The BBC recently ran a short article on the ethics of leaving stuff on the Moon. It draws mainly on environmental ethics and space law; not much on space heritage, although it does note the historical value of the remnants at the Apollo landing sites.

Until now, you might have had the impression that identity politics was one of the leading obsessions of British political life. ‘Community leaders’, ‘ethnic arts’, multiculturalism versus integration... and of course the Saltire-waving crescendo of a nationalist campaign to chop off Scotland.

Commentary on the Scottish bid to tear a country apart – that country, of course, being Scotland – is already settling down to some precriminations about the result, whatever it may turn out to be. Whatever happens, most of the comedy will surely come from Alex Salmond’s task of forging national unity; though if his promise …

Here’s a piece of guesswork about moral psychology. Suppose you are aware that purchasing antiquities without a clear provenance might result in money going to organisations like Hamas and ISIS/Islamic State. Suppose you've seen remarks like this one from Conflict Antiquities:

It is of course traditional for people to call for the dismantling of the D.C.M.S. even in weeks when the Secretary of State has not been forcibly replaced: on this occasion the Spectator is doing the honours. Yet last June the Telegraph carried suggestions that the Department was too small...

What the Hunterian Art Gallery presents: ‘This major new exhibition features a spectacular array of Scottish gold items from the Bronze Age to the present.’

‘I tend... to the view that Williams, like Hume, was a minimalist. He saw the impossibility of systems and grand narratives, and yet at the same time wanted to uphold our ordinary ways of thinking,’ writes the philosopher Roger Scruton in a Telegraph review of essays by the philosopher Bernard Williams. To which someone in the …

I’ve just had to e-mail a science education website (which shall remain nameless) to explain that the interior of the Sun is probably not, as it claims, around 107 Kelvin. By way of comparison, water freezes at about 273 Kelvin.

Here’s a hypothesis about the moral psychology involved in deciding priorities in the politics of child safety: it must create a huge sense of responsibility, mustn’t it? The kind where you’d lie awake at night, wondering whether children had been left endangered because you chose a wasteful use of resources? The kind where you’d want to …

I have a small collection of quotations, sporadically extended, for use with fortune (which ensures that Internet Explorer, for one, will probably throw away the *nix-style line breaks). The taxonomy has proved unfortunate: worldliness and world-weariness have turned out to suggest rather more items for inclusion than unworldly or otherworldly dreaminess. Still, since some of these …

‘Who owns the past?’ (or some variation) is a common question in debates and disputes involving heritage. Here’s a similar question from the world of intellectual property law: ‘Who owns a family’s history?’

One odd thing about the CharityJOB recruitment site is that there isn’t, as far as the F.A.Q. seems to indicate, any requirement that advertisers must actually be charitable under some plausible definition or legal registration. Cosmo Coffee’s advertisements for such skilled professional work as graphic design, administrative support, H.R. support and market research, among other roles, …

When I was in secondary school, I was expected to go on a short work experience placement. Lest I spend too much of this work experience placement unquantifiably experiencing work, however, I was equipped with a booklet demanding that various sections be filled in. These sections were of often dubious but generally discernible relevance to the …

Another rumour that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport may close? Or at least, lose responsibility for media policy, leaving it perhaps fatally weakened. When the Culture Secretary was appointed, despite having no evident suitability for the job, there were rumours (which reached the pages of Private Eye, if memory serves) that her secret mission …

Odd values are already being projected onto the authors of the future: