Middle Eastern Billionaires and the Working Man’s Game
“We got our club back! We got our club back!” fans of the Newcastle United Football Club chanted joyously outside St James’ Park stadium as the news broke that Mike…
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The Moral Argument for Factual Realism
Six decades ago—when I was still in elementary school—Karl Popper wrote the following eloquent paragraph: The belief of a liberal—the belief in the possibility of a rule of law, of…
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Schrödinger’s Vaccine
It stops the spread. Well, not really. It confers lasting immunity—but you may need a booster shot in six months. It makes Covid a mild disease. Not necessarily. It means…
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China’s Uyghur Prison-State
Genocide is a crime that has recurred throughout history, but that—one would hope—enlightened humanity would have put far behind it by now. But of course this is not the case.…
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Niall Ferguson’s Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe
As Niall Ferguson acknowledges in his new book, Doom, “a general history of catastrophe” must address three main questions: Why do some societies outperform others? Why do some collapse while…
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Autism and Its Abusers: The Contrasting Cases of James Damore and Greta Thunberg
In July 2017, engineer James Damore was fired for writing an internal memo entitled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” Although the memo offered ideas on how to make the company more…
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The Changing Face of History in US High Schools
Amid the national frenzy—one can hardly call it a debate—in the United States over Critical Race Theory, detailed descriptions of how course curricula are actually changing have been curiously absent.…
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Updike’s Panther: Rabbit Redux at Fifty
“Say what you see.” That was Roy Walker’s advice to contestants on the UK quiz show Catchphrase. We are attracted to other people’s observations—it is one of the reasons we…
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Ancient Philosophers, Alpacas and the Moral Status of Animals
Britain may, famously, be a nation of animal lovers, but even so, things seem to be getting out of hand. This summer, national attention was captured by the government’s ultimately…
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Confronting the Antisemitism on the Left
Traditionally, in the western world, it has been the reactionary, racist right, with its espousal of blood and soil politics, that has wielded the deadly weapons of antisemitism and Judeophobia,…
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“Can We Cope with the Complexity of Reality?” by Rolf Jucker. Review.
The title of Rolf Jucker’s newest book poses a question worth asking: we face climate change, population increases, religious and political extremism, a faltering faith in democratic institutions, and an…
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Homo Mortalis
The life force is a gift that yearns to pay itself forward. But as a twenty-first-century person without a religious belief, my experience of this yearning to self-perpetuate has encountered…
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“Borderlines: The Edges of U.S. Capitalism, Immigration, and Democracy” by Daniel Melo. Book Review.
In Borderlines, Daniel Melo exposes the unjust, inhumane and downright absurd position of immigrants in the United States, and offers an explanation for it. The arguments are not entirely novel,…
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Will This Article Kill You?
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. —John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (Meditation XVII). Can Just Seeing Something Kill You? There…
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Postmodernism in the Classroom
When I (Patty) was a high school senior newly enamoured of critical theory, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay positioning Oscar the Grouch as a victim of oppression by a bourgeois…
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Beating Them at their Own Game: Why Manga is Overtaking American Comics
These days, it’s taken for granted that the comics industry has become a media juggernaut in the western world—as evidenced by the myriad movies based on comic-book heroes that have…
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How We Chose Violence
The term violence has achieved an amusing new cultural cachet in the age of Twitter. “He woke up and chose violence” prepares us to hear a funny insult, see a…
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Patriotism: An Emotion to be Encouraged or Condemned?
I define patriotism as a sense of civic loyalty and pride, grounded in shared history, culture and interests. Nationalism has some of these qualities, but adds a sense of superiority…
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