Culture and Ideas
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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…
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International Relations: Backstage. The Viennese Volksoper and Its International Activities
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The following article provides a vivid example of international interconnectedness, ‘backstage’. I examine how one of Vienna’s largest opera houses, the ‘Vienna People’s Opera’ (Volksoper) works together with operas and theatres in other countries and parts of the world through international performances, maintaining international links both in and outside of Europe. I suggest that such ‘behind the…
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Is AI Safety ‘Rather Speculative Long-Termism’?
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When asked if the Effective Altruism (EA) movement has deviated from what he originally intended for it to look like, Peter Singer told Oxford Political Review: ‘I do think that the EA movement has moved too far and, arguably, there is now too much resources going into rather speculative long-termism.’ [1] ‘I think if we…
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50 States of Mind – What Americans could learn from a visit to all 50 states
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After the stunning victory of Donald Trump in 2016, the world is watching to see how Americans will vote in 2020. America is made up of 50 culturally unique states, each so nuanced and multilayered that no magic bullet could explain the vicissitudes of that election cycle. As pundits conjectured on the mood of America…