“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Four years on, the heady idealism of 2008 makes me cringe …
Continue reading
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of American sports from a European perspective is that for all their consumerist glitz, the leagues themselves are exemplary not of capitalism but its seeming opposite: socialism.
Continue reading
Every thriving political movement contains diverse and often warring elements bound together by little more than strength of feeling and the lure of power, so it would be stupid to look for unblemished ideological consistency in a political party. But …
Continue reading
Popular science is part of popular culture: our shelves teem with tomes that flatter and patronize us in equal measure, and every fallen senator is the victim of his genes. But what about popular philosophy? Is there a philosophical version …
Continue reading
In hindsight, the Obama campaign was most notable for the passion it excited. After a period in which apathy seemed endemic to prosperous democracies, politics as mass movement was reborn. Volunteers swarmed states not their own; devotees assembled in the …
Continue reading
My MacBook has a shiny screen. Trawling the internet, I saw myself reflected in its depths: my tabs—Facebook, Wikipedia, The Financial Times—and then me, above and behind, peering. Just a short break from the Plato dissertation. A Facebook friend had posted …
Continue reading
