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A Belief in Meritocracy is Not Only False Its Bad For You
Illustration by Zeyd Anwar; Unsplash; Wikipedia “We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else …” — Barack Obama, inaugural address, 2013…
In Netflixs Squid Game, Capitalism Takes Centre Stage
Squid Game Squid Game, an original Netflix drama produced in South Korea, is a streaming phenomenon. Released on 17 September, within two weeks the series has become the most watched Netflix title in 76 countries, including the US, Australia and…
Teaching Grit is Bad for Children and Bad for Democracy
New Politic According to the grit narrative, British children are lazy, entitled and unprepared to compete in the global economy. Schools have contributed to the problem by neglecting socio-emotional skills. The solution, then, is for schools to impart the dispositions…
Hannah Arendt Warned Us About Politicians Like Johnson
“How vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nation, or classes…” —…
Im Sick of Boris Johnson
Prime Minister Boris Johnson attends NATO in Madrid. Picture by Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street I’m sick. No, I don’t have the coronavirus or monkeypox. I have Boris Burnout Syndrome (BBS). Symptoms include a depressing loss of faith…
Should MPs Have Second Jobs?
Nadhim Zahawi leaves 10 Downing Street. Picture by Tim Hammond / No 10 Downing Street Once again, Britain finds itself in the middle of a row. The latest political divide was triggered by another Tory scandal involving the former MP…
Dishonesty Gets Easier the More You Do It
Jessica Taylor; New Politic Cast your mind back over the past week. How many times were you tempted to act dishonestly? Perhaps you were given too much change at the pub and deliberated whether to tell the barman. Maybe you…
The Next Face of the Conservative Party
Rishi Sunak inside HM Treasury / Flickr It was in 2016, when David Cameron returned from Brussels, that he realised his attempt to use the Brexit referendum to sort out his party’s wranglings over Europe had failed. Having lost Boris…
How Climate Change and Disease Helped The Fall of Rome
The Course of Empire / Thomas Cole At some time or another, every historian of Rome has been asked to say where we are, today, on Rome’s cycle of decline. Historians might squirm at such attempts to use the past but,…
We Can Predict The Future
Illustration by Zeyd Anwar If you’ve ever tried to think about the future or read an article and contemplated the implications of a particular analysis, then forecasting concerns you. Superforecasting is about how to think about the future with accuracy,…