Society & fairness
Latest articles
- The Volunteer State Has a Recruitment Problem
Community spirit is precious. It cannot be treated as an inexhaustible substitute for dependable services. - A Neighbourhood Is More Than Its Group Chat
The people absent from the conversation still belong to the place being discussed.
New essays
- The Person Who Must Tell Their Story
Help becomes a complicated gift when receiving it requires making private suffering available to an audience.
New essays
- The Guest Who Must Be Grateful
Hospitality loses something when welcome becomes a debt that cannot be discharged. - The Inheritance of a Quiet Room
Opportunity depends partly on the space in which a person is allowed to concentrate. - The Right to Be an Ordinary Beginner
A society that celebrates talent should leave room for people who have not yet become impressive.
New essays
- The Neighbourhood That Cannot Say No
When an unwanted facility must go somewhere, fairness depends on whose objections can change the answer. - The Application Nobody Finishes
Help that requires exceptional persistence will reach some of the people who need it least urgently. - The Public Good of an Ordinary Bench
A place to sit is a small piece of infrastructure with a surprisingly large moral reach. - The Price of a Familiar Accent
An institution can confuse ease of recognition with evidence of competence. - Who Inherits the Cool Room?
The consequences of heat reveal how private comfort depends on public arrangements.
Essays on unequal opportunity, unpaid care, public space and the resources that make ordinary life possible. These pieces ask who bears the costs that public measures often miss.
Essays
- The Inheritance of an Ordinary Day
How unnoticed advantages shape everyday opportunity, from the resources we inherit to the support that makes a working day possible.
- The Cost of Being Available
Opportunity often assumes a person can say yes at once.
- The Unpaid Architecture of a Day
An essay on the unpaid work that makes paid work possible, and the hidden support behind an apparently independent working life.
- The Price of a Small Mistake
Security changes how far an error can travel.
- The View from the Spare Room
Resources shape what we imagine other people could simply do.
- A Public Place to Do Nothing
Belonging should not always require a purchase.
Short notes
- The Queue and the Clock
Equal waiting times can carry unequal costs.
- The Hidden Admission Fee
A free opportunity can still be expensive to use.
- Who Gets to Be Tired?
The same exhaustion can receive very different interpretations.
- The Courtesy of Enough Notice
Time to prepare is a form of consideration.
- The Things a Wage Does Not Measure
Payment tells us something about work, but not everything.
- The Luxury of a Second Attempt
Trying again is easier when the first failure has not used everything.
A little room for longer thinking, every week
One thoughtful email each week: an illustrated essay, a reading recommendation and a question worth considering.