One of the weirdest social phenomena to emerge out of the many terrorist attacks in England over the years is one I call “apathy-signalling”. On 3 June 2017, jihadists drove into pedestrians on London Bridge and went on a stabbing spree afterwards. 8 people lost their lives, 48 were injured…

My first experience of Thomas Pynchon, if you can call a movie adaptation an experience with a writer, was Paul Thomas Anderson’s production of Inherent Vice. Anderson had just come off a run of consecutive masterpieces: Boogie Nights, Magnolia, the perhaps less obviously impressive Punch Drunk Love, and arguably the…

In 2014, the Washington DC-based think tank Pew Research Center found that Republicans and Democrats were “more divided along ideological lines than at any point in the previous two decades”. Two years later Pew reported that the ideological division in the United States was widening along educational and generational lines…

The end of Persepolis came when Alexander the Great sent his army there in the year 330 BC. The Macedonians met some initial resistance at the Persian Gates but quickly captured the city before it could be looted. After staying four months or so, Alexander allowed his troops to pillage…

The reactions to Trump’s comments about “shithole countries” have got me thinking. Why is it that people are so outraged? Here are a couple of reasons I can think of and some other thoughts. The first is that Americans are embarrassed and angry that their president would speak in such…

Just over a year ago one of my students asked me if I was familiar with a game called Eve Online. I confessed that I was not, but he seemed eager to tell me about it. His description was pretty much the same as that found on Wikipedia: Eve Online…

Some pop singer said “Remember that the people knocking on Europe’s doors are fleeing the same horrors that now cause us to stand still in grief”. I don’t buy this. The Levant is not wracked with violence because of topography. “Foreign wars of aggression caused this!” the apologists cry out…

Art and culture of the kind we associate with New York and London are present because of banking and finance. Every schoolchild knows that bankers like the Medicis helped kickstart the Italian Renaissance by patronising the great artists of that age. Today, much of the extraordinary sums of money flowing…

It’s kind of hard to remember what life was like before the world wide web. We work on it, communicate on it, socialise on it and shop on it. Just like the computer on the USS Enterprise it’s indispensable to us, and practically omniscient. The existence of Wikipedia alone means…