The old coincidence detector beeped yesterday as I listened to the Reply All podcast Candidate One. It was about an election at Berkeley High School, a hotbed of political activism and its evil twin, political chicanery.

Tl, dr; someone tried to cheat and got caught. Yay democracy and truth.

Episode summary: What will it take to make the United States a more fully-functioning democracy, and how can we, as citizens, bring about that change? By host and producer John Biewen, with series collaborator Chenjerai Kumanyika. Interviews with Michael Waldman, Jennifer Cohn, and Sanford Levinson....

Episode summary: A former Ackerman employee explains how expenses were hidden. Leaked audio of Wayne LaPierre lets people know the real damage under his watch. Where will the NRA go from here?

My script was a little flaky in picking up all episodes of this podcast series, but I just wanted to add...

I’ve just finished the most delightful book I have read in a very long time. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles is simply breath-taking in the way it spins its magic. I freely confess to being extremely sentimental, easy to tears in a film or even music, but I don’t recall having wept tears of joy...

Wackos and ZoomGlüts - Not Boring by Packy McCormick

Interesting is such a devalued word. What else to say about this rather fine essay? It explains a lot of things and it explains them well. I particularly sympathised with his experience of the glut of free and wonderful things to do online in th...

Rebecca Solnit: On Letting Go of Certainty in a Story That Never Ends | Literary Hub

Rebecca Solnit reading fairy stories is not something I’m sure I want to listen to. Rebecca Solnit writing about reading fairy stories is something else again. Full of wonderful insights, this latest essay takes t...

Episode summary: In a special live edition recorded at the Bristol Festival of Economics we discuss the impact of the technology revolution on democratic politics. Has the rise of automation contributed to the rise of populism? Is China winning the AI wars against the West? And do any democratic pol...

At the end of September, David Runciman interviewed Ian McEwan on Talking Politics. Their conversation about McEwan's two most recent books was so interesting that I went and bought both almost as soon as I got back home from my walk. I wasn’t disappointed.

Classic Wodehouse, full of period dialogue, impossible plot contrivances, two-dimensional characters and everything else one might love about old Plum, if one loves old Plum at all. Infectious, too. But here's the thing: all the while I was reading it, I couldn't shake one thought from my mind.

Stanley Featherstonehough Ukridge is without a doubt the original on which Boris Johnson modelled himself.

A friend happened to meet Edmund de Waal at this year's Venice Biennale, and in telling us about the encounter he was so persuasive about this book, which had made him seek out de Waal, that I resolved to read it. I'm so glad I did. It had been sitting on the shelf here forever, and while I had been aware of it, I thought it was about netsuke. It is, and so much more.