PU #252 - WHEN IS INFORMATION NOT POWER? - On Knowing Less To Stay Sane
Read More“if somebody had the information about when you would die, and what you would die of, would you want it?“
PU #251 - WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS - Inaction and Foreseen Consequences
Read More“What began a few years ago as a gnawing discomfort I had about how quickly people were outsourcing their thinking and creativity to generative Large Language Models (LLMs) now feels like being one of the few people who noticed a pattern of minor symptoms (coughs and rashes) appearing in the years before a deadly plague wiped out a whole civilisation.“
PU #250 - WATCHING ENGLAND - (And yes, I purposefully avoided writing something about America's Semiquincentennial despite the perfect timing of our own 250th post because it's too damn depressing.)
Read More“Earlier in the week, England manager Thomas Tuchel provided clear guidance: “Write an excuse for school and let them watch. There’s so much school to go to but the World Cup is every four years. Let them watch.””
PU #249 - DON'T HATE THE HEAT, HATE CAPITALISM - Thinking Clearly in a Heatwave
Read More“I guess we should talk about the heat. Mainly because it was all consuming, and the idea there was anything else to think about this week melted out of me somewhere around Thursday night as I lay in bed in a pool of sweat for the third night in a row, cursing capitalism….“
Association of Philosophy Teachers Annual Conference 2026 - REPORT
Read More“The heat in London today was sweltering, so it is a testament to the speakers’ quality that we all seemed happy to spend the day in a stuffy, windowless, studio room with no air conditioning down in the basement of UCL’s Institute of Education to hear them…“
PU #248 - STREAM(ING NOSE) OF CONSCIOUSNESS - Dispatches From My Sick-Bed
Read More“on some level the decision to call in sick to work is a philosophical one.“
PU #247 - WOULD YOU RATHER? - On the Value of Silly
Read More“instead of answering it, I asked a different question: why do we think dumb “would you rather” questions like this are worth answering?“
PU#246 - SO I EAT FISH NOW - On Unbecoming a Vegetarian
Read More“Tentatively, I scooped the sardines from the tin and crushed them onto the toast… “
PU #245 - DON'T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF - At Odds With Behavioural Wisdom in Schools
Read More“We should only enforce rules we can all justify on the basis of their necessity for learning. Anything that goes beyond that minimalist remit should be jettisoned.“
PU#244 - REFORMING OUR BROKEN MINDS: On Acknowledging Our Influences
Read More“I have long argued that a key problem with modern humanity is our unwillingness to acknowledge how deeply influenced we are by television and other media. Despite living in a world where we know billions are spent every year on marketing and advertising because of its known and repeatedly demonstrated efficacy on driving consumer behaviours, we still like to believe that our decisions are freely made.“
PU #243 - IS SCHOOL A SPORT? - And Could This Be The Problem?
Read More“I offered the following as something that meets our definition of a sport yet intuitively feels like it is not a sport: school…“
PU#242 - AND I DID NOT SPEAK OUT: On Our Obligation To Acknowledge That Things Are Not Right
Read More“It was important, once, we were told, that we learn the lessons of history. “
PU #241 - MAKING PHILOSOPHY MATTER: On the Second Annual British Philosophy Fortnight
Read More“if promoting our discipline through a marketing strategy that seems ill-thought-out and ineffective is the best we can come up with, is that much of a commercial for the value of philosophical thinking?”
PU #240 - TEACHING THEMSELVES: On The Lessons Within The Lessons
Read More“it is a reminder that the ostensible lesson taught inside a classroom can be an abject failure, but this does not necessarily mean that no learning has taken place. “
PU #239 - MAKING LINKS - The Skills Atrophy We Haven't Noticed
Read More“My suspicion is that, in a world where connections we used to have to work for ourselves have been repeatedly handed to us for so long (and without any resistance) by pre-loaded links and algorithms, adults raised in the previous paradigm will have seen a serious skills atrophy in their cognitive abilities to make such links for themselves, and children, who have never needed to develop those initial skills to atrophy, will be raised with a serious deficit“
PU #238 - CENSORING TOURETTE'S - Baffled By The BAFTAs
Read More“How the BBC dealt with John Davidson’s attendance at the BAFTAs last week is definitely morally questionable and offensive, but not because they let the racial slur slip past the censors when other insults were cut…“
PU #237 - CHANGE IS ALWAYS POSSIBLE - If You Want It To Be
Read More“The more we recognise how much of the way we do things in the world is the result of human choice rather than unavoidable circumstances, and that some different choices could make a different world, the sooner we might start making such choices and dismantling the impoverished way things are for something better.“
PU #236 - CHOMSKY & EPSTEIN - How Much Do The Actions Of The Person Undermine Their Argument?
Read More“the more I read, the more my instinct for defending Noam Chomsky seemed to have finally run out of ground“
235. EVERYTHING GOOD COULD STILL EXIST - On The Internet Without Capitalism
Read More“The most powerful idea we can ever hear is this: if we took away money right now, everything that exists would still exist.“
234. WHAT IF THEY WERE RIGHT? - On Kids These Days
Read More“What if what our parents warned us about did cause us harm but we were too harmed to see?“