Sharpen Your Axe is Four!
A recap of a year's worth of free essays
"Four red candles" by tillwe is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Sharpen Your Axe is four years old! I’d like to take a moment to thank all of you who have subscribed to the blog, who read it every week, who share posts on social media and who give me feedback on the essays. I appreciate it! Publishing an essay a week is a labour of love; but knowing that people read my words makes it all worthwhile.
For this week’s column, I will summarise all the essays we have published in the last year in case you missed one. I will also pin this post and link to it in future essays so that new readers have a useable landing page. You can find links to three the non-fiction books I have enjoyed this year at the bottom. Thanks for reading!
Spanish Politics and Society (including Catalan Politics)
Cybernats (9th December 2023)
Free advice for Feijóo (13th January 2024)
Bildu’s contradictions (20th January)
Crying wolf (2nd March)
Are Sánchez’s days numbered? (16th March)
Ayuso (11th May)
Passive bilingualism in Catalonia (29th June)
Sánchez and NATO (3rd August)
On the search for connections (10th August)
Charter schools (28th September)
Tarradellas (12th October)
Tezanos (19th October)
Rent controls (30th November)
Politics elsewhere
Starmer, Russia and Brexit (6th July)
Grassroots politics and allergic reactions (13th July)
On the Silicon Valley right (24th August)
How racists think (21st September)
Hot take on US election (9th November)
Political Theory
“Stay woke” (16th December 2023)
Anarcho-capitalists and the far right (23rd December 2023)
Extremism and pragmatism (30th December 2023)
If you want peace, prepare for war (22nd March 2024)
Socialism and nationalism are failed projects (25th May)
Demagogues (27th July)
Hard vs far (17th August)
What happened to the centre right? (31st August)
A/B testing (5th October)
Hedgehog politicians are bad for society (16th November)
Startups, Value Creation and Finance
Barcelona’s startup scene (6th April)
Finance as a bridge (27th April)
Value creation and next-gen liberalism (1st June)
Betterment (8th June)
Grifters and value destruction (15th June)
Platform economics (23rd June)
The real risks of AI (26th October)
How to pitch (2nd November)
Lithium (23rd November)
Deeper Issues
Why is it hard to argue with conspiracy theorists? (6th January)
Separate your values from your worldview (27th January)
Know yourself, know your enemy (3rd February)
Strategic thinking (10th February)
Disgust in politics (17th February)
Beginner’s mind (25th February)
Anger is an energy (9th March)
Cooperative apes (4th May)
Reading books (a visual column) (18th May)
Experience as a boundary condition (20th July)
Chaos and narratives (7th September)
Feedback (14th September)
Social Media and Offline Life
Bluesky (30th March)
Go hungry (13th April)
Breakfalls (20th April)
Lord Haw Haw (11th May)
Safety fund for journalists (9th June)
I hope you have enjoyed at least some of the essays we have published this year! Which was your favourite? Mine was probably the one on the new right of Silicon Valley. The comments are open.
If you want to dig deeper in the archives, here is the third-anniversary post; the second-anniversary post; and the first-anniversary post. You can also my ultra-cheap Kindle book on the futility of arguing on social media here. See you next week!
Further Reading
Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future by Ed Conway
Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray by Helen Fisher
The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland
This essay is released with a CC BY-NY-ND license. Please link to sharpenyouraxe.substack.com if you re-use this material.
Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated!
If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the third anniversary post. You can also find an ultra-cheap Kindle book here. If you want to read the book on your phone, tablet or computer, you can download the Kindle software for Android, Apple or Windows for free.
Opinions expressed on Substack and Substack Notes, as well as on Bluesky, Mastodon and X (formerly Twitter) are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.
I am thoroughly enjoying your essays- congrats on 4 years of helping people sharpen their mental axe! Thank you for the landing page- I appreciate the categorization. I am new to your catalog and have a favor to ask. Could you also list the publish date next to the title in your landing page? Although the essays I’ve read so far are pretty timeless in nature, knowing when they were produced and their ordinal positioning would be very helpful as I absorb them.
Also, I would like to follow you on bluesky if you post there. Can you confirm your handle? Thanks again!!
I would not want this milestone to pass without thanking you for your contribution to popular understanding of the political and economic dynamics of the age we live in. You have created an invaluable resource here and I wish you well with your work going forward.