained also by local legal context), all universities share a mission in being committed to knowledge discovery, knowledge transmission, and preser...| Crooked Timber
A few months ago Jacob Levy (McGill) published a lengthy Op-Ed, “Campus culture wars are a teachable moment in how freedom of speech and academic freedom differ,” in the Globe and Mail. It offered a salutary account on the nature of academic freedom in the aftermath of the “Dec. 5 U.S. House of Representatives committee hearing grilling the leaders of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, and the subsequent resignation of two of them, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s E...| Crooked Timber
In my academic job, I’ve just started a new 5-year project called ‘Visions for the future‘. In the first year of the project, I’ll tackle some methodological questions, including working out the discussion we had here some years ago on normative audits, and the question what ‘synthetic political philosophy’ is (on which Eric also has, and is further developing, views).| Crooked Timber
Here’s a virtual toast to your flourishing in 2025. But more so than any other year, our wishes should not just be from person to person, but rather wishes for societies – and the society of societies, global humanity. I haven’t felt so gloomy about politics, broadly defined, in a very long time. A genocide is happening while all of us can see it, and mainstream politics and society tries every trick possible to rationalize and justify what is happening. Our politicians are failing to g...| Crooked Timber
I’ve avoided post-mortems on the US election disaster for two reasons.| Crooked Timber
Cabo Verde is not a rich country. To have an idea, the minimum wage is €130 a month and a meal in a restaurant costs around €10. The IMF classifies Cabo Verde as a developing country.| Crooked Timber
Curtis Yarvin, darling authoritarian ideologue of many tech billionaires, is back in the news, along with his deep links to J.D. Vance, via Peter Thiel. It’s no secret that plutocrats tend to be off-the-charts economic libertarians, with extreme hostility even to wildly popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which cost them nothing. So, if they were principled thinkers, it would seem logical for them to oppose dictators and wannabe dictators. But no, more and more tech bros ...| Crooked Timber
A post I wrote last week sparked a lively debate, and one strand of that debate was whether it is appropriate to use the term “privilege” (“cis privilege” in particular) to describe the phenomena I was talking about. I identified mainly two clusters of objections, but please do let me know in the comments if I have overlooked any.| Crooked Timber
I knew when my most recent book was assigned an end-of-October publication date that I would spend much of my book tour processing the election and its aftermath. As the title suggests, Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop is partly a meditation on the future of feminism.| Crooked Timber
Now that the U.S. faces the return of a fascist President to power, we must consider the connections among plutocracy, misogyny, and fascism. In 2016, many pundits attributed Trump’s election to the rightward shift of white working-class voters in response to economic anxieties inflicted by neoliberal globalization. Political scientists quickly refuted this theory, pointing to polling and other data indicating that Trump supporters were driven by racial anxieties spurred by immigration. Tru...| Crooked Timber
Saying that being cis-gender – i.e. having a gender identity that corresponds with the sex/gender one was assigned at birth – comes with privileges need not mean erasing the lived experiences, real challenges, and specific struggles of cis-gendered people (and especially of those cis-gender people who are otherwise disadvantaged and marginalised in other dimensions). It can even be compatible with recognising that there are specific areas where some cis people can face distinctly harsher ...| Crooked Timber
A few weeks ago, seven political philosophers at my department, who regularly meet to discuss issues related to sustainable futures, met to discuss Hannah Ritchie’s book Not the End of the World. That book quickly appeared on the bestseller’s lists. For everyone who read her book, or is perhaps thinking about reading her book, here’s what we thought about it (which, regular readers of this blog will notice, is an example of Team Philosophy which we discussed here a while ago.)| Crooked Timber
Editors of academic journals have been reporting that they find it increasingly hard to secure referees for papers that have been submitted to their journals. When I’ve been discussing this issue over the years with colleagues, I’ve heard a few remarks that made me wonder what our considerations are to decide whether or not to accept a review request. Clearly, there must be a content-wise fit: if one thinks the paper is outside one’s area of expertise, one should not accept the referee ...| Crooked Timber
Obviously people are shocked, and particularly shocked at the rejection of normal sensible politics by the rubes who have elected an oaf, a criminal and a rapist to the White House, again. But the trouble is that this kind of thing keeps happening, or nearly happening, and not just in the United States. And it turns out that the policies pursued by the MAGA extremists, by Le Pen, Meloni or Farage, aren’t really all that different from the ones followed by the normal sensible people, albeit ...| Crooked Timber
Donald Trump has made very public threats to persecute his political opponents should he be re-elected and statements by him and by other leading Republicans suggests that he might persecute others on the grounds of their religion or their membership of certain social groups. If this were happen (rather than simply being bluster) then it could turn out, very soon, that some US citizens will find themselves outside of their country, with a well-founded fear of persecution on grounds outlined i...| Crooked Timber
The idea of the gold rush is deeply rooted in the American psyche. “There’s gold in them thar hills.” Anyone can abandon his family and community to gamble big on themselves. Thanks to this rugged individualism and the natural bounty of our territory, there’s a chance that you can strike it rich.| Crooked Timber
Before Rawls’ shadow in left-liberal political philosophy there was Arnold S. Kaufman (1927-1971), who died when his airplane collided with a military jet while traveling (recall this post). While there is no Wikipedia page devoted to him, Kaufman was rather famous during the 1960s because of his involvement with the student movement at the University of Michigan and especially by promoting ‘participatory democracy’ in the context of the Port Huron Statement (as the New York Times not...| Crooked Timber
There are many processes now subsumed under the term “Artificial Intelligence.” The reason we’re talking about it now, though, is that the websites are doing things we never thought websites could do. The pixels of our devices light up like never before. Techno-optimists believe that we’re nowhere close to the limit, that websites will continue to dazzle us — and I hope that this reframing helps put AI in perspective.| Crooked Timber
We’re in another round of concern about the “death of the book”, and, in particular, the claimed inability or unwillingness of young people to read full-length books. I’m not going to push too far on the argument that this complaint is ancient, but I can’t resist mentioning the response of my younger brother, who, when asked if he wanted a book for Christmas, answered “thanks, but I already have one”). That was around 50 years ago, and he went on to a very successful legal career.| Crooked Timber
I really liked and admired Agnes Callard’s essay, “Beyond Neutrality: The university’s responsibility to lead” in The Point (September 29, 2024) [HT Dailynous]. My post is, despite some quibbles, primarily about amplifying a point Callard (Chicago) makes. I do so not just because there is considerable overlap between our positions (recall here and here), but also because she advances the discussion on the nature of campus speech.| Crooked Timber
One of the most interesting developments in the little world of political theory / philosophy in recent years has been the mass resignation of the editorial teams of both Philosophy & Public Af…| Crooked Timber
So about five hundred million years ago, give or take, there was this little creature called Plectronoceras. It was about 2 cm long — just under an inch — and it had a conical shell with a bunch of tentacles sticking out. It was a cephalopod, an early member of the group that includes octopuses and squid. And it was an /armored/ cephalopod, with most of its soft body protected by that hard little shell.| Crooked Timber
I have come to the conclusion that the most essential element of the Silicon Valley ideology is its collective faith in technological acceleration. More than the mix of libertarianism and tech dete…| Crooked Timber
More in the suddenly topical vein of ‘who will rid us of those troublesome leftists’ from Sean Wilentz. For Chait, the problem is “It’s obvious to me why conservatives want everyb…| Crooked Timber
