Crooked Timber

Here’s another of my posts about being a peace activist in the UK in the early eighties. This one is mainly about my time in secondary school. When I linked to the substack version from Facebook a couple of people recognized some of the people involved, but they’re pretty well disguised unless you were there. […]

This week all the news services carried a story about the Dutch central bank shipping many, many tons of gold from the Mad King-led United States to the custody of cooler heads (well, cooling, we hope, after that very hot summer) in London. On the same day, the FT ran a story by Banu Baweja […]

… but that won’t change any minds It’s now six months since the US-Israel war on Iran began with air attacks which killed the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei as well as around 200 schoolchildren. The war has dragged on a long time. But before that surprise attack, it had appeared that the US planned to […]

We are being flooded with spam coming from fake gmail.com addresses at the moment. So, for the moment, I’ve set our spam filter to delete everything from gmail.com If you want to post a real comment, just give a spurious address like anon.com and use your existing name/nym. Although we ask for an email address, […]

I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago, responding to a challenge* to write about the economic aspects of Taylor Swift. Not long after that, the world lost the marvellous Dolly Parton. Parton’s lifetime income almost certainly exceeded a billion dollars, but she gave huge amounts away. Her biggest philanthropic endeavour was the Imagination […]

At the end of a glorious day hanging out at galleries, antique shops and the pub with friend and historian Matt Allen we walked to the station at Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, Australia (where I live) for Matt to get the train back to the city. We were confronted with this glorious mural representing […]

A summer anecdote: when on holidays in France, on a sunny August day, we visited a castle garden in rural Normandy. When buying the tickets, we got the usual: “Your postcode or country of origin?” We said “Germany,” and suddenly the face of the young woman at the counter lit up. “Would you mind doing […]

Yesterday, I ran my first gimmick promotion for the Brisbane to Gold Coast Ride against Cancer [1]. I invited anyone who donated $100 to nominate a topic on which I should write a post. Reader Daniela Brins-Norris has taken me up on the offer, and asked for a piece about the economic significance of Taylor […]

Sunday photoblogging: Parys mountain copper mine

… is set out over the fold. I’m confident readers who take a little time to think about it will realise it’s far superior to existing policy, and to any alternative proposed so far. Fourth repost since 2011

How Hegsethian heroes destroyed themselves and their entire civilisation I haven’t yet seen the Odyssey film[1], but reviews mention a minor obsession of mine, the Late Bronze Age collapse and the ensuing Greek Dark Age. I first encountered this at the end of Ken McLeod’s Intrusion where the character Geena compares modern nihilists to the […]

Progressives scored a win over establishment Democrats in the Michigan primary election for Senator on Tuesday’s election. Abdul El-Sayed beat Haley Stevens by 1 point, despite many polls predicting that he would win by 7 or more. And Stevens beat him soundly in Wayne (Detroit), Oakland, and Macomb counties, where the most Democratic votes will […]

  According to various sources, John Crowley has died. This probably means something to many of you: Crooked Timber readers are not a random draw even on the population of highly literate people. Those of you who don’t know who John Crowley was will likely have been indirectly affected by his work. If you read […]

Sunday photoblogging: Castletown harbour, Isle of Man

A friend on facebook says that Hamnet contains a pretty serious error — naming the Costwolds the Chilterns (or, pretty much equivalently, mislocating the Chilterns between Stratford and Oxford). I’m not sure that would ruin the book for me, but I definitely would find it annoying (knowing both areas very well makes it worse, but […]

So there was a modest puff of articles last month about astronomers discovering “the edge of the galaxy”.  They were referencing this recent paper, which… doesn’t really say that.  But it’s an interesting paper anyway, so let’s discuss. As we all learned back in school, our Sun is one star in the Milky Way galaxy, […]

In the final comment on my most recent CT post, John Q strategically grants a premise from an earlier comment by poster Matt: John Q grants that “it’s perfectly plausible that the number of US golfers exceeds the population of Australia.” This was not a concession to Matt’s main point, as John Q goes on […]