This is the 10 February 2025 FT Swamp Notes from Rana Foroohar and Richard Waters. [The Notes is a great @financialtimes newsletter to which I strongly recommend you sign up if you haven’t already]. It’s one of the most disturbing things I’ve read in the torrent of analysis and speculation about exactly what the Trump/Musk […]
The power of the connecting middle: where policy, delivery and democracy meet (and often don’t)
I had one of those interesting collisions between a couple of strands of my work last week that helped to make sense of a couple of things. One piece of work is The Possibility Partnership. More about this below but it’s a project full of, well, possibility about making a dent in the vexed question […]
Nothing is new, it seems
I was chasing up some information about KU Leuven, the oldest Catholic university in Europe and the site of a major EU/US meeting on tech and trade. In the process, I came across this description of the Beguines in the Belgian city of Leuven. Communities of beguines formed at the end of the 12th century . […]
In extremis: what Ukraine 2.0 tells us about reforming government and the public sector
I don’t know much about judo or any of the similar martial arts, but I gather one of the central features is the ability to use the power and momentum of the attacker to your advantage.When you are attacked, the trick is to turn the aggressor’s energy back on itself. Defence becomes attack. Aggression is […]
“We are as gods and might as well get used to it.”
I’ve borrowed the title for this blog from a recent review article from Foreign Affairs. It references Stewart Brand’s introduction to the first issue of The Whole Earth Catalog, “an encyclopedic compendium of resources for back-to-the-land living that became a foundational document of Silicon Valley’s techno-utopian culture.” This wonderful review essay is built around a […]
Why I care about a moonshot for care
I love the idea of moonshots. There is something stirring and hopeful in the conception of setting a venture for change or accomplishment whose virtue lies primarily in its scale and boldness. Mariana Mazzucato has taken the idea as far as anyone including in her latest book. In her framing, moonshots are not just big […]
