Geography Concepts: A Personal View

Development Geography The Temptation of Easy Answers Uneven development is one of the most visible facts of the modern world. The difficult question is not whether places differ. The difficult question is why. Uneven development is one of the most visible facts of the modern world. Some countries have high incomes, long life expectancies, strong public institutions, reliable infrastructure, and wide access to education. Others face poverty, weak governments, poor roads, limited health care, debt, conflict, and environmental stress. These differences are not only visible between countries. They appear within countries, within cities, within neighborhoods, and even within households. The question is not whether development is uneven. The question is why. That question has tempted people toward simple answers. Some have blamed climate. Some have blamed culture. Some have ...

A short guide to a long panic Cultural Marxism, Apparently What happens when a conspiracy theory borrows an academic-sounding phrase, waves it over half a century of social change, and calls the whole thing a plot? A field guide to culture, capitalism, panic, and the strange career of a phrase that explains everything by explaining almost nothing. “Cultural Marxism” is one of those phrases that sounds as if it escaped from three places at once: a faculty lounge, a talk radio monologue, and a haunted YouTube comment section. It arrives with thunder around it. The words suggest that somewhere, probably in a seminar room with bad coffee and better German, a group of Marxist intellectuals plotted to destroy Western civilization by means of gender studies, modern art, pronouns, public broadcasting, vegetarian options, and Disney characters with complicated feelings. It is a wonderful phrase i...