Robert Peston is a kind of modern broadcasting hero. The BBC’s Economics Editor is a popular, engaging and energetic figure who helps explain capitalism to the people of the UK. Sometimes though, he seems rather a worried man. He worries about the price of crude oil. He worries about the government deficit and the latest unemployment …
Literary scholar Jennifer Ashton – author of the canonical study From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century – has published a very interesting critical appraisal of metamodern poetry and the work of Dana Ward over at NonSite. In his poem ‘Things the Baby Liked, A-Z’, Ward invokes the figure of Bertolt Brecht, noting …
Liberal democracy isn’t doing so well these days. The countries that have it seem keen to get rid of it. Presidents are installed without being elected (Italy), autocratic populist parties are on the rise (the US, the UK, France, the Netherlands), debates are settled by hand-to-hand fighting (South Korea), and freedom of speech is inhibited …
Thirteen theses on (the end of) liberal democracy Read More »
Interesting times call for interesting books. In Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis (2010) (and elsewhere) Anatole Kaletsky, Editor-at-Large of The Times, comes up with a thoughtful analysis of the past, present and future of global capitalism. Putting the events of the 2007-2009 economic crisis, epitomized by the fall of Lehmann Brothers, into a historical perspective, he writes:
