John Fanning
Articles by John Fanning
2022
2021
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People Like Us
Society’s losers suffer not just from economic but cultural deprivation and loss of self-esteem. The winners have the opposite condition, hubris and a tendency to…
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From Drift to Decadence
It has plausibly been suggested that we now have the capability to transform the five fundamentals of the global economy ‑ information, energy, transport, fuel…
2020
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Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow
Many huge companies continue to ignore environmental and societal issues and carry on despoiling the planet and exploiting their workers in the name of profit…
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World Politics
What Is To Be Done?
The business corporation has been in existence for centuries, but it was only in the last fifty years that the primacy of maximising shareholder return…
2019
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World Politics
What are we going to do?
Most people born today can expect to become centenarians, but the structuring of education and work are still built around outdated models. These are now…
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World Politics
Living in the End Times
Oscar Wilde saw one significant drawback to socialism – ‘too many meetings’. But with increasing inequality and ample evidence of big money’s erosion of democracy,…
2018
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World Politics
The Future’s Bovine
Big Tech seems to envisage a future in which most humans will be like docile cows, to be regularly milked for their data. If you…
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World Politics
Reclaiming Democracy
The internet is the most abundantly stocked pantry of grievance in the history of mankind, its users under constant surveillance. What future can there be…
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World Politics
In Cold Blood
It has been euphemistically categorised as ‘enhanced interrogation’, but Jean Améry, who suffered it at the hands of the Gestapo, called it ‘methodical violence, the…
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World Art / Culture
The Hive Mind
Charged with reviving the ‘New Republic’, Franklin Foer hired good writers. Quality improved but sales didn’t. ‘Data specialists’ were hired, who insisted that the editor…
2017
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Science / Human Sciences
Work-Life Imbalance
If our humanist lives were organised around individualism, free markets, democracy and human rights, these, it is argued, are being undermined by information technology and…
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World Politics
Beyond Anger
There is now a steady flow of books trying to explain what Derek Mahon, in a welcome recent return to poetry, referred to as “the…
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World Politics
Businesses of the World Unite!
In the midst of growing despair over ‘precariousness’ and shifts in political support to the extremes, one oasis of progressive thinking has emerged. That it…
2016
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World Art / Culture
That’s It, Folks
The last book from the late German sociologist Ulrich Beck offers a grim prognosis for our future as a society, with traditional political institutions helpless…
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World Art / Culture
Curation Once Again
The current vogue for the term curation arose in tandem with the conceptual art movement, where the idea or concept of art took precedence over…
2015
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World Art / Culture
Really, I’m Stuffed
The drive for material goods may well be too deeply entrenched in human beings to be eliminated but perhaps a consciousness that we now have…
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World Literature
The Persuaders
There seems to be a dearth of evidence that political ad campaigns actually work. Nevertheless, politicians are always open to the advice of advertising professionals…
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World Art / Culture
The Uses of Art
Alain de Botton has been the recipient of much sniffy condescension, being characterised as a chiropractor of the soul. But this is somewhat unfair: he…
2012
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Losing Our Cool
After the Gold Rush, after the slump, perhaps Ireland could just learn to relax, and regain its creativity and its cool.
Blog Posts by John Fanning
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Yes We Can
December 15, 2025 -
Tech’s False Promise
September 19, 2025 -
The West and the Rest
December 9, 2024 -
Liberalism goes neo
February 13, 2024 -
Response to Maurice Earls
October 2, 2023 -
Aren’t we great?
October 3, 2021