I've spent a bit of my lockdown compiling an anthology of old articles and essays for an e-book. It's called Polemics and it is now available. (You'd think somebody would have already published a book by that name, but apparently not.)
It contains 42 articles published online between 2010 and 2020. Ten of them first appeared as blog posts here. The rest appeared on various websites, not all of which still exist. One of them was never published at all. All have been touched up and improved, often substantially. And I've given each of them an introduction.
Because there's an element of money-for-old-rope about this, I have priced it at a recession-proof £2.99 in the UK, $3.99 in the USA and a commensurate amount elsewhere. So if you want some bitesize reading for less than the price of a pint*, you can buy it here in the UK and here in the USA.
Here's the table of contents:
Paternalism
1. The disease of public health and its cure
2. Is the nanny state caused by socialised healthcare?
3. The importance of defending small liberties
4. Sugar: the new monster under the bed
5. The politics of ‘public health’
6. We should stop panicking about Boozy Britain
7. The prohibitionist’s dilemma
8. Jamie Oliver’s Sugar Rush
9. Whatever happens, we’ve won
10. Everything is somebody else’s fault
11. Ignore children and teenagers
12. How not to re-legalise cannabis
13. Planning for prohibition
14. Healthy new towns for a healthy new breed of man
15. Good riddance to the nanny-in-chief
16. Unlearning the lessons of Prohibition
17. Evidence-based puritanism
Politics
18. George Monbiot and stupidity
19. Conspiracy theories: Back and to the Left?
20. Sweden: An apology
21. Reflecting on the 2015 election
22. State schools should be banned
23. Post-truth
24. The ten maddest Remainer moments
Economics
25. Bootleggers and Baptists in the nighttime economy
26. The Happy Planet
27. The economics of Christmas
28. The opportunity cost of explaining opportunity costs
29. Every e-cigarette user should be a free market libertarian
30. There is no minimum pricing windfall
31. The price of rice and alcohol
32. Healthy food is expensive, if you look at it in a certain way
Science
33. The grit in the oyster
34. A tale of two epidemiological findings
35. A new low for health reporting?
36. Drinking and the radio
37. The illusion of evidence-based policy
Culture
38. I, too, hate the Olympics
39. Inception: a review
40. Freeloaders on the land
41. If Breaking Bad was really set in Britain
42. To mute is human, to block is divine
Amazon reckons the print equivalent of Polemics is 112 pages long. It's actually 230 pages. The whole thing is 50,000 words long.
Also, don't be deterred by the 'Look Inside' feature that makes the formatting look dodgy. I assure you that it's spot on.
Any problems, you know where to find me.
* Of beer, in a pub (excluding Wetherspoons).
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