The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have A Point

My Locus column about the justifiable suspicions of the medical industry, lockdowns, license-plate cameras, and beyond.

Friday (May 5), I’ll be at the Books, Inc in Mountain View with Mitch Kapor; and on May 6/7, I’ll be in Berkeley at the Bay Area Bookfest.

My latest Locus Magazine column is “The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have A Point,” about all the ways that I agree with the Right’s paranoid fringe, whom I mostly disagree with:

https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/

The impetus for the article was a widely reported, bizarre protest against the plan to create a “15-minute city” in Oxford, England. A 15-minute city is a city where planning strives to ensure that you can walk or bicycle to all the things you need — shopping, leisure, school, work, healthcare — within 15 minutes. It’s been the source of unhinged conspiracy theories from the far-right fever swamp, on both sides of the Atlantic.

The protest in Oxford was especially bizarre since it’s already basically a 15-minute city — not only is it a college town (most college towns are 15-minute cities), it’s a medieval college town, and olde timey people laid out their cities for the convenience of pedestrians…