Twenty good sites for those looking for serious analysis

My last post was a bit too pessimistic in suggesting that those looking for alternative analyses to the rubbish perpetrated on anglo-saxon MSM would find it a difficult task. There are quite a few “alternative news” sites – The Conversation is a non-profit which tries to combine academic insight with journalistic skills; the US Counterpunch has a stronger tone.

And it is analysis – rather than description – we need these days.

Having explored a few weeks ago the question of which (English language) magazines would pass a test which included such criteria as –

- Depth of treatment

- Breadth of coverage (not just political)

- Cosmopolitan in taste

- clarity of writing

- skeptical in tone

 I decided to run the same criteria on anglo-saxon blogs and, using the "blogrolls" of some of the best, came up with about 20 sites which satisfy most of the criteria - 

Stumbling and mumbling; an economist who is intrigued by dilemmas and attempts to find patterns in social science

http://potlatch.typepad.com; Blog of William Davis who is  Reader in Political Economy at Goldsmith’s, London and also Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Centre. But he hasn't posted for a year!

http://memex.naughtons.org; Naughton is one of the best writers on IT matters

The memory bank; Fascinating site of anthropologist Keith Hart which also contains full text of his book on Money

http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/; The blog of Diane Coyle, a literate economist

http://www.coppolacomment.com/; The blog of Francis Coppola, a highly literate banker

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/; A Marxist economist who makes sense

http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.ro/; One of the most thoughtful, referenced and well-written of political blogs - which used to be called “All that is solid”. It's explicitly sympathetic to the Labour Party and the unions but never hesitates to call nonsense out,

http://neweconomics.org/; the site of the New Economics Foundation

PRIME -  Policy Research in Macroeconomics (PRIME) is a network of macroeconomists, political economists and professionals from related disciplines who seek to engage with a diverse audience in order to de-mystify economic theories, policies and ideas

Book Forum; is a site I’ve strangely neglected from including in previous roundups. It’s a daily list of  academic articles selected, however. from too narrow a range of US academia .

http://www.progressonline.org.uk/; site of the soft left think tank.

http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/; Blog of Richard Murphy – who has advised Jeremy Corbyn.

http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/comment/; site of political economy unit at Sheffield University

http://publicpolicypast.blogspot.ro/; academic historian of modern Britain

Sceptical Scot; this site has started to develop - and we need a break from the anglo-saxon focus!

Hard Leftist blogs

http://www.leninology.co.uk/

http://socialisteconomicbulletin.blogspot.ro/

http://classonline.org.uk/

http://labourandcapital.blogspot.ro/

http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.ro/

Interesting that Bookforum is the only US site to pop up in this test!! Not sure why… perhaps because most of them are tribal and, paradoxically, too mainstream? Of course, there are exceptions – such as the superb and highly idiosyncratic Brainpickings – which totally avoids any hint of current affairs and gives us timeless excerpts from the classics…..

Passing Thoughts

My partner complains that I now spend all day with my bum in a chair and my face in the laptop and there is no doubt that our minds and body must be affected by our new style of communication……

One of the interesting literary sites to which I’m now subscribed is Brainpickings which turns out to be run by a young Bulgarian now working in New York and who shares her working methods here. I’m not sure if her "wobble board" and other devices quite fit the needs of an old fogey like me but I was sufficiently intrigued with her mention of the “Pocket” app to give it a test run…At the moment, my library facility is simply a “copy and paste” of relevant URLs which I insert in a word file. We’ll see what value this organizer can add……

It was Adam Curtis who made me realize last year that I should be paying more attention to documentaries. Good documentaries require a rare combination - knowledge of the subject; experience of filming; appropriate selection and editing of text, images and music; and appreciation of how to fit them together, One of the best websites for challenging documentaries must be Thought Maybe – which I thoroughly recommend.

You might also like this list of the best 50 documentaries of all time - from the excellent Sight and Sound journal. Trouble is, I feel, that they take 30 minutes to say what can be said in 5 at most…

Mainstream media and blog sites are so awful in their slavish repetitions of political conventional wisdom that a search for “alternative sites” seems a suitable response. But where to begin? A few weeks back I reported on my findings about readable journals. 

Yesterday’s post identified (for me) some new UK sites of which Another Angry Voice was most promising – if a bit shrill. And, by definition, “alternative” sites and mags are….well… “tribal” ie closed to the idea of plurality, generosity or cooperation. Google “anarchist”, “revolutionary”, “green” and other epithets and see if I’m wrong.

Which is why I’m currently more disposed to read the stuff which comes from the commons network eg this paper on policy options for the EU which came in today 

Britain's "Ceausescu moment"?

