The invasion of the Ukraine has been raging for a year now, and while it’s not looking particularly good for either side, the situation is especially dire for Russia. While the outcome of the war remains difficult to predict (as is typical with armed conflict), one thing can be confidently stated: Russia almost certainly cannot “win”.

In what must be some kind of record, the former CEO of the National Australia Bank, Andrew Thorburn, resigned as Chief Executive of the Essendon Football Club) after one single day in the role. It makes for an interesting statistic in an industry obsessed with them, but the furore over his appointment revolves around the manner of his departure.

To call someone an elite athlete, or part of an elite military unit, is a compliment. The descriptor distinguishes the individual or group as being in possession of superior talent or training than that of many contemporaries. Yet to say that someone is part of the elite is almost always contemptuous.

Blade Runner is remarkably insightful in its expression of a simple idea: that empathy—the ability to put one’s self in the shoes of another—is somehow fundamental to what it is that makes us human. Any animal can dominate others, any animal can engineer a measure of order and habit and hierarchy. These are not higher-order mechanisms. But empathic responses? That is a rarer thing.

Though it possibly seems, two decades into the new millennium, a relic of ye olden times to imagine hysterical Christians praying for the depraved players of a game brought to the Earth for the sole purpose of luring innocent children into the hands of the devil, in the 1980s and even into the early 1990s there remained a significant stigma attached to Dungeons & Dragons.

The classical Prisoner’s Dilemma creates a perverse incentive for the hypothetical criminals to betray one another when they have no ostensible reason to. There’s probably some kind of Venn diagram for their potential responses which explains it pretty well but basically if one defects (ie. they rat on their buddy) they win big, and the other loses big. But what about shoppers?