Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Politics

  • [a] question of how forgetting is avoided

    Interesting aside here from Mark Carrigan, responding to (as he puts it) an “innocuous but in practice […] unsettling” observation in Nicholas Christakis’s Apollo’s Arrow, which is a (surely rather premature?) analysis of the impact of coronavirus(es) on the way we live. Christakis observes that Covid-19 has sparked an awareness of public health challenges in…

  • (failed) states of exception

    I’ve been an admirer of Christopher Brown’s fiction ever since I bought a two-handed piece for Futurismic that he wrote with Chairman Bruce (“Windsor Executive Solutions”, which is still up and available to read, amazingly enough). I finally got my hands on one of his recent novels back in the spring, and found myself thinking…

  • the pool of potential victims appeared limited

    Danny Dorling: The mortality surge lasted for weeks at the start of 2015. It went up suddenly. In one week in January, as the hospitals became overwhelmed, the number of excess deaths rose from 448 to to 4050, then 3721, 3220, 2408, 1719, 1470, not dipping below 1000 until mid-March. It rose again to 1973…

  • a range of different positively impactful solutions available through our platform

    I have, for reasons which in hindsight are hard to understand, mostly been following UK political news for the last year or so via the New Statesman‘s RSS feed. As such, I’ve also been observing what seemed to be less an editorial drift to the center than an all-out sprint, centered around the black comedy…

  • failure / retrieval

    Strange vibes in me at the moment. Part of that is adjusting to the sudden (albeit welcome) structure of a full-time job, and with it the sudden proliferation of deadlines for projects in which a significant number of the moving parts are people, and hence priorities and possibilities shift suddenly in ways you weren’t necessarily…