Revealing What My Next Video is About! | The Friday Update

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.

What have I been up to this week?

So, it’s a couple of weeks into work on my next video, which means it’s time to reveal what my next video is about!

My next video is going to focus on Think Tanks: supposedly “independent” organisations which conduct “research” into various aspects of society from economics to military strategy in order to ”inform” politicians, the media and the general public about those topics and suggest how politicians should respond to them through policy.

As you can perhaps tell from my excessive use of scare quotes [“”] in the above paragraph, these institutes are never quite as independent as they make out. In fact, many are funded by corporations and wealthy individuals for the explicit purpose of producing “research” which supports their preferred policies (usually fairly libertarian, low-regulation, low tax policies).

The particular event which made me want to make a video on this topic at this particular moment in time was an article which was published a few months ago in The Independent based on a report released by a group called the Adam Smith Institute (which is a particularly suspect organisation in terms of its funding) and which advocated for “privatising the Moon”.

As someone with quite a longstanding interest in media literacy, I already had quite a good baseline of knowledge about this stuff but have spent the last couple of weeks digging in deep to the history of think tanks and trying to solidify my conceptual approach to thinking about them. I think it’s going to make for a fun little video!

And outside of work?

I’ve had quite a busy extra-curricula calendar this week!

On evenings throughout this week, I’ve been to the theatre twice to see some very different pieces—one was Waitress: The Musical (which I enjoyed in spite of very clearly not being in the target audience for!) and the other was a biographical play about Nina Simone (which involved music but was a bit more focused on her personal and political struggles). Last weekend, I also did a “bottomless brunch” with some friends which involved a lot of cider and pizza—and the nice weather came out for it too!

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

In my “for fun” reading this week, I’ve just started listening to the audiobook of Running with the Kenyans. The book is about a guy from the UK (not too far from me actually!) who went to stay in the Rift Valley in Kenya to try and discover what it is about the way that Kenyan long-distance runners train that makes them so dominant in the sport.

So far, it’s definitely a warm story which I’m hoping will provide an interesting insight into how Kenyan athletes have become so great at long-distance running. However, the fact of it being written/told from the perspective of a seemingly quite well-off British guy does mean there’s occasionally a touch of orientalism to it… Maybe that’s unavoidable though?

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of the Friday Update. I hope you’ve found it mildly insightful.

Thanks as ever for your generous support!