Something strange is going on in British politics – the electorate seems now to be developing a mind of its own! 
The British political class has always seen its electorate as reliable (if not malleable) - until the last week or so. For the past two years the "Leader of the Opposition", Jeremy Corbyn, has been undermined by attacks from New Labour Loyalists and subjected to a relentless barrage of ridicule by the mainstream media - and the polls have consistently showed the party and its new leader slipping further in public support....even as its membership numbers hugely increased.....

Theresa May, the new Prime Minister after the Brexit vote, had stated on numerous occasions that she intended to lead the government through to its legal term of May 2020 but, ultimately, could not resist the temptation of an incredible 20% lead in the polls and suddenly, on 18 April, called a General Election for 8 June. 
As if by magic, the opinion polls (for what they are worth) started to show dramatic changes – with Labour gaining a full 10 points at the expense of UKIP and LibDems and the Conservative voting intentions dropping a few points.

The subsequent publication of the two main party manifestos was very much to Labour’s advantage  with detailed policies attracting support – whereas the Conservatives seemed to be offering only a much-repeated mantra of “strong and stable leadership” (and yet more cuts). See this useful comparison .of the various manifestos. 

And Jeremy Corbyn's higher profile has also worked to his advantage - showing him as a man of integrity...... 

And yet the Prime Minister seems scared of debating with her opponents – steadfastly refusing all but the most carefully managed of appearances and discussions. Astonishingly, at last night’s highly publicised debate in which her Home Secretary substituted for her, the studio audience openly laughed at her invitation to “Judge us on our record”! (and don't just watch the short video" read the text!!)

This could be a veritable Ceausescu moment - suddenly, there seems to be a contest – although I can’t share the optimism of my leftist friends. Too many of the leftist votes are stacked up where they won’t make much difference. Tony Barnett has a good overview here, But the incident also reminds me of Brecht’s poem – electing another people

This article suggests that independent writers are having an unusually large impact on the election….

Highly partisan, semi-professional political blogs are being shared more widely online than the views of mainstream newspaper commentators. Websites run by a publicity-shy English tutor in Yorkshire, an undergraduate student in Nottingham and a former management consultant in Bristol are publishing some of the most shared articles about the UK general election, ranking alongside and often above the BBC, the Guardian and the Independent.

The three sites are Another Angry Voice; Evolve Politics; and The Canary - with the first being particularly well organised thematically eg this post which deals with the accusation of Corbyn and the Labour.party being ideologues. The article has been picked up by one of my favourite bloggers, Craig Murray, (who apparently gets 800,000 hits a month on his blog)

They represent an interesting development - a rebellion at last against the distorted prejudices being peddled even by once-respected British newspapers.......People have been talking for several years about the coming obsolescence of newspapers. At last I can see what they mean.....

I don't like sites which are too partial - but most newspapers pretend to an impartiality they don't actually have - for reasons varying from editorial control. corporate funding to journalistic laziness. It's about time we had a proper discussion about how journalists and the media can better hold those with power in the public and private sectors to account.
A starting point would be an end to the ceaseless drivel and drisel of "news" - and a strengthening of diagnostics and narratives about products, policies, companies, parties and countries  

Update; The Economist is normally too glib and superficial for me but this overview of the election campaign gives an excellent historical perspective....  
and this site confirms that talk of a possible Labour upset is...simple nonsense......I predict a Tory majority of 96

Cultural Amnesia; and Common Endeavour

For the past ten years I’ve been lucky enough to have a foot in both Bulgaria and Romania, spending most summers in my Carpathian mountain redoubt and winters in Sofia; with occasional forays to Bucharest. One of the delights of my semi-nomadic existence has been the rediscovery each year of my libraries in these places – particularly the extensive one in my village home near Bran in Translyvania where I have been since Monday. At 1,400 metres, the barometer registers only 10 degrees - despite the sun!

I have, for example, just opened the Introduction to Clive James’ 876 page Cultural Amnesia– notes in the Margin of My Time (2007) – copies of which I keep in both the Bucharest and the mountain house and which must be considered one of the most original tributes to cultural figures ever published (including entries on Coco Channel, Charlie Chaplin, Louis Armstrong and 4 Manns!). You can get a sense of the book in this Slate journal review and it is further discussed on his amazing website. 

He has been a voracious reader (of far more novels than I) and, indeed, annotator of books – reading many of the European books (including Russian) in their original language, His book is a tribute to the spirit of liberty which so many of the writers celebrated in the book kept alive.

