Sunday Thoughts: Common standards, re-learning to stigmatise, finding 'the one'
Here’s to a cracking Sunday, class mates. I’ll be absconding to Spain on Good Friday to walk the Camino de Santiago and so you can expect to receive fewer links in your Sunday post in the weeks to come. Worry not, podcast episodes will continue to be broadcast each Friday. Before you get to the usual links of the week and some podcast-related links, I feel I apologise for the state of my audio. I’ve received some feedback from listeners that it can be quite uneven and I now realise this is because I’ve had the mic set up incorrectly. I’ve now found the correct setting and after the broadcast of episode 20, things will sound much clearer and crisper.
Culture
- in Substack.
“Following the attack [on Cambridge University’s Lord Balfour painting], the Prime Minister gave a speech where he warned that extremism was a growing threat to British life. But while there is indeed a problem with Islamism and sectarianism, there is perhaps a more serious more existential crisis beneath this. That is, no one is really in charge anymore.
The West has a deviancy problem | Ayaan Hirsi-Ali in UnHerd
How to choose a romantic partner | Rob Henderson in his Substack newsletter
Falling birthrate to leave UK reliant on immigration until 2100 | The Sunday Times
The Islamist threat is all too real – Gove understands it needs tackling | Nick Timothy in The Telegraph
Government
Leo Varadkar vs. The People | Brendan O’Neill in Spiked
Migrants’ boost to economy overestimated, claims think tank | Will Hazell in The Telegraph
Shakespeare made theatre too ‘white, male and cisgender’, tax-payer funded study finds | Charlotte Gill in The Telegraph
Education
The sexes do not differ in general intelligence, but they do in some specifics | Matthew Reynolds’ academic paper in Elsevier
Podcast
This week’s Thinking Class saw me speak with long-time China correspondent. Ian Williams, who spoke about China’s threat to the West and the West’s inadequate responses to it, but also that Beijing’s vulnerabilities mean the country’s future may not be as golden as we are led to believe.
Listen to the full episode on Substack here or watch the full episode on on YouTube here.
Below you can find the spotlight on some segments on our conversation:
Popular episodes from the Thinking Class archives
In this last week, my episode with Ed West on lessons from history continues to be popular (listen to the full episode here), while my recent conversation with Lionel Shriver about her decision to leave Britain grows in popularity (listen to the full episode here).
Here are some clips from those episodes, which you can which in full here and here.