karl marx

Some time before I left Ireland, I took a short holiday to Galway, the main town on the west coast. Walking along the Salthill Promenade, a scenic road that traces the northern shore of Galway Bay, I stumbled upon a nondescript, somewhat…

Previously: The Abduction of Hanns Martin Schleyer It was March 1982 and West Germany had not experienced a single political assassination or high-profile kidnapping in almost four and a half years. Elizabeth Pond, a correspondent for…

Mayday, mayday – how did that come to be the international code of distress? May is also the month of special worship of the Virgin Mary, and the time for the many May Balls at universities in this part of the world (although some of them,…

In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx argued that capitalism’s greatest achievement was the systematic destruction of tradition. Money or “the icy waters of egotistical calculation” will ultimately triumph over any traditional institution…

We behave towards one another as if we are equal, but learning about others’ advantages makes us unhappy. This is Leon Festinger’s theory of social comparison. It doesn’t stop at imagined feelings of being short-changed though. Marmot’s…