Crooked Timber

Sunday photoblogging: Canigou and cherry trees

That’s the actual name of the paper. Isn’t that great? Here’s a prologue: a post I wrote a while back about the Portuguese Man-o’-War.  (It’s kind of long — I was new to CT back then, and still figuring stuff out).  To summarize: the Portuguese Man-o’-War is a large jellyfish-type creature.  And when I say […]

“I admire the many federal prosecutors across the country who have chosen to resign rather than carry out illegal or immoral orders. To my knowledge, no department head, dean, or other administrator at Texas A&M has taken any meaningful action to defend academic freedom.”—Martin Peterson Today’s post was prompted by two recent news items: first, […]

I said a while back that nobody’s going to Mars any time soon. Which is true. But that doesn’t mean Mars isn’t interesting! Mars is very interesting. So today’s paper is about Mars.  Okay, it’s about a moon of Mars.  TLDR: one of Mars’ moons may periodically tear itself apart, turn into a system of […]

Sunday photoblogging: Pézenas street

Back in the 1980s, I was (among other things) a writer and singer of satirical folk songs. Going to the National Folk Festival in Canberra at Easter, I caught up with old friends and was reminded that I had produced a book of my songs. Returning home, I dug out a copy, and decided to […]

What does it mean to be an academic in different parts of the world? What comes along as the same job description – a bundle of teaching, research, and impact tasks – varies enormously from place to place. Not only the financial conditions of universities differ, but also the social standing of researchers. This is […]

Do you know Baba Yetu? Take three minutes and listen to this performance of Baba Yetu.  (Our ancient blogging platform doesn’t like embedded video, so you’ll have to click through to YouTube.  Go ahead and click, nothing bad will happen.) Some notes: First off, if you didn’t figure it out from the short prayer at […]

Before I depart this world, I would like to visit St. Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, Scotland, and see the Jenny Geddes memorial.  I’m told it’s open to the public. Why? What’s interesting about a stool? Well, it’s probably impossible to point to a single moment, or a single object, and say “The Enlightenment began here.”.  […]

Among other things, the unlamented former autocrat Viktor Orban was one of the leading proponents of pro-natalist policies, and more open than most about the racist underpinnings of his view. However, like others who have tried to raise birth rates, he wasn’t particularly successful. To understand why not, it’s useful to consider the question: how […]

The news from Hungary’s election is so good that I need to write about it, even if not all the implications are clear yet, and even in a disorganised and way, repeating lots of what others are saying. Although the polls predicted Orban’s defeat, nothing I read foreshadowed the scale of the victory – a […]

Sunday photoblogging: Pézenas, old town

The New South Wales gold rush began more than 400 million years ago. It was an age of fire, that ended with ice. Australia was part of the super-continent Gondwana, which was not yet south. By continent standards it was moving fast. By the end of this era, the Ordovician, it would be at the […]

A journalist from the Wall Street Journal wrote to me a week ago to ask what the numbers that I use in the opening pages of my book Limitarianism would look like today. In particular, she asked whether I could calculate for her the “lifetime equivalent hourly income” of Elon Musk’s current assets today. Short […]

As I approach formal retirement from my academic job, I’m still thinking about ideas in my main theoretical field of decision theory. But I’ve largely lost interest in publishing journal articles, leaving the chore of dealing with Manuscript Central and other robotic systems to my younger co-authors in the case of joint work, and not submitting many of my own. I’ve also gone retro on reviewing. I…

Hi there could somebody perhaps do something about moderation? Nothing was posted for almost a week… I’ve been busy with various stuff. I’ll pay more attention – JQ

Jürgen Habermas has died, at the age of 96, and traditional and social media are full of obituaries and memories. For outsiders, it is maybe hard to gauge the omnipresence of his name in West Germany,* but his influence on democratic theory more broadly speaking is well-known. When I entered university, people would mention it in the same in way in which Kant or Hegel were mentioned (full disclos…

Sunday photoblogging: shed

Third and last part of an article discussing Imperia, the large concrete statue of a semi-fictional medieval sex worker. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here. A Clandestine Erection Imperia went up in April 1993, and I won’t even try to explain the insane backstory. Short version: some people in Constance wanted a cool statue to add luster to the waterfront. Most of them were thinking of something l…