Can Andrew Yang Become U.S. President?
For years, I've been reading and writing about the looming threat of automation, A.I. and new technologies, including their capacity to wipe out traditional jobs. The bulk of this writing was compiled into a book Essays in A.I. released a couple years ago. When confronted with the looming threat of automation, the traditional response from ...
Long Working Hours Are Making Australians: Unproductive, Mentally Ill, Physically Ill
Research indicates working more than 48 hours a week is associated with significant declines in productivity, more mistakes and more mental health problems. Yet the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons reckons working up to 65 hours a week “is appropriate for trainees to gain the knowledge and experience required”. It’s an attitude that explains why a 2017 audit found ...
We Need Less Experts: The Power of Educating Generalists
Imagine that you’re a doctor and that your patient has just died on the operating table. Now, you have the difficult task of telling the family the bad news. You’re an expert in medicine but you have no knowledge of...
Hypotheticals by Geoffrey Robertson (1985 – 1990): A TV Review
In the early 1980s, Geoffrey Robertson was approached by a CBS broadcaster to create the first of his ‘Hypotheticals’ for American television. [1] The premise of the show was simple. In each episode, Robertson, an established QC, would pose hypotheticals to a panel of top-profile guests, guiding them through the scenarios with interogative questioning. The ...
Top UK universities remain unreachable for 70% of students
Eight top schools have as many Oxford and Cambridge admissions as the next 2894 UK schools combined, according to a new report by the Sutton Trust. The Trust suggests that little has changed regarding access to opportunity at Oxbridge since its last report in 2011. For nearly three quarters of school leavers across the UK, ...
Oxford’s Libraries Should Be Open and Free To The Public
In the last two years, over 100 public libraries across the UK have been forced to close down. A further 500 are now being run by all-volunteer workforces, often made up of retirees working for nothing to keep their local communities alive. Even in the best-case scenario, volunteer-run libraries lack oversight and accountability, let alone ...
The Prison of New Technology
There is a line in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death that has been haunting me for months now. It reads in part: “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” The idea is counter-cultural. We believe, intrinsically, that new technologies empower us to think. The ...
The Cinema Rosa – Kickstarter Relaunch
The Cinema Rosa is a new puzzle exploration game inspired by The Stanley Parable, Gone Home, What Remains of Edith Finch and Bioshock. Now on KICKSTARTER.
Book Review: Inside Family Law: Conversations from the Coalface
I was recently given an advanced copy of Zoe Durand's Inside Family Law: Conversations from the Coalface. I decided to review the book, in part because it sounded interesting to read firsthand accounts of family law in practice. Below is my review in full: Family law is an area of law known for emotional and psychological ...
Law Schools are Failing Their Students
This is a brief excerpt from my book Legal Education, Privatization and the Market, about the role universities play in guiding young law students away from charity and towards private practice.
