Wouter Veenendal, Third World Quarterly, 2021 Discussed by Scott Hamilton According to the precepts of mainstream political science, Vanuatu should be a violent, intolerant place in the 21st century. Instead it is ranked as one of the freest countries in the world by Chatham House. Vanuatu's political system is profoundly paradoxical. The country has fifty-two MPs, yet they belong to over a dozen parties. Parties form and collapse regularly, MPs frequently change their colour

Scott Hamilton James Marriott's substack essay 'The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society' went viral in the United Kingdom and United States after it was published last year. Marriott documented the decline in reading in those societies, and linked this decline to the explosion of social media. He argued that members of a post-literate society will be vulnerable to conspiracy theories and demagogues, and wondered whether democracy could survive without a mass reading culture. Ma