The Tyrant and His Enablers
Stephen Greenblatt, Professor of the Humanities at Harvard and Shakespeare scholar, examines the author’s preoccupation with politics, and more specifically with tyranny and how it comes about.
The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain
A piece looking at the huge number of cognitive biases human beings are lumbered with, from a bias against evidence that counters our existing views, to prioritising rewards in the present over increased returns in the future.
The Art of Biography
The Paris Review interviews a master of political biography, whose epic work on President Lyndon Johnson has only reached the start of his Presidency after four volumes. Caro eloquently described his philosophy on biography at a round table with Kurt Vonnegut in 1999 – “I realized that what I wanted to do was to use biography as a means of illuminating the times and the great forces that shape the times – particularly political power.”
Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War
Essential reading on those alleged connections between Messrs Trump and Putin and the latter’s world view in a triple byline article co-authored by The New Yorker’s Editor David Remnick.
This Town Has Been Labour Since 1919. It’s About To Switch To The Tories
The writer goes to the traditional Labour stronghold of Newcastle-under-Lyme that polling suggests is now leaning towards the Conservative Party and speaks to constituents to find out why.
My déja vu is so extreme I can’t tell what’s real any more
The author’s brain tumour has left him experiencing acute and persistent déja vu – here he his uses his personal experience to explore both the phenomenon and memory more broadly.
See No Evil
Not for the fainthearted, this 1993 piece tells the tale of Charles Albright, a man of great charm and many talents who was an apparently upstanding member of Texan society. He was also a murderer, several times over.
To catch a paedophile, you only need to look at their hands
A look at the identification techniques designed to help prosecutions against paedophiles.
Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble
Talk about the Bitcoin bubble and fortunes made and lost is one thing (cf. the news this week that rapper 50 Cent was paid in Bitcoin for an album, forgot about it, and is now $8m richer), but this insightful piece proposes that the blockchain technology behind it can unlock things of far greater value.
Why Earth’s History Appears So Miraculous
An ambitious piece looking at observer selection effect – where a data set’s composition or properties are correlated with the very existence of its observer. The first example the piece calls on is an analysis of planes returning from WWII bombing raids with the goal of identifying which areas of the fuselage to reinforce, but it rapidly expands in scope to extinction events for our world, and our universe.