Welcome to Future / Conditional!

I’m a historian, writer and sometime anthropologist. And I’ve grown tired of doom-scrolling through the news and feeling like I’m always losing.

Future / Conditional is a personal experiment in radical optimism, which uses history to analyse the present, and maybe even find reasons to hope for the future.

Expect a mix of historical analysis, left-wing provocation and a touch of existentialist sangfroid about the immensity of history and the ultimate smallness of our own little slice of it.

Plus occasional screeds about people and places that we should care about more than we currently do: namely battles for Indigenous rights, environmental struggles and the ‘small wars’ of forgotten peoples.

Above all, the aim of each weekly slice of contemporary global future-history will always be to galvanise, to inspire, and to make ‘witnessing’ into something that foments action rather than despair.

Subscribe now for weekly takes on what’s happening in the world today. And where we might even find ourselves tomorrow.