A strange space odyssey
A brief review of a strange little space odyssey prompted by BBC4’s excellent documentary Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race, still available at the time of writing on the iPlayer.
Politics
Eisenstein’s kaleidoscope
Notes on a rare showing of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 masterpiece Battleship Potemkin.
Engineering utopia
Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty is not just any old history of post-war Soviet cybernetic mathematical modelling. This is an account of centrally administered resource allocation quite unlike any other.
European futures
Two new books written by very different authors, from very different worlds, argue that – despite everything – the EU still offers a credible framework for the advancement of progressive political purposes if critical design flaws in the mechanisms of the eurozone can be fixed, and its economic policy can be turned from austerity towards expansion.
Into the future, cautiously
The considered view is that Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour Party conference in Manchester last week was rather dull: a prosaic outline of the goals a Labour government will pursue if elected next year, and the concrete measures by which it will try to meet them.
Scottish independence referendum images
Here’s a collection of images I took in Edinburgh while out and about during the Scottish independence referendum campaign.
John Ruskin’s celestial city
The John Ruskin: Artist and Observer exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery includes many of his most famous illustrations of the city he idealised, Venice.