Assessing the sci-fi future of labor done by emulations of brain-scanned human beings.
Henry Farrell
Henry Farrell is an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University.
Posted inEducation, Higher Education
Would Academic Life Collapse if Grad Students Could Bargain?
Now that the National Labor Relations Board is considering the question of graduate student unionization again, we’re beginning to see people write pieces suggesting that academic life would collapse if graduate students had bargaining rights. If there’s any use to this particular one (by Jonathan Gartner, who is, as best as I can tell from […]
Posted inPolitics
Hulk Hogan and the Vindictive Billionaire
There’s been a lot of reaction to the news that Peter Thiel secretly funded Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit (which has led to a $140 million award) against Gawker. Thiel is, of course, not only a Silicon Valley billionaire, but a man of strong, if idiosyncratic, libertarian views. Hence, it’s ironic that he illustrates some of the […]
Posted inPolitics
What’s So Brilliant About Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning
Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning is finally out (Powells, Amazon), so that you can read it too (I’ve been impatiently waiting to share it with everyone I know). As Jo Walton says here, it’s wonderful. It does something that I think is genuinely new (or at least, if other people have pulled it off, […]
Posted inPolitics
Today is Krauthammer Day #13
Again, it’s Krauthammer Day. Today is the unlucky thirteenth anniversary of the day when the prominent pundit announced: Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem. As of today, we’ve […]
Posted inPolitics
2016 Hugos
As usual, my list of the Hugo eligible books for this year (as well as short story collections), meant less as a form of canvassing (especially given that nominations are about to close) than of solving the commitment problem of getting me off my arse to talk about books that I liked and didn’t like. […]
Posted inPolitics
Gods Behaving Badly
WARNING – COPIOUS SPOILERS ABOUT BOTH BOOKS It’s a terrible idea to reduce a novel into an argument. As Francis Spufford said in another Crooked Timber seminar, the great thing about a novel of ideas is that you can have your cake and eat it too; using negative capability to present multiple arguments in serious […]
Posted inPolitics
David Bowie
Comment on his career seems superfluous and almost impertinent. I have difficulty thinking of another recently living musician who so defined the contours of the world I grew up in and lived in. The one thing that’s noticeable to me (at least for the music I know, which is obviously far from everything), is that […]
Posted inPolitics
Aaron Swartz Died Three Years Ago Today
People who didn’t know Aaron remember him for his tireless work for a variety of public causes. They usually don’t realize that this work went together with a myriad of private kindnesses. I got to know Aaron as an extraordinarily intelligent commentator on Crooked Timber, an academic blog that I contribute to. At first, I […]
Posted inPolitics
Benedict Anderson Has Died
Obituary here. His Imagined Communities was an important book to me, as it was, I suspect, to many other people in the Crooked Timber community. Indeed, it’s the book that made me decide to do graduate studies in political science (how could it not be wonderful to work in a discipline where one could read […]
