Knocking down the walls

Today marks 30 years of German Reunification, and next week classes start again at the Karl-Franzens-Universität. One seminar I will be taking sounds very promising – The Desire for Walls After 1989. The course description : Thirty years ago the wall between East and West Germany fell. For many people, 1989 was also seen as …

Ruth Bader Ginsburg 1933-2020

No pithy comments or smart ass remarks today - too busy reflecting on the passing or RBG.

The Revolution will not be on Facebook

In his 1971 funk, spoken word, masterpiece The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Gil Scott-Heron artfully criticized the banality of broadcast television. Deftly weaving over 50 cultural references together in just 3:06 – including Bullwinkle, Spiro Agnew, and Liquid Plumr – he elucidated that television did not foster social transformation but apathy. Back in the …

Can EBPM work?

Recently an article by Gudula Walterskirchen in the Austrian daily Die Presse about evidence based policy making (EBPM) caught my eye. EBPM has been kicking around since the 1980s. Essentially it is the idea that policy decisions should be based on comprehensive, meticulously established, objective evidence as opposed to intuition, ideology, or common sense. It …

There’s a storm coming, Mr. Bezos…

While small businesses, restaurants, or stores struggle to survive the corona crisis and unemployment has reached new heights, the fortune of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has grown by 24 billion dollars since the beginning of 2020. Tesla founder Elon Musk has had to make do with a little over 10 billion. While the fortune of …

Hello? Anybody out there?

Political debate is getting uglier and polarization in politics is widening. American research shows that in 2012, less than half of voters absolutely rejected (“from the bottom of my heart”) the candidate of the opposing party and would under no circumstances vote for him/her. By 2016, that figured had risen to 70%. One cause of …