Simon Kuper: 'Donald Trump is the first US president to voice a pessimistic worldview' (2-20-25)

I love Simon Kuper's writing.

Simon Kuper writes in the FT: I’m belatedly warming up to historical pessimism. Even scientific progress has limited value. We now have vaccines against measles, but also a US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who spreads doubt about vaccines.

As for tech, this century it has probably worsened our lives. We now average nearly seven hours a day online, alone, increasingly atomised, stripped of privacy, absorbing nonsense. And think of other technological “advances”. True, vaccines contained Covid-19, but the CIA concluded that the pandemic probably began with a Chinese lab leak. Processed foods fuelled global obesity. Nuclear proliferation may worsen as the US stops protecting its allies. Above all, the technology of burning carbon has caused a kind of untreated planetary cancer.

Being raised on Russian children’s stories might have helped us grasp all this.

https://www.ft.com/content/a3b6e6c1-831f-45bc-8565-81193ce07f5a

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Kuper:

Kuper has written several books, starting with the William Hill awarded Football Against the Enemy (1994), which was later released in the United States as Soccer Against the Enemy. The Times wrote of the book: "If you like football, read it. If you don't like football, read it."

In 2003 he published his book Ajax, The Dutch, the War: Football in Europe during the Second World War. He co-authored the 2009 book Soccernomics with Stefan Szymanski. The authors subsequently put forward a formula allowing Kuper to predict that Serbia and Brazil would play the 2010 FIFA World Cup Final.

His book The Football Men, which was published in 2011, offered a collection of articles about the world of football over a span of 13 years, along with new pieces written specifically for this book. The Independent wrote that "Simon Kuper is a refreshing antidote to the current media obsession with 'getting the nannies [nanny goats = quotes]', however banal, from players. He doesn't mince his words: talking of past greats, he dismisses Bobby Charlton as "a dullard", Michel Platini "a weak character" and Pele "a talking puppet."

Kuper's book Barça: The Rise and Fall of the Club that Built Modern Football appeared in 2021. It won the Sunday Times award for Football Book of the Year 2022.

Also in 2021, Kuper released The Happy Traitor,[28] an account of the life and motivations of George Blake, a British spy for the Soviet Union. The narrative, praised for its detailed exploration and understanding of Blake's complex character, sheds light on Blake's ideological shifts and personal struggles with identity and marks a significant addition to Kuper's body of work.

In 2022 he published Chums - How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, about the connections that enabled a university network to dominate Westminster.

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