The big turning point in all of this is, of course, the one that, in the space of a few days in March 2020, changed the perceptoin of lockdowns from unheard-of barbaric practice to acceptable and logical policy response. In the coming years and beyond, this will be the inevitable…

(Perhaps one of many: who knows) There’s this really cheap psychological trick that probably every counsellor learns on their first day of training, which is about showing the other person that you hear them, that you believe what they say, that you empathize with them, and which is assumed (I…

Preface: I have been plunged into severe depression by lockdowns, complete with suicide attempts. If you object “Oh but you might have had depression anyway mental illness is complex we’ll never know”, I reply “Oh but 99% of Covid-19 victims might have died during the past year anyway co-morbidities are…

Another series of indefinite length. Originating from this post here but mostly a harmless bit of fun. September 2025. I go back to my office on the first day of the academic year. The building is half-empty, as is always the case now: after some rather acerbic disputes between the…

I don’t know where the much-touted phrase “lives vs the economy” came from, but I am prepared to be that there’s a high chance it was a A&H academic. Academics in the A&H can be divided into two groups according to their attitude towards and understanding of Economics (a discipline…

Snobbery. Academia is your archetypical middle-class profession; not as well-paid as medicine or law, but clearly the middle classes at some point needed some kind of artefact to perpetuate themselves, and that artefact was universities. There is a lot of talk now about how the old class system doesn’t really…

In this post I discuss two rather obvious reasons; because they are obvious — and one of them is not exclusive to A&H academics — , they are not so interesting to me, but they are worth discussing anyway for completeness. Introversion It won’t be a great revelation to say…

Like many in the lockdown-sceptic community, I sometimes fall prey to reverse doomerism (less often, I must say, since I started a course of antidepressants. Yes, lockdowns did this to me. No, it is not the case that “we don’t know” whether it would have happened in the absence of…

Sinéad Murphy, a lecturer in Philosophy, published last week an article called “Preliminary materials for a theory of Devi Sridhar”. It’s so ridiculously good that I read it twice on Friday before I went to sleep, then woke up on Saturday and read it again. …