Remember the article on Kiva, the website that links up microcredit lenders with borrowers?
The Sharpener article was mentioned in the European Tribune, and from it was picked up by the Daily Kos — and Kiva have now had a rush of new lenders, able to fund every loan application available on their website! As a [...]

After my unintended absence, I’m back. Thanks to Jarndyce and Katie for holding the fort and the prime seats in front of the TV for me in my absence, but now I shall retake my rightful place in command of the Sharpener remote control.

Washington, DC is abuzz today with the fallout of a momentous week’s news. Harriet Miers is toast. Lewis Libby suddenly finds he has a lot of time on his hands. And Karl Rove is still left sweating.
And who frames this debate? Who to a large extent drives it, shapes it, boosts it? The blogs. Blogging [...]

This week’s ranters: Stuart and Dave are communists with a book habit. They blog at From Despair To Where .
A rant… against rant
Who doesn’t love a good rant? We certainly do. Indeed, as a socialist, almost the first thing you will have to learn is the art of the rant. And, in our founding [...]

Makers of political telly face a bit of a conundrum. The audience that you could consider your ‘core’ are a bunch of armchair pedants. People who shout at the news and write letters to the editor. Or keep whiney blogs. So your obligation to verisimilitude immediately leaves you somewhat circumscribed as to the kind of [...]

A lot has been said by a lot of people concerning the legality of the war in Iraq. Personally, I couldn’t care less whether it was legal or not. It’s a technicality. The idea that someone gets to dictate an international law determining just when war is legal and when it is not is as [...]

Microcredit — lending small amounts of money to poor people to help them set up small businesses — is not a new idea; it started in the 1970s when Muhammad Yunus set up Grameen bank. Since then, Grameen has proved outstandingly successful, lending over $3 billion and empowering millions of people.
A new twist on this [...]

I’m rather more free than the previous six degreers, Nosemonkey and Phil, in that I am not tied to starting from my own blog. I thought that today we’d explore the virtual world thematically and introduce you, dear readers, to the wonderful weirdness of the expat blog.
As a recently returned expat from first America [...]

In the comments to this typically sharp post by Chris, fellow-Sharpener Phil and I have been debating torture. Among other things: what it is about torture that makes it inappropriate. Phil (rightly) questions its reliability in generating decent evidence:

As the MPs from my party go to the polls today to decide the two people to put forward to the membership to be the next Prime Minister of this glorious country, I’ve been thinking about the influence of the media on the race and on politics in general. It is usually a good indicator [...]

This week’s ranter: The Moai is a recovering socialist who doesn’t like offending people but realises some of them need it. S/he blogs pseudonymously at Kalahari Lighthouse.
The hand-wringing racists of the Left
Over the past few years, I have begun to question all of the left-wing political assumptions I once had. Many of these assumptions, [...]

I’m looking after the review column this week while Nick’s away, so things will be a little different (that is, rubbish.)
I was going to write something about The Daily Show, now available Monday to Thursday on UK television thanks to Channel 4’s new spinoff channel More 4. Finally a reason to own a Freeview box. [...]

M People were in Manchester last week, which meant that they were on heavy rotation on local radio. I hate M People more than I probably should. Manchester music used to be enjoyable on a number of levels. It was intelligent and scally, or depressing and danceable. It had a fully formed personality. It took [...]

As a recovering theoretical physicist, I often have the urge to break things down into the smallest possible component to see why and how they work. For those not in the know about the king of all sciences, the general trend over at least the last hundred years in physics has been for reductionism. During [...]