I discussed the success of the Right online for the New Economics Foundation podcast, following my London Review of Books article about Farageist Tiktok
‘Facial recognitions’
A new essay in The Ideas Letter on how the politics of the face has grown more fractious, in context of smartphones, face-covering bans, facial recognition algorithms, ICE agents and protest culture.
‘A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0’
The Guardian has published an edited version of my N+1 essay on stupidity and Trumpism as a Long Read.
‘TV meets fruit machine’
An essay in London Review of Books on ‘Faragist TikTok’, which explores the discontents of the algorithmic public sphere.
‘Bonfire of the bureaucrats’
I have written the cover story for this week’s New Statesman, an essay on the new wave of anti-bureaucratic sentiment sweeping states around the world.
‘A crisis in credibility’
Article in London Review of Books on Labour’s economic dilemmas and the recent budget.
‘Fever dream’
Essay in London Review of Books reflecting on 14 years of Tory rule
‘Eye-watering taxes are a problem for the Tories – and an even bigger one for Labour’
Comment piece in The Guardian on the new fiscal settlement, in which tax rises have become unmoored from any palpable social progress.
‘The business-lounge intellectual’
Review of Martin Wolf’s new book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, published in The New Statesman
‘If Boris Johnson were a stock, canny investors would be looking to unload’
New column for The Guardian, on the “animal spirits” that drove up Johnson’s value, and could quickly abandon him.
Review of The Assault on Truth
I reviewed Peter Oborne’s new book, The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism, for The Guardian.
Review of Brexitland
I reviewed Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford’s Brexitland, on the rise of Remain/Leave identities, for the London Review of Books.
The decline of the ‘state effect’
Comment piece on the crisis of trust in British government, originally drafted in October, now shared on the PERC blog.
William Davies 