Over the past few days, I have read Michael Strevens’s The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science . This book caught my attention because it creates a clash between two biases of mine: while, on the one hand, I am sceptical about method-centric accounts of science, I am also very interested in seeing treatments of the irrational elements of scientific practice.1 So, after seeing some enthusiastic reviews on Twitter, I decided to give this book a try.

In October 2020, legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson published his final book-length story: The Ministry for the Future. The book’s story begins with a massive heatwave in India in the near future, which kills millions of people and spurs global action. Most of the narrative is centred on the so-called Ministry, an international organisation based on Zurich and created with limited powers to defend the interests of the future generations within the Paris Agreement framework.

Happy New Year, everyone! The start of this new year also brings my second term in Italy, after a very productive (but exhausting!) first term. In the last few months, I learned much and meet various colleagues and professors, and joined some interesting projects. However, I have not blogged as much as I planned, and that is something I intend to change, as blog posts seem a good medium for texts that are too big for a reasonable Twitter thread and too informal (or still undeveloped) for a paper.

Like many scholars, I did not get much published in 2020. However, one of my projects that did move forward is a book chapter on Dune and corporate law, written in Portuguese (with João Gabriel Arato Ferreira) for a book on geek law. In this chapter, we analyse the corporate structure of the CHOAM Company, a major player in the first books of the Dune series, and compare it with Brazilian corporate law.