The culture of self-promotion has turned many who in other times would have been modest and self-effacing into boasters and braggers. They take things about themselves which are technically true and make them sound more impressive than they are. Here are four of the tropes I find most grating.
ReadBank holidays are a British idiosyncrasy that some former members of our empire continue to honour. Other countries don’t have more of them, they have public holidays instead. This is not a matter of mere terminology. A public holiday is a shared civic commemoration of something important for the society that celebrates it.
ReadAs the years pass, his stock only continues to rise. Card-carrying Wittgensteinians might be relatively thin on the ground but he pointed a direction for philosophy to head in that many are now following.
ReadIf the Home Office and Starbucks yield to the temptation to address their failings only by introducing yet more policies or protocols, they will have failed to learn a more than two-millennia old lesson that remains just as important today.
ReadReading Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition today, it’s easier to see how much he got right, and why so much that was done in postmodernism’s name was an aberration.
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