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Oct 10, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Matt Johnson |Brian Stewart |Robert Thornett |Oscar Clarke
There’s a devastating civil war and vast humanitarian crisis unfolding in Sudan right now, and it barely makes the headlines. Since April 2023, a conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced more than ten million people.
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Oct 9, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Brian Stewart |Robert Thornett |Oscar Clarke |John Aziz
We seem to have reached a hinge moment in the long-running battle against the Islamic State. In recent months, the jihadist outfit has been mustering forces in Syria’s Badiya desert, recruiting and training a new band of holy warriors to resurrect its dream of ruling a caliphate. The rallying of jihadist forces and the corresponding outburst of violence have not been out of the ordinary in this vast ungoverned space, but they may yet prove combustible enough to engulf Syria and parts of Iraq.
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Oct 9, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Zoe Booth |Brian Stewart |Robert Thornett |Oscar Clarke
Until recently, David Benatar was a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, where he also directed the university’s Bioethics Centre. He is widely known for his controversial and challenging views on topics like antinatalism—captured in his groundbreaking book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence—which argues that bringing new life into the world inevitably leads to suffering.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Robert Thornett |Oscar Clarke |John Aziz |Iona Italia
Introduction: My guest this week is Megan Gafford. Megan is an artist, teacher, and writer. She publishes visual essays on her Substack “Fashionably Late Takes.” She is also a frequent contributor to Quillette.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Robert Thornett |Oscar Clarke |John Aziz |Iona Italia
“Civility prevails,” read the headline of the Spanish newspaper El País. “Walz and Vance embrace an endangered species: agreement,” reported the Guardian. Such responses to the recent US vice-presidential debate between Republican J.D. Vance and Democrat Tim Walz were a world away from those that followed the bitter Trump–Biden and Trump–Harris debates in the preceding months.
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Aug 22, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Jay Sophalkalyan |Nick Enfield |Leon Hadar |Oscar Clarke
As the 2024 US presidential election approaches, immigration continues to be one of the most divisive topics in the national conversation. Amid this debate, one disparity is frequently overlooked: the contrasting treatment of international students who have graduated from US universities versus undocumented immigrants.
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Nick Enfield |Leon Hadar |Oscar Clarke |Brad Strotten
Reality matters because our survival depends on it. To navigate reality, as individuals, we first reduce its complexity through the interface of sensory perception. But to coordinate around reality, in concert with other people, our speciesâ forte is to add another interface, a further level of transformation: the interface known as language. We present reality to each other in language-delineated pieces. As the mathematician Friedrich Waismann said, language is the knife we use to cut out facts.
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Leon Hadar |Oscar Clarke |Brad Strotten
Introduction: In this weekâs episode, I spoke to John R. Wood, Jr., the national ambassador for Braver Angels, an organisation that brings together Democrats and Republicans, in an attempt to help them understand each other better, with a view to strengthening the American civic state. John is also a columnist for USA Today and a former Republican nominee for Congress, as well as former vice-president of the Republican Party of Los Angeles.
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Leon Hadar |Oscar Clarke |Brad Strotten |Thomas Larson
My socialisation into polite liberal society‚ÄĒmy crunchy, Quaker-school education and my progressive cultural milieu in a Northeastern American metropolis‚ÄĒhelped to forge my worldview. I was, after all, the product of a culture and a generation in which the liberal world presided over the most peaceful and prosperous societies in the history of humanity. Liberalism seemed to be the natural order of things.
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Aug 20, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Leon Hadar |Oscar Clarke |Brad Strotten |Thomas Larson
A review of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz, 432 pages, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (June 2024)In the early 1990s, I was a research fellow with the Cato Institute and served as the Libertarian Party’s shadow secretary of state. It was a great time to be a believer in personal and economic liberty.
