Links I liked

I’m now sold on the idea of a weekly ”Links I liked” feature for the blog. It allows me to use the folder in which I keep the hyperlinks of material which has caught my eye over the year - and select those which warrant further – if brief – study. And the links which are used can easily be found subsequently by me in the "search" facility which is the blog’s most valuable feature..... 

Like everyone else, I have a morbid fascination for the latest development on Coronavirus; and, as a retired person, have the luxury of being able to take the precautions even further than we are advised . So I not only frequently wash my hands, I gargle with salt water; swallow ears of garlic and Vitamin D (for immunity) and avoid public places and touching...

As far as the wider discussions are concerned, I can only follow Oscar Wilde’s dictum that ”I always pass on good advice....it’s the only thing to do with it!”  
- The inimitable Scottish Review carried a typically solid analysis;

- Michael Roberts looked at the economic implications; and then, prolific blogger that he is, followed up the very next day with an analysis of whether the obvious Keynesian solution will work this time around……  

- the Future of Life Institute website gave me access to a fascinating document on existential risks

- no less a figure than Branko Milanovic has some interesting thoughts

I’ve been having (unresolved) problems accessing The New Yorker site to which I took out a temporary 6 dollar subscription – but I was able to read and download a couple of articles from an interesting series they’re currently running on the Future of Democracy – one on Politics without politicians; and this one On the Right to Listen. 
I've long admired The New Yorker for the sheer quality of its writing and the 6 dollar offer appealed to my Scottish nature! I'm not sure if I'm attracted to the 99 dollar annual sub - and it will be interesting to see how easily I will be able to cancel (given the problems I've had accessing)

The LSE Review of Books regularly feeds me with commentary on interesting books and, in view of eralier comments of mine about rationing non-fiction books, I particularly appreciated this intro to a recent review of a book about populism

Sometimes, it feels like populism has become its own non-fiction genre, like true crime or travel writing. Publishers have issued several primers on the topic in recent years, from Cas Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser’s entry in the Very Short Introduction series, to Jan-Werner Müller’s What is Populism? and John Judis’s The Populist Explosion. Some works try to examine the electoral aspects of transnational populism, like Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart’s Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism, while others examine populism as a style or manner of campaigning, like Benjamin Moffitt’s The Global Rise of Populism. 

In such an atmosphere of intense examination, wide-ranging research and prolific explanations, each new work on populism emerges to an immediate question – does this book tell us anything we didn’t already know? Does it offer a new angle, a new perspective, a new conception on the problem? And, given how mutable the term ‘populism’ is, does the book even describe the correct subject?

I wish I had some way of sending it to the author of a 500 page book called EuroTragedy – a drama in Nine Acts which has a 25 page intro and a 75 page bib but absolutely no attempt at an explanation of why he burdens us with yet another history (I know of at least half a dozen books on the same topic). I stumbled on the book because of this article the author has just written for Spiked

The TransNational Institute (TNI) is a body I admire and has released a very useful short paper Seven Steps to Build a Democratic Economy

The TLS is doing an interesting series called Footnotes to Plato ”appraising the works and reputations of great thinkers”. Ever since University I’ve recognised the importance of Hannah Arendt -  particularly the care she took to parse the Latin and other words for the deeper meaning they contained. But I don’t pretend I understood very much. One sentence in the current TLS article is typical of her  

Self-interest, Arendt frequently argued, is a misnomer, since ”inter est” refers to the common world that lies between individuals, not inside them.

A very good example of what the writer in an earlier post had emphasised as the benefits which can come from looking at words carefully

The Communards are one of the few groups I remember from the 1980s (Queen was my favourite) and I was fascinated by this article about one of its members who has subsequently  become a clergyman (!) and public figure – to the extent of fronting several television programmes including one called The Great Painting Challenge which led me to this delightful presentation by a painter

The Guardian is currently marking the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union with  a brilliant series called This is Europe -

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/mar/05/european-critics-on-uk-culture-this-is-europe

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/07/shock-of-new-novelists-stories-europe

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/mar/07/my-europe-27-things-we-love-european-union