1/ The home of all my journalism, @The_Corres, is celebrating one year of publishing hopeful journalism this month! If you are a founding member, it would be so great if you'd renew your membership by the end of the month via corr.es/renew-now
2/ Here are just a few of the stories I’ve published this year:
--> A chapter that I ended up leaving out of my book, about Peter Kropotkin, the Russian prince-turned-anarchist who had a VERY dangerous idea: most people are pretty decent. thecorrespondent.com/443/brace-your…
3/ A few months into the pandemic, it became clear that the era of neoliberalism is over. But what comes next? I wrote that the time has come for ideas that seemed impossible just months ago: thecorrespondent.com/466/the-neolib…
4/ And I’ve also published several extracts from my book HUMANKIND, including this essay about the remedy for hatred and prejudice (hint: get to know those who are different to you). thecorrespondent.com/668/science-sh…
5/ If you’re a founding member, please do renew your membership before 30 September to support ad free, independent journalism. corr.es/renew-now
6/ If you’re not a member, but enjoyed some of these articles, become a member! Membership is pay-what-you-want, because we know that most people are pretty decent, and will pay what they can afford for independent journalism: thecorrespondent.com/join [the end]
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Incredibly powerful investigation in Dutch newspaper NRC: Seven of the world’s leading genocide scholars — including renowned Holocaust experts — describe Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal.
And according to them, nearly all of their peers agree.
These are not activists. They include Holocaust scholars and the heads of major genocide research centers. Scholars from Israel, the U.S., the U.K., Australia and the Netherlands.
And they are not divided. Without exception, they describe Israel’s actions as “genocidal.”
Raz Segal (Israeli scholar): “Can I name someone whose work I respect who doesn’t consider it genocide? No."
Uğur Ümit Üngör (University of Amsterdam & NIOD): "I don’t know them.”
We need wealth redistribution. And we also need talent redistribution.
In fact, the two are intimately connected.
Research by three top economists: higher taxes (for the rich) would get more people to do work that’s actually useful.
Since the 1970s, more and more Ivy League graduates have been going into finance, consultancy and corporate law, instead of... preventing the next pandemic, saving democracy, abolishing factory farming etc. etc.
The economists found that Reagan-era tax cuts sparked a mass career switch among the country’s brightest minds, from teachers and engineers to bankers and accountants.
I’m coming to Harvard University on April 29 with an unfiltered message 😄
Every year, thousands of teenagers write passionate application essays about the global problems they aspire to solve—hunger, poverty, pandemics, you name it.
But a few years later...
... nearly half work for corporations like McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, or Kirkland & Ellis.
My friend @s_vanteutem, Oxford-graduate, calls it the ‘Bermuda Triangle of Talent’: consultancy, finance, and corporate law – a black hole that devours many promising young minds.
This isn’t just a waste of time. It’s a waste of potential on a historic scale.
It’s like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but instead of plastic polluting the ocean, it’s human potential clogging up in cubicles.
The first excerpt from my new book MORAL AMBITION is published today in The Guardian!
Of all the things we waste in this throwaway world, the greatest is wasted talent. I wrote Moral Ambition for the millions of talented people stuck in not-very-impactful jobs.
For the dreamers who’ve settled. For the idealists who gave up. For those who want to make their one life count.
You’ve only got about 2,000 workweeks in your career. How you spend that time is one of the most important moral decisions of your life. You can spend those hours making people click ads, writing reports nobody reads, or managing people who don’t need managing.
Or… you can do something that really matters.
That’s the core idea of Moral Ambition: using your talent to take on the biggest challenges of our time—climate change, corruption, inequality, future pandemics. To make the world a wildly better place.
Most of us fall into one of three categories:
1) Not that ambitious, not that idealistic
2) Ambitious, but not idealistic
3) Idealistic, but not ambitious
What we need is a fourth kind of person.
Let’s talk about Category I first. About 8% of employees believe their own job is socially meaningless. Another 17% aren’t sure it adds value.
The late David Graeber had a highly technical term for this: bullshit jobs. We're talking about millions of jobs, mostly in the private sector.