Crooked Timber

Last week, my partner and I performed a familiar ritual of modern co-parenting: I told him that I felt overburdened by mental labor, and we made a plan to adjust.

I went to see NAZA last week.

Last week I was in the Public Records of Victoria (PROV) looking at records of the Melbourne mint.

Colleagues Cyril Hédoin and Pablo Paniagua are running a symposium on “PPE” (philosophy, politics, and economics) over there.

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?’

(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 Un…

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.

Chris just let me know that Alan Thornett has died.

Having alighted from the bus in an industrial area I’d never been before, I found the right building and descended the stairs.

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 subj…

(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.

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.

These days, methodological nationalism is finally sparking a heated debate in philosophy.

I’m mostly a descriptivist when it comes to the meaning of words.

Books that complain about the state of universities, written by university members, are probably as old as the institution itself.

Responding the gloominess of recent posts, I thought I’d try a piece that’s more optimistic about Europe, if not about the US.

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.

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 gl…

About a year ago, I started doing this thing that the people who do it just call “climbing.”

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.

Here’s another of my posts about being a peace activist in the UK in the early eighties.

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.

… 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.

We are being flooded with spam coming from fake gmail.com addresses at the moment.

I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago, responding to a challenge* to write about the economic aspects of Taylor Swift.

A couple of years ago, I edited a volume on pluralizing political philosophy, in particular in relation to economic and ecological inequalities.

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.

Ceuta, the small Spanish enclave on the coast of North Africa, has been in the news lately.

A summer anecdote: when on holidays in France, on a sunny August day, we visited a castle garden in rural Normandy.

Yesterday, I ran my first gimmick promotion for the Brisbane to Gold Coast Ride against Cancer [1].

The Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, likes to invoke international law.

… is set out over the fold.

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.