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‘I am staying unsettled and trying not to talk for three years’, the painter Agnes Martin wrote to a friend in the late 1960s, adding, ‘I do not think that there will be any more people in my life’.[1] This vow of silence was soon broken, the prediction of solitude proving false. Nevertheless, Martin did leave New York City rather dramatically, or at least unexpectedly, in 1967. She had spent ten years there as a working artist, belatedly gaining, in her mid-fifties, some r

Introduction Governments have launched a series of ambitious digital strategies over recent decades to improve how they operate and interact with citizens. However, many of their anticipated benefits have yet to be achieved, leaving governments ill-equipped to respond effectively to a growing array of social and economic policy challenges, both domestic and international. The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee recently expressed concerns at: T he number of complex

Convince an enemy, convince him that he’s wrong Is to win a bloodless battle where victory is long A simple act of faith, in reason over might To blow up his children will only prove him right History will teach us nothing…[1] And many more Destructions played In this ghastly masquerade, All disguised, even to the eyes, Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.[2] Introducing turmoil Reflecting on the ‘atomistic chaos’ of his day, Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out some tr

Carved into the stone of the ancient temple of Apollo at Delphi was the injunction to ‘know thyself’. Without such knowledge we are tossed this way and that by forces we neither suspect nor understand. Knowing ourselves helps explain our predicament; and doing so is greatly aided by understanding an aspect of the way in which the brain constructs the world. I believe we have adopted a limited vision of a very particular type, and precisely because it is limited we cannot se

Introduction My philosophy aims at an ordering of rank: not at an individualistic morality. The ideas of the herd should rule in the herd—but not reach out beyond it.[1] Nietzsche, The Will to Power Alongside Marx, Nietzsche was one of the great nineteenth-century critics of modernity. Contra Marx, for some time the operative assumption was that Nietzsche was effectively an apolitical critic. Caustic and elitist perhaps, making the occasional bizarre aside on ‘blond beasts’

Introduction Legal dramas often focus on the climax of courtroom arguments and verdicts. In doing so, they gloss over crucial aspects...

The emergence of blockchain technology is creating solutions to key issues that stateless people face. Stateless people and their...

Professor Judith Butler is a world-renowned philosopher and theorist whose writing has made them a household name. Their work has shaped and continues to shape how we conceive of gender, post-structuralism, embodiment, sexuality, and language. This interview is centred around Butler’s recent work Who’s Afraid of Gender? (Allen Lane 2024), which addresses the cultural and political anxieties surrounding gender and gender nonconformity. The following discussion dissects the ri

Professor Jan-Werner Müller is the Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences and Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He has published many books—including Contesting Democracy (Yale University Press 2011), What is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania Press 2016), and Democracy Rules (Penguin 2021)—and voluminously in academic journals and public fora including the Guardian , The New York Times , and Project Syndicate . This interview was conducted o