Welcome to The Interesting Times

All the news unfit to print

Welcome to The Interesting Times

As you might have heard, ‘may you live in interesting times’ is an old Chinese curse that as it turns out is neither all that old nor Chinese. In some sense, this phrase’s journey from the mind of a rather obscure turn-of-the-century British politician, Austen Chamberlain, to the status of received ancient wisdom from the East is emblematic of the terrain this newsletter plans to traverse.

Regardless of its origins, these are indeed interesting times in the sense of how this ‘curse’ is commonly understood. The plan is to publish essays, podcasts, and eventually some original reporting that bore into the historical, philosophical, economic, and political forces shaping these interesting times and the ways we have come to think about them. Just as rivers and oceans have surface currents and undercurrents, so to, does the social reality we inhabit from day-to-day. In this sense, The Interesting Times will always aim to walk that delicate line between contemporary affairs and the forces guiding the currents just below the surface.

During a public lecture, the philosopher William James once said:

I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds…Philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.

Our hope is to provide thoughtful reflections, arguments, and analysis that helps us all see the social world in critical and interesting ways. Or, put differently, to humbly engage with the philosopher in all of us that James describes and better grasp the way our own philosophy “determines the perspective in [our] several worlds.”

About Me

Now to be sure, I am no ‘official philosopher’, but more of the everyday sort James describes. I am a political economist by trade and currently an associate professor of political science and Korean studies at Akita International University in Akita, Japan. I am interested in politics and power and the modes by which various notions of the social or political good are formed, debated, and ultimately adjudicated in the political sphere. For me, a true appreciation of these processes must always engage with a wide range of thoughts and disciplines. I am particularly interested in discourses that attempt to juxtapose the technical and the ethical, especially in the realm of economics and development. I will be producing most of the ‘content’ (I don’t really like the term) for this site, especially at first, but the plan is to feature wide range of voices and perspectives—indeed perhaps some that I don’t fully sign onto myself—from all over the globe. Please join us in “feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.”

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