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What does it mean to be an academic in different parts of the world? What comes along as the same job description – a bundle of teaching, research, and impact tasks – varies enormously from place to place. Not only the financial conditions of universities differ, but also the social standing of researchers. This is […]
Do you know Baba Yetu? Take three minutes and listen to this performance of Baba Yetu. (Our ancient blogging platform doesn’t like embedded video, so you’ll have to click through to YouTube. Go ahead and click, nothing bad will happen.) Some notes: First off, if you didn’t figure it out from the short prayer at […]
Before I depart this world, I would like to visit St. Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, Scotland, and see the Jenny Geddes memorial. I’m told it’s open to the public. Why? What’s interesting about a stool? Well, it’s probably impossible to point to a single moment, or a single object, and say “The Enlightenment began here.”. […]
Among other things, the unlamented former autocrat Viktor Orban was one of the leading proponents of pro-natalist policies, and more open than most about the racist underpinnings of his view. However, like others who have tried to raise birth rates, he wasn’t particularly successful. To understand why not, it’s useful to consider the question: how […]
The news from Hungary’s election is so good that I need to write about it, even if not all the implications are clear yet, and even in a disorganised and way, repeating lots of what others are saying. Although the polls predicted Orban’s defeat, nothing I read foreshadowed the scale of the victory – a […]
The New South Wales gold rush began more than 400 million years ago. It was an age of fire, that ended with ice. Australia was part of the super-continent Gondwana, which was not yet south. By continent standards it was moving fast. By the end of this era, the Ordovician, it would be at the […]
A journalist from the Wall Street Journal wrote to me a week ago to ask what the numbers that I use in the opening pages of my book Limitarianism would look like today. In particular, she asked whether I could calculate for her the “lifetime equivalent hourly income” of Elon Musk’s current assets today. Short […]
(A piece I wrote for the Guardian) A couple of weeks ago, just before my 70th birthday, I completed the Mooloolaba standard distance triathlon (1,500m swim, 40km cycle, 10km run). There was nothing exceptional about my performance, placing 1,509 out of 1,730 overall and 14th out of 18 in my 65-69 age category. But not […]
As I approach formal retirement from my academic job, I’m still thinking about ideas in my main theoretical field of decision theory. But I’ve largely lost interest in publishing journal articles, leaving the chore of dealing with Manuscript Central and other robotic systems to my younger co-authors in the case of joint work, and not […]
Jürgen Habermas has died, at the age of 96, and traditional and social media are full of obituaries and memories. For outsiders, it is maybe hard to gauge the omnipresence of his name in West Germany,* but his influence on democratic theory more broadly speaking is well-known. When I entered university, people would mention it […]
