Letters Remain

Tag: politics

  • Education and Surveillance

    After a school here in the UK installed a CCTV system in a classroom used for the teaching of an A-level politics class the students revolted; walking out only to return once they were reassured that the monitoring system was inactive and to be used solely as a teaching aid. The students’ plight was eventually…

  • Can Technology Solve Our Climate Problems?

    After reading Cambridge physicist David MacKay’s much lauded Sustainable Energy (free download available), the FT Economist Tim Harford worries that we are “too complacent about technological fixes for the twin problems of climate change and finite oil and gas reserves”. Harford suggests that if we contemplate the idea that technological progress may not solve these…

  • Top Ten Foreign Affairs Articles

    After compiling a few ‘top ten’ lists of classic foreign affairs books, Stephen Walt—professor of international affairs at Harvard University—compiles a more digestible version: the top ten articles in the field of international relations. The ten articles Walt recommends are below, but click through to the original to see his reasoning behind each choice and…

  • Observations on London and Paris

    Returning from a trip to Europe, Nate Silver—proprietor of the political analysis website FiveThirtyEight—has promptly compiled a list of observations on London and Paris from an American point of view. As an ‘insider’ it appears that I’ve take a lot of these gradual changes for granted, not really making any conclusions. London, and the United…

  • Taming White House Trolls

    When the Obama administration embraced blogging, sans commenting, on the White House website there were a number of detractors saying that Obama had retreated from his campaign promise of providing a site enabling public discussions. The reasons why are fairly obvious, but Clive Thompson looks at how the WhiteHouse.gov blog could enable commenting and successfully/safely control trolls (the…

  • Inauguration Roundup

    The Internet is bustling with news of yesterday’s inauguration of President Obama (it feels strange writing that) and I feel somewhat guilty adding to the overabundance of news. As a compromise I’m going to limit myself to this single roundup post. One intrepid soul has compiled a collection of videos of every inauguration speech from the…

  • The Future of Food Policy

    Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, discusses the future of U.S. food policy. Michael Pollan: A lot of people talk about the elitism of the food movement. And they think about Whole Foods and people shopping at upscale farmers markets. But there is another face to this food movement. There is a…

  • Interview With a Somali Pirate

    A pirate boss speaks to The Guardian We give priority to ships from Europe because we get bigger ransoms. To get their attention we shoot near the ship. If it does not stop we use a rope ladder to get on board. We count the crew and find out their nationalities. After checking the cargo…

  • The Global Baby Trade

    Foreign Policy looks at the international adoption trade and the corruption that has made it a lucrative industry. Westerners have been sold the myth of a world orphan crisis. We are told that millions of children are waiting for their “forever families” to rescue them from lives of abandonment and abuse. But many of the infants…

  • Selling Hand-Washing to Africa

    The New York Times on how Dr Val Curtis ‘sold’ hand-washing to Africa: Diseases and disorders caused by dirty hands — like diarrhoea — kill a child somewhere in the world about every 15 seconds, and about half those deaths could be prevented with the regular use of soap, studies indicate. But getting people into…