Death by tonsillitis: Imagining a world without antibiotics
Many of us can safely say that without antibiotic treatment, we would not be alive today. Yet because of their effectiveness, low cost and relatively wide availability, these miracle drugs are often taken for granted. Since their discovery only 75 years ago, antibiotics have been losing their effectiveness at an alarming rate, leaving even the most trivial infections untreatable.
Recent articles
Academia and Intellectual Soulcraft: A Conversation with Cornel West
King’s Review recently had the pleasure of talking with Cornel West during his stay last week at King’s College, Cambridge. Here he talks to us about the role of academia and the responsibility of intellectuals in the public sphere, particularly their relation to recent political movements such as Occupy, and pressing social and political problems such as climate change, poverty, and financial crises.
I want to be alternative – Local and virtual currencies attacking $, € and ¥
How Bitcoin, the Brixton Pound and Time Dollars are injecting pluralism and democracy into the monetary system.
Of Fat Cats and a Barking Public
Precisely one month ago, on March 3rd, Swiss voters backed a proposal to enforce some of the world’s strictest regulations on executive pay. In a society where obesity is the most common result of malnutrition, citizens seem to have realised that the fat cats sitting on the boards of Swiss companies embraced gluttony in a deregulated market—and a diet is in order.
Ward Seven
The Russian mentality – borne out of eternal struggle for survival – has become nationally addicted to the consoling idea of ‘a quick fix’. It seems that a new age occultism is fast becoming the religion for many Russian people.
Justifying Government Overreach: Brennan’s Confirmation, Partisan Politics and America’s Secretive Security State
On February 7, 2013, John O. Brennan, President Obama’s nominee for CIA director, appeared before the Senate for his confirmation hearing, his shock of receding white hair and sharp red tie framed by a protestor’s sign behind him reading “US Citizen Age 16 Killed by Drones”.
Changing the Wheel: Bertolt Brecht’s Stories from the Revolution
Brecht’s Stories from the Revolution are insightful, idiosyncratic and profound pieces of political poetry
The Rights of Journalism and the Needs of Audiences
In Tom Stoppard’s play Night and Day, one character remarks to another: “I’m with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.” I don’t think that our discussions of the proper configuration of press freedom have moved very far from this impasse in the thirty years since the play was published.
Why Economists are Liars (and other stories)
At first glance, experiments suggesting that business and economics majors lie more than others provide material for yet another indictment of academic economics. But the experiments also point beyond themselves to a much more recent development – one that implicates Udacity founder and Google Glass pioneer Sebastian Thrun – and to another more complex story involving bombs, the Ford motor company, and the self-fulfilling prophecy.
From Arab Spring to Arab Summer?
A transition in the MENA region towards greater human rights protection and democracy may not happen soon. But it will happen.
Patronage and Crisis: German theatre and cultural politics
With cuts threatening to plunge state-subsidised arts institutions into crisis, how should they respond?
Current strands
Academia and Public IntellectualsBiological dilemmas
Climate change
Democracy in crisis
Free speech
Insecure security states
New economy
Revolution
Techno-topias
The spread of mental illness
Featured letter
Of Liars, Cynics, and Business Schools
As a business school student who took great interest in the article “Why economists are liars (and other stories)”, I find myself wondering whether my faculty environment might indeed favour dishonesty. My knee-jerk response, hardly a surprise to you, is no. But it seems worth reflecting on at least two mechanisms at work in the realm of business schools and society at large, which do have the potential to corrupt moral integrity... →
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Get email alerts→America’s Strange Love Affair with Guns
May 6Guns, like country music, cowboy boots, and bourbon, have for the past forty years enjoyed a cultural cachet in America that is removed from any practical uses to which they might be put. They have become symbols of Southern and Western self-sufficiency and toughness, an easy way for consumers from particular regions in a market economy to flaunt a middle finger to authority.
Menstruation Taboos: Let’s Break the Silence
Mar 23Two weeks ago, we celebrated International Women’s Day. While there should be no time-stamp on such celebrations, a specific day does provide an opportunity for focus, for female issues to be raised and discussed by experts and non-experts alike. At …
Closed material procedures, Rudi Dutschke and King’s
Mar 22Nicholas Mulder’s piece ‘Closed Trials and Open Wounds’ unknowingly served to bring back to mind the part played by Ken and Rosemary Polack and King’s in the cause celebre of the Rudi Dutschke affair of 1970 and the seminal part …
Closed Trials and Open Wounds
Mar 12The political repercussions of the proposed Justice and Security Bill rocked the Liberal Democrats’ spring conference in Brighton this weekend. Civil rights campaigner Jo Shaw resigned after renouncing her support for Nick Clegg.
My language ate my savings
Mar 10Keith Chen is a vanguard, almost a Žižekian pop-intellectual fulfilling the necessary clichés (receding hair, slightly squint-eyed, untucked shirt). His theory is daring and far-reaching. It could not only influence, but revolutionise our way of thinking about the economy (at least our way of excusing economic incompetence).
Chaplin, Grillo and the spectre of centrist populism
Mar 8In 1940 Charlie Chaplin wrote and starred in The Great Dictator, a feature-length satire directed at the awful absurdities of fascism.
Billions of pounds to map billions of neurons
Mar 7In the last month, both the European Commission and U.S. president Barack Obama have pledged to give billions of dollars to fund two separate projects geared towards creating a working model of the human brain.
How to annihilate a royal
Mar 4The irony was delicious. The Mail runs a story headlined “Kate puts her baby bump on parade”, mixing an attack on Hilary Mantel’s alleged literary offensive against the Duchess with incessant cooing over Middleton’s “gently swelling stomach”.
Let’s Beat Up The Poor
Mar 1The Bullingdon Club is back in the news. The Oxford Student recently ran a story about a student who was admitted to the club only after an initiation ceremony which allegedly included burning a £50 note in front of a tramp. The publication of the story generated a lot of huffing and puffing about its reliability and its source (a third party). More generally, toff-bashing seems to have lost its allure. It is felt to be in political bad taste, an expression of the ‘politics of envy’.
Kickstarting Taxation
Feb 18George Osborne, formerly known as the City-boys’ puppet in power, has turned into the Great Enforcer, riding his “new agenda of transparency” into Ethiopia, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda and Tanzania.