2021's Most-Read

Just in case you missed one...

Jan 4, 2022

This is the second “end of year list” I’ve made, having always swerved to avoid the potholes they tend to be, and despite being well aware it is now the start of another year.

Thankfully, you’ll be spared any rhetoric about the New Year, resolutions, or otherwise.

Having grown incrementally since I started committing ad hoc brain dumps to a more permament fixture - here - I looked back out of interest at the most-read articles from last year. Well, half the year given this started in June.

So, for those of you perhaps more recent who have been kind enough to provide your email and recieve the intermittent ramblings of the tortured nocturnal sort, here are the five most-read articles from last year, in order. Except the first, which was more an elaboration of the genesis for “3am Thoughts”:

3am Thoughts

Calm After the Storm

It’s sudden. Always. So sudden that it’s hard to tell if there could have been a moment to resist, to control of which direction to take. But there is no control over this hand that reaches into the safety of slumber and hauls me into the tumultuous storm of the nocturnal mind. There are demons to slay. There is no hiding…

2 years ago · 3 likes · Alan Flanagan

3am Thoughts

The Paradox of Freedoms

'Tyranny'. To hear that word uttered by people in societies like the US and UK in relation to pandemic measures, escalated by the drive for vaccination, is to know we have entered a realm of fantasy, of detachment from reality. In the US and in the UK, the pandemic has laid bare how the cult of individualism, launched in earnest in the 1980's, has distor…

2 years ago · 4 likes · Alan Flanagan

3am Thoughts

The Right to Feral Speech

"Freedom of speech." It is hard to avoid coming across a declaration, particularly in the popular press, that freedom of speech is under threat. But what we are witnessing is not, in truth, a debate about free speech. It's a race to the bottom, to the lowest common denominator of reactionary narrative-driven agenda…

3 years ago · 8 likes · Alan Flanagan

3am Thoughts

The Inviolability of Ignorance

Understand that there are two ways evidence can be used. The first is the true scientific method; asking a question, forming testable predictions, testing that question, getting an answer, then moving forward with that answer, updating our mental models to incorporate that answer with current knowledge, shaping new questions, then testing them anew. In …

2 years ago · 7 likes · Alan Flanagan

3am Thoughts

Democracy Doesn't Die in the Dark

In the aftermath of the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president, the Washington Post adopted the slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” While evocative and somewhat quaint, it is historically illiterate. The Rise and Progressive Decline of Democracy…

2 years ago · 3 likes · Alan Flanagan

3am Thoughts

Tech Culture & Democracy

Can you have a functioning democracy with a participatory, informed electorate, when the control of information, data, and the capacity to direct thought, is held by a concentrated power, an unaccountable third party operating beyond the institutions of state…

2 years ago · 1 like · Alan Flanagan

If you missed any of them, you may enjoy reading back over them. Although I am aware that the stats for these may simply be biased by the timeframe from publication, i.e., as the list grew more recent posts have more views. So this is perhaps a biased sample.

And if you have been enjoying the reads, do consider sharing them with a friend who you think might also value the perspectives.

Wishing you the best for 2022.

Yours in Reason,

Alan