William Davies, Freelance Journalist Profile

Articles

TV Meets Fruit Machine

1 week ago | lrb.co.uk | William Davies

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.
A Crisis in Credibility

Nov 11, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | William Davies

Before Labour took power in July, there was a lot of talk about ‘foundations’, and it has continued since. The second chapter of the party’s election manifesto was titled ‘Strong Foundations’. On the fourth day of the new administration, Rachel Reeves gave a speech outlining the ways she planned to ‘fix the foundations of our economy’.
CCDC47 gene and trichohepatoneurodevelopmental syndrome: Report of the fifth and sixth cases from Saudi Arabia

Aug 22, 2024 | onlinelibrary.wiley.com | Mohammed Almuqbil |William Davies |Clinical Neurosciences |Najlaa A. Alsubeeh

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT AB-A, SA, and EZ are employees of CENTOGENE GmbH. All other authors declare no conflicts of interest. REFERENCES , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , … (2021). Successful application of genome sequencing in a diagnostic setting: 1007 index cases from a clinically heterogeneous cohort. European Journal of Human Genetics, 29(1), 141–153. , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , … (2013).
Fourteen Years Later

Jun 24, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | William Davies

George Osborne gets booed at the London Olympics. Suella Braverman cracks gags during her visit to a half-built asylum detention centre in Rwanda. Boris Johnson is illegally presented with a birthday cake. A Tory staffer throws up as the exit poll drops. David Cameron keeps his bladder full all night to achieve maximum focus during EU negotiations. The Bank of England takes emergency action to stave off financial panic following the ‘mini-budget’.
Anticipatory Anxiety

Jun 12, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Jonathan Haidt |William Davies

In the 1980s the term ‘anxiety’ was almost eliminated from the lexicon of American psychiatry. The infamous DSM-III (the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) took an axe to various legacies of psychoanalysis that had dominated psychiatric thinking in the postwar decades. Among them was a preoccupation with anxiety.
Capitalism Decarbonised

Mar 27, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Brett Christophers |William Davies

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.
The rise of central banks: State power in financial capitalism. By Leon Wansleben, Harvard University Press. 2023

Dec 27, 2023 | onlinelibrary.wiley.com | William Davies

BOOK REVIEW The rise of central banks: State power in financial capitalism. By Leon Wansleben, Harvard University Press. 2023 First published: 28 December 2023 No abstract is available for this article. REFERENCES Krippner, G. R. (2012). Capitalizing on Crisis: The political origins of the rise of finance. Harvard University Press. Lindblom, C. (1959). The science of ‘muddling through. Public Administration, 19(2), 79–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/973677 Rose, N., & Miller, P. (2010).
Stay away from politics

Sep 13, 2023 | lrb.co.uk | Wendy Brown |William Davies

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.
Inflation Fixation · LRB 13 July 2023

Jul 3, 2023 | lrb.co.uk | William Davies