JUST A TYPICAL DAY

I wanted to share the reading I do each day – before 3.30pm. So let me tell you 

that this Sunday these are the (various blogposter links eg this here) – a strange 

mix of right-wing tracts and left-wing writing

Taboo – how making race a sacred cow produced a cultural revolution Eric Kaufmann 
(2024)
Bad Education – why our universities are broken and how we can fix them Matt Goodwin 
(2025) reviewed here
World History – a new perspective Clive Ponting (2000)
Thirteen Days – the countdown to the Great War Clive Ponting (2003)
1940 – myth and reality Clive Ponting (1990)
From What Is to What If Rob Hopkins (2019)
Society Against the State - essays in political anthropology Pierre Clastres (1989)
Waiting for Yesterday – pages from a street kid’s life Michael Parenti (2013)
Attenuated Democracy – a critical intro to US government and politics  David Hubert 
(2020)
History as Mystery Michael Parenti (1999)
Power and the Powerless Michael Parenti (1989)
Hemingway documentary 
Underground Empire – how America weaponised the world economy 
Henry Farrell and Abe Newman (2023)

In Praise of Bibliographical Essays

Last April I posted on this theme

Readers are aware of the rather eccentric stress this blog puts on the importance of 

books having annotated bibliographies. Last year Penguin published 

Why Politics Fails – the 5 traps of the  modern world and how to escape them  

Ben Ansell (2023) which ends with a rare essay which covers, for each chapter, the key 

books the author has found essential as themes for the lens through which he examines 

democracy, equality, solidarity, security and prosperity. 

The only other book I’ve come across with such an essay is Peter Gay’s 680 page 

magnum opus Modernism – the lure of heresy  (2007) which has a stunning 32 page  

bibliographical essay which, he warned, was “highly selective”! 
Peter Gay was born in Germany in 1923 but his family came to the States via Havana 

in 1941 where he became a prolific US historian – as is evident from this Wikipedia entry.

One of his books is My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (1998), a powerful 

and insightful account of his teenage years in Berlin. 

Another which also has an extensive bib essay is Freud – a Life for our Times (1988) 

whose bib essay extends to 76 pages. The book does, after all, have 1350 pages! 

For me, such bibliographical essays are rare gems which offer an opportunity to understand 

an author’s preferences.

Yesterday I came across another book with a great bibliographical essay - 

Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven published in 1991. It’s essay is only 50 

pages long!

The Humanitarian Impulse is alive and well – exemplified in Mondragon

I haven’t posted enough about Mondragon and the shining example it offers about the potential of workers’ cooperatives. A young American, Ellie Griffin, from Utah state recently published The Elysian Manifesto

Once we wrote constitutions and built governments, the work was done and our future became fixed. The pamphlets stopped. The illuminated ideas ceased. We no longer amend our constitution or reinvent our governments. You wouldn’t see something like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense or Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers published today—something that would “decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice.” Instead, we cover all of the ways our systems are failing without imagining what better ones could be.

Journalism is no longer about thinking up solutions, it’s about reporting on the problems. Even our fiction is dystopian. Our science fiction writers can only imagine a future plagued by AI apocalypse, government surveillance, computer chips in our brains, and space colonies that take us away from the polluted world we created. If even our best literary minds cannot imagine a better future, how are we supposed to create it?

That’s why I’ve created the Elysian League—a utopian garden where we can study philosophy and debate politics and rethink capitalism and enjoy contemplative leisure and be part of a new Enlightenment. It’s a place where we can think through a more beautiful future through essays and literature and discourse. And I’m just optimistic enough to believe that’s enough of a start to building one. The Elysian League is the Enlightenment social club made modern, and this Manifesto is my entry into the utopian canon

Her blog is a celebration of Mondragon with such posts as

• https://www.elysian.press/p/the-cooperatist-manifesto-of-mondragon?hide_intro_popup=true

