Links I liked

It’s been more than 2 months since the last weekly “Links I liked” round-up of interesting hyperlinks – for which my apologies. There’s no excuse – they’re easy to do and I suspect the short notes are a welcome relief for many of you from the usual long post on a post of a recondite theme……

I had been saving The Post-Pandemic Mind for a special Covid roundup but got distracted. The article makes the point that the debate already underway about the long-term effects of the health-and-economic crisis -

can be grouped as right-leaning, anywhere-leaning, and left-leaning. To wit:

- a conservative and nationalist interpretation - which challenges globalisation and reinserts state sovereign rights

- an industrial interpretation, relating to the way digital culture has boomed during the pandemic

- and a social-democratic interpretation which could give the state and/or mutuality a more significant role

In the early days of the pandemic, certainly, it seemed that most so-called forecasts of the lasting impact were little more than wishful thinking sustaining the prevailing world-view of the commentators. We need a rather more hard-headed approach  

Michael Roberts is my favourite economic blogger. Not only are his expositions so clear verbally but his visuals are a real object lesson. And the speed with which he can put material together is quite frightening – the Japanese PM had no sooner indicated that illness was forcing him to resign than this post about Abenomics appeared in my mail.  

Visual Capitalist had a useful visual on the 700 year decline of interest rates

Bill Nighy and Annette Bening are two of my favourite actors whom I had never dared hope to see together and I am therefore very much looking forward to viewing the Hope Gap film in which they star.

Martin Hagglund seems to be an up-and-coming philosopher by origin Swedish whose This Life – why mortality makes us free (2019) seems to be making waves. The extensive google excerpt certainly indicates it’s elegantly written - although it seems so far to be making the fairly obvious point that our limited time on earth should make us value more our projects and relationships – compared with the eternal boredom that awaits the believer……I’m not a fan of the Dawkins/Hitchens anti-God screeds – although 3 new Chris Hitchens books await me (on Orwell; Letters to a Contrarian Friend; and "And Yet", his final volume of collected essays )

Having vicerated a Quillette article recently, I’m hoping that Post post-modernism on the left will be less offensive

The increasingly impressive Boston Review reviews a clutch of books on White Liberalism – which reminds me that I need to get back into Eric Kaufman’s “Whiteshift – populism, immigration and the future of white majorities”. Also an excerpt from one of the chapters

Finally, I liked this story of an American teenager who has been revealed as the author of more than half of the Wikipedia entries on the Scots language.

If you don’t know what that is – here’s a nice presentation of the Scots language