And his introduction made me realize that my blog is at least partly a tribute to those writers who have kept me company at one time or another on my journey of the past half century or more. A couple of years ago I listed the 50 or so books which have made an impact on me here – and here. In what I call the “restless search for the new”, we would do well to pause every now and then and cast our minds back to such books and try to identify the “perennial wisdom” embodied therein…. 

The one frustrating thing about a blog is that it gives a reverse image of reality – with the most recent post coming first and the reader then required to scroll down several times to see older posts……Noone these days has that sort of patience…..whereas a book format allows you to begin at…….…the beginning.

I’ve therefore begun to upload the 2017 posts in book form – with the tentative title Common Endeavour. This includes an updated version of my Sceptic’s Glossary as an annex – being my provocative definition of some 100 plus terms used in the questionable discourse of our elites. I’ve set this in the context of texts (and images) which I’ve found useful in the puncturing of their pretensions…..

The Commons

It was some months ago that I first mentioned the P2P Foundation which sends me at least a couple of interesting posts daily eg here and here

Their posts have also made me aware of the potential of what they call “platform cooperativism” with reservations which are well reflected in another of their posts. One of the problems I have is their language – and the feeling that they are unaware of the wider experience of “mutuality” expressed in the work, for example, of Paul Hirst.

But they have led me on to other interesting sites such as Commons Transition (eg http://commonstransition.org/from-platform-to-open-cooperativism) and On the Commons from which I retrieved a fascinating booklet Celebrating the Commons (71pp). David Bollier is one of the key names and has a book – Wealth of the Commons which gives good insights…..

Grassroots Economic Organising (GEO) is another good site from which I got yesterday’s diagram and article about solidarity economics and which has a nice explanation of the commons movement. 

Share the World’s Resources is another relevant site which offers offerings such as this -

http://www.sharing.org/information-centre/reports/primer-global-economic-sharing

A lot of material relating to “the commons”, however, delicately tiptoes round the topic of “common ownership” – see this excellent overview The Commons as a new/old paradigm for governance – with a second section here

But I think I have to revise my opinion about writers not standing on the shoulders of giants…

The Solidarity Economy

Some time ago I shared an excellent couple of diagrams about the ills of our present socio-economic system and how it might be changed.

I had some issues with aspects of the presentation and have just come across this diagram which, for me, offers a clearer outline of the features of a better system – one called a “solidarity economy”

Yes I realise that you can't read the small print! For that, just click the diagram.

The author has a short paper which superbly situates the concept in the wider context of an emerging global movement of the past two decades in which even yours truly became involved as far back as 1978 - when I launched a community-based project designed to help the long-term unemployed access jobs which would contribute missing local services in poor areas.

Within a decade, it had become a well-resourced Community Business in the West of Scotland – part of a wider social enterprise effort within Scotland and Europe which continues to this day.

My effort at making sense of this concept can be seen at p 124 of In Transit – some notes on Good Governance (1999). Interesting to compare it with the amazing richness of the diagram which adorns this post!

Journals worth Reading?

A few weeks back I made a nasty crack about the superficiality of newspaper coverage. Some personal exchanges I’ve had since have raised the question of 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

- skeptical in tone

My own regular favourite reading includes The Guardian Long Reads and book reviews, London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books – and the occasional glance at the New Yorker; New Statesman; and Spiked.

This choice betrays a certain “patrician” position – not too “tribal”…….although my initial google search limited itself to such epithets as “left”, “progressive”, “green”;; “radical” and “humanist”. 
It threw up a couple of lists – one with “progressive” titles, the other with “secular” . 
From these, I have extracted the other titles which might lay some claims to satisfying the stringent criteria set above…..

Aeon; an interesting new cultural journal
Book Forum; an amazing daily service which gives you about a dozen links from mainly academic journals –  a good idea but just far too US centred for my taste…..

Brain Pickings; a superb personal endeavour which gives extended excerpts from classic texts about creativity etc. One of the best

Dissent; a US leftist stalwart 

Jacobin; a new leftist E-mag with a poor literary style

Lettre International; a fascinating quarterly published in German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian and Romanian (where it has just celebrated its 100^th edition), it makes available translated articles with superb etchings..

