My interests are a little more obscure than Tom. I too dabble in politics and economics, but more or less tend to stay more aloof from the fray. The topics that interest me are more 'philosophical' to be crude about it. But philosophy is simply a tool to chip knowledge and understanding down to size before it can be dealt with by other disciplines, so I intend to stay fully grounded, or at the very least to leave some ballast in the 'real world'.
At the moment I am thinking about what it means to be a person in a sea of social ideas, how to best understand the nature of our artistic engagement and also some issues to do with meaning and symbolic representation. But really, I promise not to be too esoteric. Let's see how it goes.