Asked about the enduring appeal of his hardware store, Roberts says: “It’s a community as much as anything. People like coming in and having a relationship they feel they can trust.” Perhaps one reason why this social factor is so valued is that we have so little else to hold our neighbourhoods together.  It is as though the burden of creating a sense of community and cohesion has fallen disproportionately on the shoulders of local businesses. We need them more than ever to fill a hole that has been created by decades of creeping social atomisation. Article for the FT Weekend ..read more

Mr Chopra interprets everything though the lens of anxiety and as a result either magnifies its true significance or sees it where it is not. To invert and adapt an old proverb, to an anxious nail, everything looks like a hammer. (Review for the Wall Street Journal) This content is for supporters only. Visit the site and log in/register to read ..read more

Attaching a price to a human life is the height of poor taste. It obscures the distinction between two very different kinds of value – the monetary and the existential. However, there are situations in which one can, should or even must set aside any thought of the sanctity of human life and make cold, hard calculations. Review of Jenny Kleeman’s the Price of Life for the Literary Review ..read more

In her very readable book Time Warped, science writer and broadcaster Claudia Hammond explained why we almost invariably overestimate how much time we will have to do things in the future. The tasks of the present loom overwhelmingly large in our minds, but when we look ahead, we can see fewer commitments and so we assume we won’t have as many then. But, of course, jobs accumulate and if we are busy now and have been for as long as we can remember, we should assume we will be continue to have as little free time as we do now. From memory (disclaimer: it’s unreliable) Hammond advised that if yo ..read more

Ironically this is based on my September 2023 newsletter and I have only just added it to my website… Time management used to be something only over-ambitious executives and wannabe-executives worried about. Now, I think almost everyone is at least a little bit interested in it, even if they don’t call it by its name. It’s related to FOMO – Fear of Missing Out. There always seems to be more to do than we have time to do it in, and what’s more, social media is full of people who appear to be cramming more into one day than we can manage in a month. I find myself taunted by the people who manage ..read more

An essay for the Telegraph on whether the science of consciousness threatens cherished beliefs about our selves, our free will and our human uniqueness. This content is for supporters only. Visit the site and log in/register to read ..read more

A review of Ravenous by Henry Dimbleby and Jemima Lewis and Healthy Eating Policy and Political Philosophy by Anne Barnhill and Matteo Bonotti for the TLS (April 28, 2023) which explores the issues of food and public health. This content is for supporters only. Visit the site and log in/register to read ..read more

An article for Index on Censorship (Vol 52, No 3) on what is right and wrong in the idea that we ought to privilege the viewpoints of those with lived experience. This content is for supporters only. Visit the site and log in/register to read ..read more

An article for The Author, the magazine of the Society of Authors, on the myth of sole authorship. (Published Autumn 2023) This content is for supporters only. Visit the site and log in/register to read ..read more

Review of George Musser’s book on how science has rekindled its interest in subjective experience, for the Wall Street Journal This content is for supporters only. Visit the site and log in/register to read ..read more