From the Fall of the Berlin Wall until about a decade ago my animating intellectual question was pretty much, ‘how did a small number of natural sciences become qualitatively more impressive than the social sciences?’ Because I met the late George Smith relatively early in my thinking about this (as an undergraduate), I often formulated […]

(This is an updated version of something I posted 20 years ago, on the 20th anniversary, and 10 years ago, on the 30th anniversary, of my friend’s death) About 43 years and 3 weeks ago the soon-to-be late lamented You and Yours had one of those “off to University” shows, helping parents and about-to-be new […]

When I posted a piece on the latest failure of the US Navy a while back, I predicted that I wouldn’t be changing any minds. That was one of my safer predictions, confirmed almost immediately by Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money. Farley declined to respond, saying “whatever his other virtues, Dr. Quiggin is […]

Chris just let me know that Alan Thornett has died. International Viewpoint has a long obituary here. I doubt The Graun will carry an obit, and The Times certainly won’t. I got to know members of the Oxford branch of what was then the Socialist Group (a successor of the Worker’s Socialist League, via a […]

Having alighted from the bus in an industrial area I’d never been before, I found the right building and descended the stairs. As instructed by email, I rang the doorbell. I was immediately met by the two cutest dachshunds you’ve ever seen. My first words to the Westpac archivist: “This is already the best archive […]

I am sharing this from Benjamin Ferguson and Roberto Veneziani, with thanks (I will be back to post myself soon, apologies for the long radio silence): We are conducting a survey about academic philosophers’ views of (1) the effect of exploitation on subjective wellbeing, (2) how morally wrong exploitative relations are, and (3) norms around […]

(A piece I ran in The Guardian) The recent panic about a breach of Medicare computer security by an “AI agent” contrasts sharply with other recent cases such as the Telstra and Optus outages that left many Australians unable to reach Triple Zero. In those cases, no one blamed the computers involved. The mistakes were […]

People here often ask me what part of England I grew up in, which isn’t a particularly easy question – I was born in the north, but then lived in South Wales and then various place in the South all of which were west of London. Oxford is sort of familiar to everyone (though not […]

These days, methodological nationalism is finally sparking a heated debate in philosophy. A flurry of new papers has recently been published in open access: Baycan, 2026; Beaton, 2026; Milioni, 2024; Sager, 2021; Ujlaki, 2026. Naturally, some of them question the relevance of the critique of methodological nationalism to political philosophy. As I myself argued that […]

I’m mostly a descriptivist when it comes to the meaning of words. If everyone uses “literally” to mean “figuratively”, that’s fine by me. Same if there is no likelihood of confusion, as with “aggravate” for “annoy” as well as “exacerbate”. But that still leaves me plenty of room to gripe about the way in which […]

Books that complain about the state of universities, written by university members, are probably as old as the institution itself. And if there is one institution that needs – and should be able to provide – self-reflection, it is universities. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to comment on a new addition to this genre, Long […]

Responding the gloominess of recent posts, I thought I’d try a piece that’s more optimistic about Europe, if not about the US. It’s a mashup of a couple of recent Substack newsletters. The New York Times has a thumb-sucker about the rise of the European far right, which would greatly mislead anyone not up with […]

The story of last week, which will certainly return, is the threat to the survival of humanity (and maybe all life on Earth) from artificial intelligence. I don’t know how real that threat is and find it hard to think about, but I am worried that even if humanity survives, AI will be a means […]

At La Pointe courte, in Sète, France, where Agnès Varda shot her film of the same name.

One of the oddities of our age is that there are two apocalyptic sensibilities that have captured two almost completely distinct groups of the scientifically literate not least among the youth: one can be found among those concerned with the effects of global warming produced by human (technological) activity. Scientifically literate apocalypticism is what concerns […]

About a year ago, I started doing this thing that the people who do it just call “climbing.” Basically, you go to a giant place where there are things strategically stuck to a wall, and you grab them with your hands and feet trying to climb to the top of the wall. The things combine […]

Last week, on 9 September, Donald Trump promised that, if the Republicans retained their Congressional majorities in the November elections, he would send $5000 to every adult American citizen. The cost has been estimated at around $1.2 trillion. The announcement received cursory coverage in the mainstream press the following day. A few retired Republicans protested. […]

Here’s another of my posts about being a peace activist in the UK in the early eighties. This one is mainly about my time in secondary school. When I linked to the substack version from Facebook a couple of people recognized some of the people involved, but they’re pretty well disguised unless you were there. […]

This week all the news services carried a story about the Dutch central bank shipping many, many tons of gold from the Mad King-led United States to the custody of cooler heads (well, cooling, we hope, after that very hot summer) in London. On the same day, the FT ran a story by Banu Baweja […]

… but that won’t change any minds It’s now six months since the US-Israel war on Iran began with air attacks which killed the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei as well as around 200 schoolchildren. The war has dragged on a long time. But before that surprise attack, it had appeared that the US planned to […]

We are being flooded with spam coming from fake gmail.com addresses at the moment. So, for the moment, I’ve set our spam filter to delete everything from gmail.com If you want to post a real comment, just give a spurious address like anon.com and use your existing name/nym. Although we ask for an email address, […]

