The ‘hereditarian left’ is having a moment. I first wrote about this — still largely hypothetical — political tendency two-and-a-half years ago in the aftermath of the Sam Harris-Ezra Klein affair. That blog remains to this day one of the most viewed items on my page, largely I think because…

Spoiler warning for the first half-season of the “The Nevers”. You’ve been warned. Seriously. HBO has a new prestige drama. You probably haven’t seen it — if the ratings are anything to go by, very few people have — and the critic reviews of the first batch of six episodes…

Libertarian or democratic socialists — in contrast to more authoritarian members of the socialist tradition — tend to preserve and maintain their philosophical links to more mainstream liberal beliefs, and represent their political program [correctly] as an evolution or perfection of the clearly flawed and self-serving modern liberal democratic state…

“Capital and Ideology” (2020) is the long-awaited sequel to French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 opus, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”. Whereas the first volume was a fairly dry text, heavily informed by Piketty’s lifetime of data collection and research on the true extent and causes of economic inequality, this second…

This is my first fiction book review for this blog, and fittingly enough it’s the new book by Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Ministry for the Future”. It would be fair to say that Robinson’s works — especially the Mars Trilogy and the earlier Three Californias trilogy — had a formative…

There are three essential traits I look for in a political book: the author must choose interesting subject matter; they must present a coherent theory of events; and they must write clearly and succinctly in support of their narrative. Thomas Frank’s new book, “People Without Power: The War on Populism…

Before getting into my review of Stephanie Kelton’s new bestseller, “The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and How to Build a Better Economy”, it’s important to stipulate a few things. That the public discourse about debt and deficit in Western media, politics and academia is deeply, profoundly stupid. That advanced…

Liberalism, as a collection of philosophical, political and economic beliefs, is a universalising ideology that shares with the messianic religions a transcendental and utopian character. Like organised religions, liberal societies therefore must confront the fundamental challenge of a material existence that does not usually confirm to ideological expectations. Whereas for…

I’ve tried to resist entering ‘the discourse‘ when it comes to analysing whether famed author JK Rowling is a TERF — a ‘trans exclusionary radical feminist’. For the record, Rowling’s actions suggest those of a TERF. Kat Blaque’s video embedded below addresses this better than I ever could: Instead…