• https://www.elysian.press/p/social-companies-like-mondragon

For readers wanting to know more about cooperatives I strongly recommend

• Democracy at Work Richard Wolff (2012)

• Owning our Future – the emerging ownership revolution Marjorie Kelly (2012)

• The Case for Community Wealth-building J Guinan and M O’Neill (2020)

• Design of a Worker Cooperatives Society – an alternative beyond capitalism and 

socialism and the transition roward it Geert Reuten (2023)

The Routledge Handbook of Cooperative Economics and Management ed JN Warren et al 

(2025)

About the blog

This blog has been running since I began to contemplate “hanging up my boots” after a career which had started in the late 1960s in “planning” work, moved on to economics and public administration and finished as a “consultant” in ex-communist countries in something called “institutional development”. You might think that after 16 years this blog has said most of what there is to say – but I keep coming across books which throw new light on things. Most blogs have a specialist focus, be it economic, political, sociological or cultural and apply that lens to the latest fashion of the day. This blog celebrates instead the butterfly approach and depends very much on what catches my fancy – generally a book or article, sometimes an incident, painting or piece of music. And I do like to offer excerpts from the books and articles I feel positive about – as distinct from offering opinions. It’s time, however, to do one of my periodic stock-takings of the blog. When it started (in 2009) it set out three aims -    

• “This blog will try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history (let alone hope).

• I read a lot and want to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the 

• time nor inclination to read widely.

• A final motive for the blog is What have we done with our life? What is important to us?”

The first two objectives are still important. After 12 years, it’s fairly obvious from the unfinished nature of my books on administrative reform (“Change for the Better?”) and on social change (“What is to be Done?”) that there’s still work to be done – although I often feel I’m just going round in circles. And I’m still finding fascinating books and continue to have this urge to share relevant insights with posterity. But I should probably stop imposing these rather forbidding reading lists.

But the blog has been weak on the third purpose. Indeed one friend has queried the absence of the personal touch – feeling that the tone is too clinical and aseptic. And it’s certainly fair comment that the blog is a bit “scholastic”. A couple of other friends have indeed called me a “scholar” – which I used to take as a compliment. Perhaps they meant bloodless!?

As I move through my “autumn days” and feel the approach of winter, the “settling of final accounts” (in the spiritual sense) should, certainly, loom larger. Charles Handy is a real inspiration here – someone constantly challenging himself and making fresh choices every decade or so about where to put the energies and skills he’s been endowed with  

One of my favourite fellow-bloggers is Canadian Dave Pollard who is constantly offering valuable insights from his life experience – he is a few years younger than me. A lot of this touches on inter-personal relations – one of my weak areas. In that spirit let me apply the Johari Window

	strong Known to me weak
Strong Known to others Weak	Open “The Arena”	Blind The “blind corner”
	Hidden “The Façade”	Unknown

Our public self is something we try to control – but rarely succeed in. People notice things about us which we ourselves are not necessarily aware of (our blind corners). Friends should be helpful here – but we often resent critical comment and they soon learn to shut up…

From 1990 I’ve had a nomadic life – living in some ten different countries – generally leader of teams in which I would make a few new friends. Both the contexts and my particular role were very different from those in which I had spent the previous 20 years.

But I was very aware of this – even so, it took me almost a decade before I was fully up to speed and confident that my skills were producing results. Those skills were broadly the same mix of political and scholastic I had used in my previous life - but the context was so very different. And my new skill was being sensitive to that and making the appropriate adjustments to the tools I used. 

As a Team Leader, I had, of course, to be sensitive to the strengths and weaknesses of the members of the team – but it’s almost impossible to shake off one’s cultural assumptions and I carried the baggage then of a Brit still proud of what our democratic tradition had given the world (!!!). In the past decade, in Bulgaria and Romania, I've deepened my understanding of cultural contexts - and am still learning..... 

I write in English – but literally a handful of Brits read the blog. Americans are its biggest fans making up 30% of readers (for which I’m so deeply grateful) - with Russians, curiously, coming in next at 15% and no other country having more than 5%. But the scale of non-English readership is an argument for keeping the posts short. 