Literary Hub; a literary site with original selections and frequent posts – ONE OF MY HOT FAVOURITES
Los Angeles Review of Books;great new journal 

Monthly Review; an old US stalwart with good solid analysis

Mother Jones; more journalistic US progressive

N+1; one of the new and smoother leftist mags

New Humanist; an important strand of UK thoughtNew Left Review; THE UK leftist journal - running on a quarterly basis since 1960 

New Republic; solid US monthly

Prospect (UK); rather too smooth UK monthly

The American Prospect (US); ditto US

Public Books – an impressive recent website (2012) to encourage open intellectual debate
Quillette; a "free-thinkng" contrarian and libertarian journal 

Resurgence and Ecologist; ditto UK Greens

Sceptic; celebration of important strand of UK scepticism

Slate; more right wing

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

The Atlantic; one of my favourite US mags
The Conversation; a rare venture which uses academics as journalists 

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

The New Yorker; very impressive US writing
Washington Independent Review; a new website borne of the frustration about the disappearance of so many book review columns

World Socialist Website; good on critical global journalism

After due consideration, I would now add Book Forum, Brain Pickings, Literary Hub and Public Books to the small list of my current regular reads – although I wish there were an English version of Lettre International or even Courrier International

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.

Parliamentary Affairs; West European Politics and Governance run it close with more global coverage.

Self-styled “Radical“ journals 
seem, curiously, to be gaining strength at precisely the moment the left is collapsing everywhere  and got a not unfair treatment here ….

Beyond the small grove of explicitly revolutionary titles lies a vast forest of critical publications. From “Action Research” to “Anarchist Studies”, from “Race and Class” to “Review of Radical Political Economics”, an impressive array of dissident ventures appears to be thriving. As Western capitalism jabs repeatedly at the auto-destruct button, it may seem only logical that rebel voices are getting louder. But logic has nothing to do it with it. Out in the real world, the Left is moribund. Socialism has become a heritage item. Public institutions, including UK universities, are ever more marketised. Alternatives seem in short supply.

So, far from being obvious, the success of radical journals is a bit of a puzzle. And they have proved they have staying power. The past few years have seen a clutch of titles entering late middle age, including those in the Marxist tradition, such as “New Left Review” (founded 1960), “Critique” (1973) and “Capital and Class” (1977), as well as more broadly critical ventures, such as “Transition” (1961) and “Critical Inquiry” (1974). Numerous other titles have emerged in the intervening years. And they are still coming.
 Recent titles include “Power and Education”, “Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies” and “Human Geography: A New Radical Journal”. Of course, some disciplines provide more fertile soil for such ventures than others. In cultural studies, politics, geography and sociology, radicalism has entered the mainstream. But even the more stony ground of economics nurtures a wide assortment of dissident titles.

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 – the others being “virtual” or E-journals eg Arts and Letters Daily a good literary, anglo-saxon exemplar; The Intercept a political one; with Eurozine taking the main award for its selection of the most interesting articles from Europe’s 80 plus cultural journals

I learn one main thing from this review - how tribal most journals are. Most seem to cater for a niche political market. Only N+1 (and the New Yorker) makes an effort to cover the world of ideas from a broader standpoint...The lead articles which Eurozine gives us from different parts of Europe makes it an interesting read; and Political Quarterly is a model for clear writing - even if it is a bit too British in its scope.  

But I give away both my age and agnostic tendencies when I say that my favourite journal remains "Encounter" which was shockingly revealed in the late 80s to have been partially funded by the CIA and which therefore shut up shop in 1990....

The entire set of 1953-1990 issues are archived here – and the range and quality of the authors given space can be admired. European notebooks – new societies and old politics 1954-1985; is a book devoted to one of its most regular writers, the Swiss Francois Bondy (2005) 

A generation of outstanding European thinkers emerged out of the rubble of World War II. It was a group unparalleled in their probing of an age that had produced totalitarianism as a political norm, and the Holocaust as its supreme nightmarish achievement. Figures ranging from George Lichtheim, Ignazio Silone, Raymond Aron, Andrei Amalrik, among many others, found a home in Encounter. None stood taller or saw further than Francois Bondy of Zurich.

European Notebooks contains most of the articles that Bondy (1915-2003) wrote for Encounter under the stewardship of Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, and then for the thirty years that Melvin Lasky served as editor. Bondy was that rare unattached intellectual, "free of every totalitarian temptation" and, as Lasky notes, unfailing in his devotion to the liberties and civilities of a humane social order. European Notebooks offers a window into a civilization that came to maturity during the period in which these essays were written.

Bondy's essays themselves represent a broad sweep of major figures and events in the second half of the twentieth century. His spatial outreach went from Budapest to Tokyo and Paris. His political essays extended from George Kennan to Benito Mussolini. And his prime metier, the cultural figures of Europe, covered Sartre, Kafka, Heidegger and Milosz. The analysis was uniformly fair minded but unstinting in its insights. Taken together, the variegated themes he raised in his work as a Zurich journalist, a Paris editor, and a European homme de lettres sketch guidelines for an entrancing portrait of the intellectual as cosmopolitan.

Update; Current Affairs is a fairly new American radical journal which looks to be very well-written eg this take-down of The Economist mag