Club Troppo

[ first published at Curl by Kate Galloway. ] First year law students are invariably regaled with the mantra of learning to think like a lawyer: that law school is all about developing this skill. As some have identified , 'thinking like a lawyer' is a nebulous concept at best...

Continue reading →

[ first published at Normblog by philosopher Norman Geras. ] There's a column by Simon Armitage here headed 'Poetry should be subversive'. I started reading the piece thinking 'No, it shouldn't', because I don't believe there's anything (in the way of political direction or ch...

Continue reading →

There are rumours in the Welt am Sonntag and the Wall Street Journal of another grand plan to save the Euro. The main outlines have already been foreshadowed in recent weeks by the main players (Draghi, van Rompuy, Barosso, Juncker): a re-focus on bailouts for banks, not gover...

Continue reading →

It's a pity Twitter doesn't allow slightly longer threads. Otherwise I'd post this there. I just ran across it in a John Kay book and I think it's delightful. It's the introduction to a section on Advertising. My uncle was a Scottish pharmacist of scrupulous integrity. When as...

Continue reading →

More evidence that groupthink is one of the biggest enemies of organisations. Ingratiation and Favoritism: Experimental Evidence Date: 2012-05-03 By: Stéphane Robin and Agnieszka Rusinowska, Marie-Claire Villeval at http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-00694160&r=exp...

Continue reading →

I've offered Troppodillians several of Constantine Cavafy's poems. They're magnificent. I haven't actually managed to elicit a comment on any of them, but perhaps they're being enjoyed anyway. I'm told they're of a different order in the original. But I wouldn't know. Here's o...

Continue reading →

The more they change Here are two facts about the world which won't return any time soon. Good facts. The first is that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a paraplegic. Now of course you knew that, but the fact associated with it is that noone knew. The mores of the time were the o...

Continue reading →

It has been an interesting few months in Europe. The Greeks have just had their first round of parliamentary elections and need at least another round before a government can be formed. The French have just elected a new president on an anti-austerity platform, making it a cle...

Continue reading →

I wonder how much, if any of our aid budget is going into stuff like this . . (video over fold): http://youtu.be/dWdy_BmleJ0 .

Continue reading →

Well folks, the World Chess Title is being decided right now. I didn't want to bug you as the players played the first twelve games - each taking several hours. The score after those games is 6 Anand (Reigning world champion) and 6 Gefland (Challenger). It hasn't been the best...

Continue reading →

On all recent polls, it appears that the Coalition is still unbeatable. But Newspoll suggests that Abbott’s leadership of the Liberal party is viewed with suspicion by the electorate – for good reasons. First, Abbott has still to reveal how he is going to close the budget blac...

Continue reading →

Today's column is pretty self-explanatory. I would have liked to say a fair bit more about the system and how it works, but there's a haiku like pleasure in getting it down to 800 words (OK well, that's not haiku, but you get my meaning). Here it is: I FIRST came upon the rema...

Continue reading →

http://youtu.be/FF-tKLISfPE Steve is all the rage. Run your company like Steve Jobs. Do nuclear physics like Einstein. I doubt anyone should try to run their company like Steve Jobs. But that doesn't stop it being interesting to listen to things he says. In any event, I ran in...

Continue reading →

http://youtu.be/lU-Uwl7AZ7o

Continue reading →

E-gad it's hard to keep those heterodox ideas from popping out - especially if they're the plainest commonsense. Brad Delong quotes Matthew Yglesias: Mitt Romney on Fiscal Policy : The GOP candidate sounds like Paul Krugman except without the qualifications about the zero lowe...

Continue reading →

[caption id="attachment_19919" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Bob Collins"] [/caption] I had a bit of a cyber-chinwag on Twitter this morning with a couple of other legal academics about the rather obscure topic of the torts of maintenance and champerty. Melissa Casta...

Continue reading →

Just as almost anyone has a near veto power in a bureaucracy even if they don't have much power, so the street theatre of outrage can have a powerful effect on politics even if the majority of people think that the minority putting on some show are way out of line. When things...

Continue reading →

Seems like an important paper - which I've not read yet. Trustworthy by Convention, By: M. Bigoni, S. Bortolotti, M. Casari, D. Gambetta, URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp827&r=evo Social life offers innumerable instances in which trust relations involve multiple...

Continue reading →

Having promised myself that I'd buy a Mac when they brought out a netbook sized MacBook Air, I did just that about nine months ago. I got forced out of Macdom many yearsafter I began on a Mac in 1986 I've been meaning to write a review of my experience FWIW but haven't got rou...

Continue reading →

http://youtu.be/9fXuREZu_BQ Well humans are still competitive - for now.

Continue reading →