Because I have the time to read widely; live on Europe’s edge; and have been out of my home country for more than 30 years, I have perhaps developed a bit of the outsider’s perspective….But I remain painfully aware of my shortcomings in the inter-personal field - I learned so much when I first did the Belbin test.... 

Charles Handy's Inside Organisations - 21 ideas for managers includes the Johari window as one of the ideas. It's a delightful and easy read which I strongly recommend

What I am really trying to say is that I have to recognise that I have always been a bit “distant” in my relations with others. Indeed, as a young politician who was quickly given responsibilities, I was seen as a bit arrogant – when that was the last thing I actually felt. It was rather a defence mechanism. Ernest Schumacher (author of "Small is Beautiful") put our usual approach into superb perspective in 1973 when he wrote -

"There are four sorts of worthwhile learning

· learning about things
- learning about oneself
· learning how others see us
· learning how we see others"

I was slow to learn about myself – let alone the other dimensions. Despite undergoing some sessions of psychotherapy in the late 1980s, I was too much of a “word merchant” to allow mere words to get inside my brain and challenge my being.

It’s only recently I’ve been willing to be open about that experience all of 30 plus years ago which, at the time, it wasn’t possible to discuss. Philip Toynbee was one of the rare people who had actually written about it – I learned later that Winston Churchill used the euphemism of “black dog” to refer to his episodes. And about the only popular book about the subject was Dorothy Rowe’s Depression – a way out of your prison (1983). How times have changed – with credit being due to characters such as Stephen Fry and Alasdair Campbell who were amongst the first to go public and to encourage others to be open about a condition which touches most of us at some time in our lives.

One of my favourite books is Robin Skynner and John Clease’s Life – and how to survive it (1993) A therapist and leading British comic have a Socratic dialogue about the initial stages of everyone’s development – as babies weaning ourselves from our mothers, learning about the wider environment and coping with our feelings. The understanding the principles of healthy (family) relationships and then use these to explore the preconditions for healthy organisations and societies: and for leadership viz -
- valuing and respecting others
- ability to communicate
- willingness to wield authority firmly but always for the general welfare and with as much consultation as possible while handing power back when the crisis is over)
- capacity to face reality squarely
- flexibility and willingness to change
- belief in values above and beyond the personal or considerations of party.

It took a massive change of role and circumstances before I came across an early edition of “A Manager’s Guide to Self-Development” by Mike Pedler et al which made me aware of a range of self-evaluation tools such as the Belbin Test of team roles which you can try out on yourself here. When I did it for the first time with my team of the moment, it was quite a revelation. I had assumed that I was a “leader”. What I discovered was that I was a “resource person” ie good at networking and sharing information – which was exactly right.

Harrison and Bramson’s The Art of Thinking (1982) was also a revelation for me - indicating that people have very different ways of approaching problems and that we will operate better in teams if we (a) understand what our own style is and (b) that others think in different ways. The authors suggest we have 5 styles – “synthetist”, “pragmatist”, “idealist”, “realist” and “analyst” and, of course, combinations thereof. I regret now that I came late to an understanding of the interpersonal - the question I now have is how people can avoid my fate. Is it enough that there are so many books around for people to stumble on? Or should it now be an integral part of undergraduate work? Perhaps it is?

Dave Pollard is one of the few bloggers whose posts I generally read in full – always thoughtful, generally provocative. This post is typical - professing lack of interest in what people had to say about themselves in CVs or expressions of future hopes – but preferring rather to suggest……

six “leading questions” that might evoke some kind of useful sense of who someone is and what they care about - and possibly assess whether the person you’re talking with might be the potential brilliant colleague, life partner, inspiring mentor or new best friend you’ve been looking for. These are the questions:

1. 1. What adjectives or nouns would you use to describe yourself that differentiate you 

• from most other people? When and how did these words come to apply to you?

