Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) left a legacy of influence that many more literary writers might envy… The impact of his best-known writings has, however, been almost entirely opposite to their intentions. He has become something of a hero to a range of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs who see his writing, which Asimov himself described as social… Read More »
Wherever you stand on the management of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is hard not to accept that it has created a serious crisis of legitimacy for the liberal social and political order… …The consequence was a set of state-backed interventions that were neither rational nor legal but harked back to an earlier time of traditional… Read More »
The immediate reaction to the emergence of a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in Wuhan, China, has focused on its challenges to the biomedical sciences. But the new infection is at least as big a challenge to the social sciences. If we continue to neglect this, there is a serious danger that we end up with mistaken… Read More »
The constitutional processes are now complete and Robert F Kennedy, Jr has been confirmed as Secretary for Health and Human Services despite a vicious, and at times vitriolic, campaign waged by the biomedical and public health establishment. For more than fifty years, I have been reading work by US medical sociologists on the power and… Read More »
…Trump’s plan to take over the territory is merely the latest American failure to understand that others also have nationalist sentiments and national pride. It was a mistake that dogged US policy in Central America for a generation and led to the disaster in Vietnam. Trump’s plans for Palestine take the USA down the same… Read More »
It is widely reported that one of the first acts of the incoming Trump administration will be to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO). Predictably, responses are divided. US nationalists dislike the growing efforts to turn WHO into some form of world government with authority to dictate health policies to individual states. Against this,… Read More »
The proposed appointment of Robert F Kennedy Jr as Secretary for Health and Human Services (HHS) has provoked howls of outrage from many prominent figures in the US medical, bioethical and public health establishment. No doubt it was intended to do so. One does not have to accept his answers to many of the key… Read More »
Kate Winslet’s biopic of Lee Miller, the pioneering woman war photographer, raises some interesting questions about the ethics of fieldwork and their governance. If we reframed Miller’s work as visual ethnography rather than photojournalism, much of it would probably be barred by today’s ethics regulations. On the other hand, her reflective moments well capture the… Read More »
The term ‘settler colonialism’ was coined by an Australian historian in the 1960s to describe the occupation of a territory with a view to displacing the original inhabitants. A new society would be created on the occupied territory through the elimination or permanent subordination of the existing people. There is often an element of ethnic… Read More »
One of the sleeper hits for Netflix UK this summer has been a reimagining of Bocaccio’s Decameron as a commentary on pandemic behaviour. ….The narrative arc is fundamentally an investigation of class and character in times of peril…The experience of lockdown has changed lives, and eliminated some, but there is little hope amid the chaos.… Read More »