Pharmaceuticalization as the Tobacco Industry’s Endgame

A new article I wrote with colleagues at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education (CTCRE) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), has just been published in BMJ Global Health.   It investigates the multi-decade plan of various tobacco...

The first modern ‘War on’ was a War on Smog funded by the fossil fuel industry

A new exposé by Rebecca John at DeSmog Blog shows that as early as 1953 industry was up to capturing popular outrage and dishing out placation. To mollify disgust of Angelinos at the mounting smog in Los Angeles, industrialists got ahead of the public action curve to...

Denial of Death?

“Burnout is nature’s way of telling you, you’ve been going through the motions your soul has departed; you’re a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administrating stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.”?...

Life From Plato’s Cave Podcast Interview

A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of hanging out with Mario Veen and talking with him on his Life From Plato’s Cave podcast. It was a rollicking good time and enabled us to enter into some crevasses of why our world is so stuck, and how we can make it more...

When Institutions start arresting or firing climate scientists, government is infested

Governments are supposed to help us live better, survive. You know, all that crap Hobbes went on about, keeping us from killing each other. But when government systematically shuts up those who try to help us from committing collective suicide through broken Nash...

Reflections on EUR’s Roundtable on Academic Freedom and Sustainability

After the 28 November, 2022 occupation of the Sanders Building at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where I work, by OccupyEUR, the students involved in the very nonviolent protest were violently removed by riot police at the Executive Board’s behest. Not the finest...