I have written previously of the “manufacturing” of success by US President Donald J Trump. Much as consent and misinformation, success – too – has become an artificial product, one that is birthed fr ...More
EJ Insight2025-02-05
On the campaign trail last year, US President Donald J Trump proudly declared that “to me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff”. His brusque and assertive rhetoric resonated naturally ...More
EJ Insight2025-02-04
What makes or breaks a world-class city? Some would posit the answer rests with infrastructure – the more modern and advanced the hardware, the more developed the software. Others would advocate we pr ...More
EJ Insight2025-01-26
I have had the pleasure of working on the piloting of two Master’s programmes at the University of Hong Kong – the MA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and the MA in AI, Ethics, and Society. Und ...More
EJ Insight2025-01-15
A few weeks back, I watched one of the most widely anticipated releases of 2024 – Conclave, a riveting political thriller directed by Edward Berger. Without giving too much away, I would settle for th ...More
EJ Insight2025-01-15
“Carpe Diem” – we are told. To seize the day, is a moral prerogative. We must expend each and every hour, minute, and second with due care and caution, paying conscientious heed to the fact that our t ...More
EJ Insight2025-01-09
I had the pleasure of perusing ‘Revolusi’ – an exceptional work by David Van Reybrouck – over the Christmas and New Year holidays. The book proved to be a riveting tour de force, taking its readers th ...More
EJ Insight2025-01-09
I spend an unhealthy amount of time answering emails. So I breathed a sigh of relief when I was recently made aware of an application that could scan through thousands of my emails, devise a fairly ac ...More
EJ Insight2025-01-01
“Why do we write?” One way of answering this question is by reflecting upon its counterpart, “Why do we read?”We read for a plurality of reasons – instrumentally, as a source of information, inspirati ...More
EJ Insight2024-12-18
The Shakespearean tragedy ‘King Lear’, modelled loosely after the apocryphal Leir of Britain, tells the story of an ageing King who seeks to divide his power and land between his three daughters. Whil ...More
EJ Insight2024-12-18
Why do we live? This is a question that is often met with a fundamental introspection into the meaning and value of life. The more speculative answers will focus on the cosmological origins and roots ...More
EJ Insight2024-12-05
I have always been fascinated by the phrase “character building”. We invoke the phrase to refer to all sorts of trials and tribulations – a deeply irksome and truculent acquaintance or colleague, a ma ...More
EJ Insight2024-11-28
Just a little over a month ago, the leaders of 56 heads of government in the Commonwealth came to the public conclusion that “the time has come” for a proper conversation about the reparations for the ...More
EJ Insight2024-11-26
One of my favourite songs of all time opens with,“When you try so hard and you don’t succeed… When you get what you want, but not what you need.” Thanks, Coldplay. Life is filled with frustrated aspir ...More
EJ Insight2024-11-24
It was the tenth lecture of my twelve-lecture series introducing my MA students to the theory and practice of politics. On this gloomy, somewhat dour November day, I opened my lecture with two particu ...More
EJ Insight2024-11-24
There is a growing trend that concerns me in contemporary geopolitical discourse – beyond the tendency of popular discussions and commentaries to veer towards the banal, or for debates to become incre ...More
EJ Insight2024-11-14
As a liberal, I felt embarrassed by the events that unfolded subsequent to the re-election of Donald J Trump. The roots of such embarrassment had little to do with the apparently predictable, and fund ...More
EJ Insight2024-11-13
“Do not go gentle into that good night.Old age should burn and rave at close of day;Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” One of my favourite poems of all time is Dylan Thomas’ “Do not go gentle ...More
EJ Insight2024-10-31
There is one election in the world that has the eyes of all trained on it. This election is neither – strictly speaking – a directly democratic one; nor is it one in which the vast majority of the wor ...More
EJ Insight2024-10-31
My good friend, colleague, and collaborator Prof. Li Cheng recently took an interview with the Financial Times. In one of its hallmark “Lunch with the FT” series, journalist Edward White engaged in an ...More
EJ Insight2024-10-27
