Culture and Ideas
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Is expertise as contagious as COVID-19?
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By Jan Eijking In 2017 a book with a well-timed title landed on bookseller’s shelves across the UK: “The Death of Expertise.” Written by US Naval War College professor Tom Nichols, and published only shortly after Michael Gove’s now-infamous declaration that “Britain’s had enough of experts,” this little manifesto bemoaned a growing threat to expertise…
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Refugees in Camp Moria and COVID-19
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Around the world, COVID-19 has forced countries into a sudden reckoning with their most primary fragilities. It cannot be beaten by drone strikes or intimidated by economic prowess. The bold virus seems undaunted by the rhetoric of world leaders or the size of their armies. So as COVID-19 spreads, many comment on the apparently rare…
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The Case for Humility in Our COVID-19 Response
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As of mid-March 2020, the United Kingdom’s strategy for battling the COVID-19 pandemic is markedly different from that of virtually every other Western country. While the UK government’s more relaxed policy is provoking controversy among scientists and policymakers around the world, there is a subtle irony that we should not lose amidst the chaos –…
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How can armchair ethicists help fight pandemics?
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The popular prefix ‘armchair’ to ‘ethicists’ perhaps implies a false notion of ease with what ethicists do. Mathematicians work similarly to ethicists in many ways – an inquiry of truths by sitting in libraries with pen and paper. Yet few scold them for being ‘armchair mathematicians’.
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Oxford Political Review Interviews Noam Chomsky
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Editor-in-Chief Brian Wong interviews Noam Chomsky – linguist, political scientist, philosopher, writer, activist, and one of the most iconic American voices of the 20th Century.
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In Defense of Debate
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by Gabe Rusk and Numair Razzak This year’s Presidential primaries present us with such a heavily packed stage that candidates seem to primarily mine them for Tweetable moments in order to break from the pack. This problem will surely compound as it becomes harder and harder to qualify for the preceding debates. As the rhetoric…
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The Age of Impunity: A Review of David Miliband’s Fulbright Lecture
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In its most basic description, it is a thoroughly unremarkable photograph: heads of state shaking hands at the G20 Summit last autumn. But for those who have seen the striking image, a basic description could not do it justice. The man on the right wears the dark suit favored by intelligence operatives the world over,…
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Is British democracy really under threat?
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What’s been going on? In late September 2019, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the government acted unlawfully in proroguing, i.e. suspending, parliament for 5 weeks. The supposed reason for this prorogation – to prepare for a Queen’s speech – was deemed by the courts to be insufficient to justify such a long period of…
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The Sinking Ship of Capitalism: Towards the New Path of Ecosophy
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‘I am too young to watch pornography. Why am I seeing the planet getting fucked?’. This sentence blazed on a banner held by a 15-year-old during a march for climate change I attended in my home town of Brussels. ‘Climate Change’: not only does this term capture the rise of global average temperatures, predominantly caused…
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The Case for Hope in Resisting Climate Change: A Conversation with Michael Mann
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Brian Wong, Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Political Review, sits down with Michael Mann, leading climate change scientist and theorist, recipient of Tyler Prize, and perhaps most famously known for his exposition of the existential threat confronting humanity through his “Hockey Stick Graph” in his 1999 article. A Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and the…