Dear John,

The syllabi are ready. As mentioned last week, we’re making some improvements. You’ll now be able to access all the syllabi easily online through the links below. You’ll still be able to save them as PDFs.

The Cyberflâneur #28: Joan Subirats

Joan Subirats is a professor of political science and frequent contributor to the Spanish media. He’s actively involved in Spanish politics – currently the Deputy Mayor for Culture in Barcelona – and the co-founder of the citizen platform Barcelona en Comú. Joan’s selections from our stacks make for excellent reading for anyone interested in fresh perspectives and case studies on urban society and governance. The pieces drawing on areas such as “new municipalism”, metropolitan rebellions or “urban entrepreneurialism” are especially relevant in the context of our cities under assault from COVID-19.

For Joan’s Twitter and bio.

Open Access Paper of the Week

Recent high-profile scandals in Greece, Argentina and Brazil have focused public attention on the many ways in which governments manipulate macroeconomic indicators. The authors of our open-access paper of the week contend that “macroeconomic indicators are much more ambiguous than…commonly realized” while accusations of lying with statistics are often politically charged. As a result, “the political construction of manipulation ‘scandals’ that surround them” deserves as much scholarly and public attention as the manipulations of data themselves.

(“Many Shades of Wrong: What Governments Do When They Manipulate Statistics” by Roberto Aragão & Lukas Linsi in Review of International Political Economy)

The New HTML Version of Our Syllabi

You can now read all our curated syllabi without bothering with the attachments:

The Machinist (on technology)
The Progressive (on political economy)
The Cosmopolitan (on global affairs)
The Activist (on social justice)
The Intellectual (on arts & ideas)

Best of Academic Articles
Best of Videos
Best of Podcasts
Best of Journalism

You can also find all of these links here. And last but not least: your personalised syllabus.

Happy reading, listening and watching,

The Syllabus

Highlights from this week’s Syllabus

The Machinist

“Blockchain in the World of Work: Hype or Hope?” (report link)

“Unveiling China’s Digital Currency Goals” (podcast link)

On why data mining is likely to be fool’s gold (article link)

Facebook’s Oversight Board and human rights (journalism link)

The Activist

The far-right, Italian spooks and an NGO (journalism link)

On why the COVID-19 crisis is not the last chapter about the Leviathan and its bio-powers (document link)

“Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World” (book link)

“All for one and one for all: Why a pandemic preparedness league of nations?” (article link)

Highlights from ‘Beyond English’

“Los Cárteles de México se Disfrazan de ONG” (podcast link)

“Problèmes de la transition” (journalism link)

“Die Bürde des Menschen ist unantastbar” (journalism link)

“Eminenze grigie: mitologia della lobby” (journalism link)

PS: Update preferences here. Our Twitter. To check out all of our syllabi in full, head over here.