1. 1. Describe the most fulfilling day you can imagine, some day that might realistically

   • occur in the next year. Why would it be fulfilling? What are you doing now that might 
   • increase its likelihood of happening?

   1. What do you care about, big picture, right now? What would you mourn if it disappeared?

   • What do you ache to have in your life? What would you work really long and hard to 

   • conserve or achieve? How did you come to care about this?

   1. What is your purpose, right now? Not your role or occupation, but the thing you’re 

   • uniquely gifted and inspired to be doing, something the world needs. What would elate you if you achieved it, today, this month, in the next year? What would devastate you if you failed, or didn’t get to try? How did this become your purpose?

   1. What’s your basic belief about why you, and other humans, exist? Not what you believe 

   • is right or important (or what you, or humans ‘should’ do or be), but why 

   • you think we are the way we are now, and why you think we evolved to be where we are. 

   • It’s an existential question, not a moral one. How did you come to this belief?

   1. What’s your basic sense of what the next century holds for our planet and our 

   • civilization? How do you imagine yourself coping with it? How did you come to this belief?

• These are not easy questions, and asking them might prove intimidating or even threatening to some people, which is why in the last post I suggested volunteering your own answer to each question yourself first, in a form such as “Someone asked me the other day… and I told them…”. It’s also why there are supplementary questions to each, to get the person you’re asking started. And the last supplementary question in each group lends itself to telling a story, since that’s what we’re most comfortable with. Even then, some of these questions will stop many people cold, which might tell you something about them right there.

What about Intellectual Fare? The state of English-speaking journals and mags

It’s some 5 years since I last did an annotated list of interesting journals, As the number of newspaper titles shrinks, the number of weekly, monthly and even quarterly journals seems to increase - although substack is now offering a highly competitive (paying) model which may challenge their future.

My question then was - which (English language) journals would pass a test which included such criteria as –

- Depth of treatment

- Breadth of coverage (not just political)

- Cosmopolitan in taste (not just anglo-saxon)

- clarity of writing

- sceptical in tone

That’s a tough test but this was the list -

3 Quarks Daily; I last said “my daily fix - an amazing site which offers carefully chosen articles which suit my demanding taste perfectly” but I don’t actually receive it any more. But Nous y verrons

Aeon; an impressive cultural journal (online since 2012) whose articles are about big issues and have real “zing”

Arts and Letters Daily; this daily internet service highlights an article and book but I’ve only recently resubscribed.

Boston Review; a mag I rate highly for originality

Brave New Europe; greatly improved site which contains essential reading for leftists such as this conversation between Varoufakis and Jeffrey Sachs

Consortium News; a leftist radical US site

Current affairs; a bi-monthly and slightly anarchistic American mag

Dissent; a US leftist stalwart 

Dublin Review of Books; great crack

Eurozine; a network of some 90 European cultural mags which gives a great sense of the diversity of European writing

Jacobin; a leftist mag which has improved with age.

Lettre International; a fascinating quarterly published in German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian and Romanian.

Literary Hub; a literary site with daily selections but one, for some reason, I haven’t looked at recently

London Review of Books; my favourite for the past 40 years to which I generally subscribe

Los Angeles Review of Books; tries too hard to run with the politically correct

Marginalia; gives extended excerpts from classic texts about creativity etc. a personal endeavour of a Bulgarian woman now living in the States which, recently, I’ve found it a bit too predictable 

Monthly Review; an old US stalwart with good solid analysis

Mother Jones; more journalistic US progressive

N+1; a centrist mag published only 3 times a year

New Humanist; an important monthly strand of UK thought

New Left Review; THE UK leftist journal publishing every 2 months since 1960. Always worth a look 

Prospect (UK); rather too smooth centrist UK monthly

The American Prospect (US); ditto US

Public Books – an impressive recent website (2012) to encourage open intellectual debate

