Just an observation. When people in the UK start talking about the National Health Service as “The New Church of England,” as Timothy Garton Ash is quoted here as suggesting, they may be saying more than they realize.
First of all, in coming decades, healthcare will continue to occupy a larger and larger share of our financial resources (as societies, regardless of whether...
Sounds like a fun new book by Wendy Lesser on Scandinavian crime fiction:
Lesser is especially interested in how Scandinavia and Scandinavians stack up against America and Americans. “Crime, in Scandinavia, is rarely seen as the bad action of a single bad actor,” she writes, invoking a...
This is an interesting article to me. Its argument is that technology and the sheer velocity of life in our world is making it hard to be “deeply literate”. In many ways, I want this argument to be right—I too fear that we are losing something important as a culture and as humans.
But it’s weird that he anchors his argument in the evolutionary...
Good news! ICANN has stopped a private equity company from buying the rights to control all .org internet addresses. How is it possible that this was even conceivable?
I am currently reading Kyle Harper’s quite stimulating book The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, and come across an interesting idea that to me speaks to our current situation.
Historians have been thinking about disease and its relationship to human history for some time. For me, an entry into this literature was Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian...
A good older piece (from 2017) about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Americanah. She’s right about the “cannibalistic ethos” of the American left, too:
It swiftly, gleefully, brutally eats its own. There is such a quick assumption of ill will and an increasing sanctimony...