The 37 or so songs of American satirist Tom Lehrer (1928- ) should all be part of the vocabulary of, well, everyone. They are dirty (Smut, I’m a market they can’t glut), sick (I hold your hand in mind and “Be Prepared” - “don’t solicit for your sister, that’s not nice; unless you get a... Continue Reading →
A couple of weeks ago Australian novelist Tim Winton wrote a really provocative piece called Our leaders are collaborators with fossil fuel colonialists. This is the source of our communal dread, which I would strongly recommend. I wrote a response called Winton, Fanon and what is to be done: On climate, capture, Cesaire…, which got... Continue Reading →
A Looting the Ivory Tower on Sovacool, B. 2024. The promise and peril of sociotechnical visions of the future. Nature Reviews Physics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-024-00774-5 Not all academic work is self-serving word-spinning helpfully quarantined behind paywalls and verbiage walls. I wouldn’t want to hazard a percentage, and it varies from a) field to field and b) taste to... Continue Reading →
This from the Guardian in October 2024. Children are being “plunged into poverty”, a charity says, because of a lack of support for kinship carers – relatives or family friends who step in to look after children after a crisis. Kinship carers, who are often grandparents, are twice as likely as other adults to rely... Continue Reading →
First, the cartoon. The cartoonist is Banx, who for my money is one of the best in the UK. His work appears in (at least) the Financial Times and Private Eye (these two are indispensable for understanding what is going on in the UK, as is the Morning Star. None of the three should be... Continue Reading →
Two particular Cultural Artefacts bumped together in my head just now, and I realised they are the same thing. Item the first - "This be the verse" by Philip Larkin. It's the one that begins "They fuck you up, your mum and dad". Get beyond that, and there's dark despairing wisdom (my favourite kind, obvs).... Continue Reading →
Jotting a note to self for future possible work. I love old cartoons that talk about the ecological crisis - back to Pogo in 1971 "we have met the enemy and he is us" but also others from the same period. They remind me that the stakes have been known since the time I was... Continue Reading →
I should be working (1). Anyway, I am sure some of the readers (singular? plural?) of this blog will have had the experience of trying to explain that there are in fact limits - ecological, social, cognitive, physical, to someone who just denies it all and says, oh, you know the drill "limitless capacity for... Continue Reading →
The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous. E.O. Wilson Am so in love with this quote. Yes, yes, the dangers of mystifying class relations by harkening back to our hominid ancestry. Blah blah 'it's not the anthropocene, it's the capitolocene' blah blah.... Continue Reading →
On Saturday, at a wedding, talking - as you do - about cortisol levels in people in long-term stressful situations and brain architecture. Pushback from a none-too-bright ideologue (no, seriously) who tried to evade questions about their position/experience (always a sign, that), and had some, ah, odd, ideas about how fear and negative stimuli work... Continue Reading →
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