Quillette; a "free-thinking" contrarian and libertarian journal 

Resurgence and Ecologist; dependable UK Green mag

Sceptic; celebration of important strand of UK scepticism

Social Europe; a european social democratic E-journal whose short articles are a bit too predictable for my taste

Soundings; if you want to keep up with UK leftist thought, this is the journal for you – issued only 3 times a year

Spiked; a libertarian net-based journal with challenging articles always guaranteed to be anti-PC

Sydney Review of Books; still can’t make up my mind

The Alternative UK; an excellent new platform aimed at establishing a "friendly revolution" to transform politics - it actually gives  space to interesting new thinkers

The Atlantic; one of the US oldest mags (founded in 1857)

The Baffler; great writing. Apparently founded in 1988, it surfaced for me only recently

The Conversation; a rare venture which uses academics as journalists 

The Cultural Tutor; an amazing site which offers each week a taste of music, literature and architecture – produced by Sheehan Quirke

The Nation; America's oldest (1865) weekly, for the "progressive" community

The New Republic Progressive US monthly which has been publishing for more than a century

The New Yorker; very impressive US writing

The New York Review of Books; I used to love this journal but have not renewed my sub – partly in protest about what’s happening in US politics

The Point;  a quiet rightist mag

Tribune; the original left paper for which Orwell wrote and to which I am currently subscribed. Has some great writers such as Owen Hatherley and Grace Blakely

Verfassungs blog; an excellent Anglo-German site which focuses on constitutional issues

Washington Independent Review; a new website borne of the frustration about the disappearance of so many book review columns

Words without Borders; a journal of translation

Wrong Side of History; Ed West writes that “every writer has an axe, or multiple axes to grind, and I’m obviously politically conservative – although I would more describe myself as a depressive realist – but I’m not anti-liberal. Liberalism works in certain circumstances, but it needs saving from itself. If there’s a campaigning theme to Wrong Side of History, it’s my belief that there is a political drift towards a form of soft totalitarianism, which includes a fixation with inserting activism into every aspect of our lives, whether it’s sport, education or visiting a cultural attraction. I want less politics in our daily lives”

Substack favourites

Aurelien; very thoughtful posts

Chris Hedges Report; the guy who rivals Chomsky

Critical perspectives; rigorous international research revealing how global systems actually shape our world- from Rex McKenzie

The long memo; posts on politics, collapse, and the architecture of exit by William Finnegan

Thoughts from the shire; highly literary thoughts from a wee Hobbit trying to escape clown world

https://www.kitklarenberg.com/; a male investigative journalist explores global risks

https://athenamac83.substack.com/; Anthropologist and a rare female author, specializing in bioethics and anthropogenic existential risk.

Academic journals

I would not normally deign academic journals with a second glance since theirs is an incestuous breed – with arcane language and specialized focus which breaches at least two of the above five tests. But Political Quarterly stands apart with the superbly written (social democratic) analyses which have been briefing us for almost a century and to which I have recommenced an (internet) sub. Parliamentary Affairs; West European Politics and Governance run it close with more global coverage.

A concept with unrealized potential, I feel, is that of the “global roundup” ” with selections of representative writing from around the globe. Courrier international is a good, physical, Francophone example – with Eurozine takes the main award for its selection of the most interesting articles from Europe’s 90 cultural journals

The archive on journalism

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2011/03/investigative-journalism.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2011/07/british-bread-oz-circus-and-bulgarian.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/03/fighting-big-brother.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/04/suborning-democracy.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/06/getting-under-skin.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2015/05/confessionals.html Pat Chalmers
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2015/05/is-british-journalism-dead.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/05/journals-worth-reading.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/08/in-praise-of-journalists.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/09/making-sense-of-global-crisis.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/03/why-we-should-not-be-so-cynical-about.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/03/brexit-and-reassertion-of-nation-state.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-writers-craft.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/11/kenneth-roy-voice-to-renew-faith-in.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-stuff-of-journalism.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/03/in-praise-of-literary-magazines.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/03/what-does-brexit-tell-us-about-ourselves.html