Prof Bill McGuire writes that the pandemic is like a 'waterless flood' that is bracing us for what new studies suggest are much larger ones to come A little more than a decade ago, Margaret Atwood published The Year of the Flood - the second book in her dystopian...
How often are ideas that once seemed radical and to some, even preposterous, made tame by the turn of events? That is the case now with the suggestion that Britain should experiment with National Gardening Leave, an idea suggested in a 2012 pamphlet I wrote with my...
It wasn't clear at the time, but a couple of weeks ago I gave what is likely to be my last public talk for a while, reproduced below, at an event called Human Nature, organised by the Experimental Thought Co. Already it seems an age away, but even then our...
Nothing like the current upheavals around the world in the wake of the novel coronavirus, COVID19, have been experienced in peacetime. But societies have mobilised like this during conflict and mass conflagrations. Are there lessons to be learned, and could it lead to...
Lindsay Mackie and Andrew Simms explore how crises reveal fundamental flaws in underlying political and economic models and call for a new approach It looks like it’s going to be a national emergency, or, in Whitehall terms, a very grave civil contingency. Novel...
Noel Newsome took over the BBC European Service on the day that the Nazis invaded Poland, on 1 September 1939. He was a known maverick who often fought his BBC superiors- but may have saved the BBC in the process. His was the voice in the BBC which demanded truth over...
Every UK administration gets angry with the BBC, but this time it's different. New Weather examines what's really behind the Government's attack on the licence fee and its 'consultation' On 5 February 2020, culture secretary Nicky Morgan launched a public...
We now know the truth, courtesy of the Sunday Times revealing on 16th February that the Government, in the shape of the Prime Minister and Dominic Cummings, want to “whack” the BBC by dismantling it and abolishing the licence fee. Apart from being a monumentally...
In the second post about the threat to public media in Britain, New Weather's Lindsay Mackie unpicks the lines of attack being used against the BBC as government plans to financially undermine it emerge, and shows why they are little more than a thin veil for vested...
I have just in the last few days published a book on the much-derided tickbox culture (it is called Tickbox). So I am also aware, and especially now, about where people disagree. They point to another book, by the doctor and writer Atul Gawande, called The Checklist...