Category: Current Affairs
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‘When We Rise Up, We Must Not Lift Away… Real Hope is Horizontal’
Thrilled to announce that my talk at TEDx Exeter is now online! It was a huge honour to be asked to close the event, which was on the theme of hope. ‘Instead of getting out of our heads, we must work with our hands.’ In Countering Political Turmoil with a New Summer of Love I look…
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‘Sometimes the Burned Landscape Blooms Most Lavishly’ | ‘All This Is Temporary’
Beautiful – and important words here from Rebecca Solnit, via Robert Macfarlane. Something all writers – and politicians – need to digest: On that same plane, I’m really grateful to Barry Taylor for sharing this talk given by Mark Fisher in February 2016, in which he gives a rather brilliant summary of his thinking… and,…
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The Cloud of All-Knowing | Democracy and Demagogues in the Age of Data
“True power is not the strength to force someone into slavery, but to make them happily lock their own manacles, as if chains were adding to their liberty.” Yesterday The Observer published a long and detailed piece that attempted to join (some of) the dots between the ‘big data’ socio-political technology firm Cambridge Analytica, and…
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From Russia, With Chaos
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been re-reading Peter Pomerantsev’s book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, each page pushing me towards the same, slightly counterintuitive conclusion: if you want to understand Trump’s America, you need to look to Putin’s Russia. I first read the book when a colleague – a history teacher I’d…
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A Gandhi for the West?
I watched Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi this week. I remember being taken to it by my parents back in 1982. There was an intermission half way through as the reels were changed. I was 10 years old and as the film opened with his assassination, then jumped back in time, I remember being blown away by the…