I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago, responding to a challenge* to write about the economic aspects of Taylor Swift. Not long after that, the world lost the marvellous Dolly Parton. Parton’s lifetime income almost certainly exceeded a billion dollars, but she gave huge amounts away. Her biggest philanthropic endeavour was the Imagination […]

A couple of years ago, I edited a volume on pluralizing political philosophy, in particular in relation to economic and ecological inequalities. It was put together under the Covid-pandemic, so we had to swap the authors-conference for online meetings, with the authors spread out from China to Argentina. Sometimes the people in the most unfavorable […]

At the end of a glorious day hanging out at galleries, antique shops and the pub with friend and historian Matt Allen we walked to the station at Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, Australia (where I live) for Matt to get the train back to the city. We were confronted with this glorious mural representing […]

Ceuta, the small Spanish enclave on the coast of North Africa, has been in the news lately. And I’ve seen a couple of articles mentioning that Ceuta has been a Spanish possession since 1668. Which triggered my inner history nerd, because on one hand actually Ceuta has been under the Spanish crown since 1560, not […]

A summer anecdote: when on holidays in France, on a sunny August day, we visited a castle garden in rural Normandy. When buying the tickets, we got the usual: “Your postcode or country of origin?” We said “Germany,” and suddenly the face of the young woman at the counter lit up. “Would you mind doing […]

Yesterday, I ran my first gimmick promotion for the Brisbane to Gold Coast Ride against Cancer [1]. I invited anyone who donated $100 to nominate a topic on which I should write a post. Reader Daniela Brins-Norris has taken me up on the offer, and asked for a piece about the economic significance of Taylor […]

The Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, likes to invoke international law. Imagine that one day, someone had finally responded to him. Not just anyone, but one of the founding fathers of international law. It happened just after the Ceuta incident, in July 2026, when tens of thousands people from Morocco surged into Ceuta, a […]

… is set out over the fold. I’m confident readers who take a little time to think about it will realise it’s far superior to existing policy, and to any alternative proposed so far. Fourth repost since 2011

How Hegsethian heroes destroyed themselves and their entire civilisation I haven’t yet seen the Odyssey film[1], but reviews mention a minor obsession of mine, the Late Bronze Age collapse and the ensuing Greek Dark Age. I first encountered this at the end of Ken McLeod’s Intrusion where the character Geena compares modern nihilists to the […]

Progressives scored a win over establishment Democrats in the Michigan primary election for Senator on Tuesday’s election. Abdul El-Sayed beat Haley Stevens by 1 point, despite many polls predicting that he would win by 7 or more. And Stevens beat him soundly in Wayne (Detroit), Oakland, and Macomb counties, where the most Democratic votes will […]

According to various sources, John Crowley has died. This probably means something to many of you: Crooked Timber readers are not a random draw even on the population of highly literate people. Those of you who don’t know who John Crowley was will likely have been indirectly affected by his work. If you read […]

A friend on facebook says that Hamnet contains a pretty serious error — naming the Costwolds the Chilterns (or, pretty much equivalently, mislocating the Chilterns between Stratford and Oxford). I’m not sure that would ruin the book for me, but I definitely would find it annoying (knowing both areas very well makes it worse, but […]

So there was a modest puff of articles last month about astronomers discovering “the edge of the galaxy”. They were referencing this recent paper, which… doesn’t really say that. But it’s an interesting paper anyway, so let’s discuss. As we all learned back in school, our Sun is one star in the Milky Way galaxy, […]

In the final comment on my most recent CT post, John Q strategically grants a premise from an earlier comment by poster Matt: John Q grants that “it’s perfectly plausible that the number of US golfers exceeds the population of Australia.” This was not a concession to Matt’s main point, as John Q goes on […]

The producerist vision of AI seems to assume an endlessly expanding market for reading. And reading. Well. It is rather more than a market. Warning: this post is a little more sweary than usual. If that bothers you, maybe read something else. We read aloud in our household. A lot. We always have. When my […]

A number of commenters noted a malware problem with the site.It appears to be a well known attack called ClickFix. It’s now fixed, thanks again to Doctor Memory

My son Daniel points me to a piece by Nate Silver which announces the discovery that highly educated workers with low or precarious income are the natural constituency of the Democratic Socialists of America. We’ve been over this at length at CT, starting as far back as 2012 (and it wasn’t new then). Given that […]

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, […]

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 […]

It’s hard not to feel glum as I write this post on the 250th anniversary of my country. I remember celebrating the 200th as a teenager. As I recall it, it felt like the country was ready forward to better times. The Vietnam War and Watergate were over. Americans celebrated the 200th with exuberance. Today, […]

There was a renewed burst of enthusiasm for nuclear power a few years ago. In Australia, where I live it was confined to the political right and didn’t last long, but elsewhere support was broader. Most notable was the 2023 commitment by more than 20 countries, led by the US, UK and France, to triple […]

I start with characterizing a term, ‘Humphreys opacity’ (or, if you prefer, ‘epistemic opacity’):1 this involves the inability to surveil the steps of a process from a known input to a known desirable (or truthful, useful, beautiful, etc.) output in a timely manner to the decision-maker or responsible agent. (For more on the origin and […]

For the first time in history, the country in which I live – the Netherlands – has issued a Code Red alert due to the heat. Code red is only issued when the environmental circumstances are such that there is a significant risk of “destabilising of society”. I can only remember that we’ve had this […]