Fluke: Power, Perception and Paying Attention

I sit down with Dr Brian Klaas, Associate Professor of Global Politics at University College London, and author of "FLUKE: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters"

When I joined Substack a year ago I did so because I had a huge hunger to experiment, explore and write creatively beyond the lines of what I had been writing about as a constitutional law academic at Cambridge University. After all, how can we fully understand and engage with what’s going on in a given topic and assess its wider implications if we don’t peer over the wall and see what others are doing? How can we truly connect the dots of events and interpret their meaning if we don’t do that?

This method of analysing events and issues has been fundamental to the direction of my Substack, The Breakout Room, because I believe there greater value, enjoyment and learning by writing and reading through this lens. It’s one of the reasons why one of the first Substacks I began reading was Brian Klaas’ The Garden of Forking Paths which draws on multiple realms of human knowledge. From pieces on why We are different from all other humans in history to How the World Sped Up, Brian’s explorator…