Subterms
The Guardian’s columnist Will Hutton, a declared Keynesian, has expressed his astonishment at the Tory government suddenly abandoning its economic orthodoxy as the appropriate response to the coronavirus pandemic. His readers certainly remember the “Cameron-Osborne austerity” of only a few years ago, when Conservative economists, as they have done for decades, insisted that austerity was […] More
We live in an age of accelerated individualization — or so sociologists and social philosophers like Ulrich Beck have told us for decades. We have accepted it, even if we did not necessarily like it. The citizens of the former Soviet empire were among the first to take note. In East Germany, in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary […] More
Tracing the ever-rising death toll of the COVID-19 outbreak to the exotic meat on sale at a wet market in Wuhan, China, probably feels a bit surreal. If anything, it serves as a sobering reminder of how, in our globalized, interconnected lives, a plate of dubiously sourced food can rapidly lead to packed hospitals, empty […] More
Other sectors of the world economy may be suffering but the arms industry continues to do a roaring trade, and nowhere more so than in the MENA region. In its annual report released on March 9, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), notes a dramatic increase in weapons exports to a part of the world engaged […] More
Former PM doubts ‘appetite for socialist revolution’ Debate: ‘Sledgehammer on Trump, scalpel on Sanders’ Tony Blair has warned Democrats in the US that nominating Bernie Sanders to face Donald Trump for the presidency would be “an enormous gamble”, risking defeat on a similar scale to that suffered by the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. Related: […] More
Donald Trump filed his paperwork to run for reelection only hours after his inauguration in January 2017, setting a presidential record, the first of his many dubious achievements. For a man who relished the adulation and bombast of campaigning, it should have surprised no one that he charged out of the starting gate so quickly for 2020 […] More
Watching French President Emmanuel Macron’s address to the nation on March 12, I couldn’t avoid admiring the skill with which he deployed two supremely engineered strategic themes. After drawing attention to the importance of a concerted European response to the pandemic, he insisted that the French government would not only bypass the interests of the […] More
The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has a prodigious output and, indeed, it takes a prodigious effort to keep up with it. No sooner had I completed reading the latest trio of her books than a new one was signaled, many of the recent works being based on her delivery of prestigious guest lectures at universities around […] More
