“... When​ historians examine Britain’s departure from the European Union, one of the things that will puzzle them is the behaviour of the Conservative Party. Thanks to copious demographic and geographical analysis, we are already in a position to make sense of the referendum result itself. But it remains difficult to grasp how the Tories could effectively have taken what was to everyone else a fringe issue and used it to attack the interests they had until very recently represented: the City of London, big business, the Union, even Whitehall ...”

“... internet are now so ingrained in childhood that it’s impossible to turn the clock back to a Just William world of muddy knees and tree-climbing.One frustrating thing about this debate is how much space a figure like Haidt takes up. Some of the success of his book no doubt reflects the force of the truths it contains, but these would once have stirred the ...”

“... There​ are two types of people: professional social scientists and amateur social scientists. To put that another way, a central problem of social science is that, unlike natural science, your objects of study have their own account of who they are and what they’re doing. The professional demographer may classify someone according to a set of categories widely recognised among experts, but unrecognisable or even offensive to the person being classified ...”

“... From​ the 1920s until the 1990s, as Quinn Slobodian describes in Globalists (2018), his history of neoliberal thought, Austrian and German free-market thinkers had a common ideal of legally ‘encasing’ the market, in order to leave it safe from political harm. Price signals could be compared with an electrical current flowing down copper wires at lightning speed ...”

“... About​ five years ago, in the course of studying the commercial applications of psychological research, I contacted the agent of Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke University, to inquire whether Ariely might want to speak at a conference in London. It didn’t come off: I had to explain that my ‘conference budget’ didn’t stretch to the $75,000 speaker fee and first-class return airfare ...”

“... When​ Britain left the EU on 31 January, led by a prime minister commanding a fresh eighty-seat majority in the House of Commons, a line (of sorts) was drawn under the most turbulent period in the country’s recent political history. The past four years have witnessed one historic referendum, two general elections, two major upsets at the ballot box, three prime ministers, the birth of the Brexit Party and multiple anti-Brexit groups, a Supreme Court judgment that the prime minister had behaved unlawfully, and much else along the way ...”

“... The​ words ‘market’ and ‘capitalism’ are frequently used as if they were synonymous. Especially where someone is defending the ‘free market’, it is generally understood that they are also making an argument for ‘capitalism’. Yet the two terms can also denote very different sets of institutions and logics. According to the taxonomy developed by the economic historian Fernand Braudel, they may even be opposed to each other ...”

“... Britain​ is entering a crisis in mortgage repayments that nobody can ignore, but which nobody in power seems willing to prevent. In May, the average interest rate for a two-year fixed rate mortgage passed 6 per cent, a reflection of market expectations regarding Bank of England rate rises, which are in turn a response to the sustained difficulty of getting inflation down ...”

“... In the month​ leading up to the Chris Pincher scandal, which finally did for Boris Johnson, there was a flurry of bleak news about the state and future of the British economy. Inflation hit a forty-year high of 9.1 per cent, and the Bank of England announced its fifth interest rate rise since December, to 1.25 per cent. At the end of June, Andrew Bailey, the governor of the bank, admitted that inflation in the UK – triggered by a combination of war in Ukraine and supply-chain bottlenecks in the wake of Covid lockdowns – is likely to endure for longer than in the United States or mainland Europe ...”

“... The phrase​ ‘hard-working families’, a staple of New Labour and Conservative rhetoric for about twenty years, fell by the wayside with the political upheavals of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015 and the resignation of David Cameron the following summer. (Theresa May initially hoped to refocus on ‘JAMs’ – Just About Managing families – but lost all ideological confidence along with her parliamentary majority in June last year ...”

“... Justice is what love looks like in public,’ Cornel West said some years ago, a slogan now so well-known that you see it on T-shirts and posters, a kind of ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ or ‘This House Runs on Love, Laughter and Prosecco’ for the activist left. It’s an engaging claim. But is it true? At first glance, justice and love have entirely different, even contradictory, qualities, and elision flatters both ...”

“... One​ morning in the summer of 2016, a few weeks into the disorientating aftermath of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, my wife and I sat in a community centre in Poplar, East London with our baby son. Our three-year-old daughter must have been at nursery. The occasion was a ‘consultation’ hosted by Tower Hamlets Council on the ‘future of Children’s Centres’ in the borough ...”

“... The​ sociologist Monika Krause, in her book Model Cases (2021), shows that social scientists have tended to base their concepts and theories on a surprisingly limited range of shared empirical instances. Images of the modern metropolis, for example, have been excessively shaped by studies of Chicago and Berlin. Political theories of populism have been heavily indebted to cases in Latin America, in particular Argentina ...”

“... In​ the mid-2010s, the Chinese technology company ByteDance studied the leading video clip-sharing platforms, such as Vine and Musical.ly, and identified some crucial weaknesses. The clips were not well formatted for what had become the world’s most popular interface, the vertical smartphone screen. And while the existing platforms were well designed for watching and sharing videos, they were less user-friendly when it came to creating and editing them ...”

“... There​ are two broad narratives about what has happened to universities in the English-speaking world over the past forty years. They are very different from each other, yet both have some plausibility. The first runs roughly as follows. The rise of the New Right in the 1980s introduced a policy agenda for universities aimed at injecting enterprise and competition into a sector that had previously seen itself as somewhat insulated from the market ...”