Ian Leslie has released what looks to be a fascinating book about the Beatles and more specifically the relationship between Lennon and McCartney. I thought that I too might as well get in on the act and talk about the Beatles story and why it is so remarkable, mysterious and...

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There’s a strong gerontocratic tinge to US politics of late — the youngest of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren and Mitch McConnel is Chuck at 73. Many a theory has been propounded to explain this phenomenon, but a simple on...

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Cameron Murray’s The Great Housing Hijack is self-recommending. You certainly don’t need a review of any sort to tell you to go read it if you have any interest in the peculiar case of the housing market. Nevertheless, here I supply my own review of sorts and extrapolate on wh...

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The biggest winner from the referendum on the weekend is John Stuart Mill. There’s a strand of left-wing orthodoxy these days that deprecates free speech and brands opposing viewpoints as dangerous wrongthink. This firebrand mode of thinking is excellent at producing an engage...

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Valiant attempts have been made to measure happiness and wellbeing. People much smarter than me have developed fancy indices, and people even smarter than that, such as our own Nicholas Gruen, has called bullshit on many of them . What I propose is something far simpler: make...

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I’m a Labor voter and I'll do as I've always done at the upcoming election by voting Labor again. Nonetheless… I think there are at least three Labor Party policy pillars that made sense once upon a time but now need overhauling due to their turning counterproductive to labour...

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Huge thanks to the long suffering Jacques for all his work on Troppo over the decades. And thanks now to Antonios who's managed to transfer Troppo to a new internet host and massively improve the speed of the site and the functionality of our plugins. Troppo has now officially...

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We've just had an economic experiment of epic proportions and there's really only one conclusion: on house prices, Cameron Murray is as correct as anybody can be about a contested economic issue. Cameron Murray is an all-round interesting thinker whose views at least on some t...

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[caption id="attachment_34398" align="aligncenter" width="736"] There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy[/caption] It’s a supreme finding of Hume’s clever reasoning that ought cannot be derived from is. The claim is so irrefutab...

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[caption id="attachment_34097" align="aligncenter" width="900"] King Lear and Cordelia's Rejection[/caption] Welcome to Antonios Sarhani' s first post. I've got a brief post welcoming him aboard immediately above this post. Nicholas Gruen The ceremony and the circumlocutions o...

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