Naimisha Forest
The R. Wilfer Family
In "Our Mutual Friend" (1864) Dickens lovingly portrays what was then becoming a universal social type, the humble office clerk, although now, 150 years later, apparently destined for extinction, or, at best, a modest Universal Basic Income, by - you know - efficiency, progress, technology, IT, AI, Messrs. Floogle, Fatebait . . .
Posted in: charles dickense-commercefiction
'Free, free, free! Zimbabwe will be free!'
That was our chant at a big demonstration and rally in Trafalgar Square for the liberation of Zimbabwe, sometime in the late seventies. Yesterday's news about the army takeover there made me look back and wonder. What had I and my friends thought would come next, after liberation? Disturbingly, as best as I recall, we didn't think . . .
Posted in: africanational liberationzimbabwe
Globalization is still flat - and that's not necessarily bad
Martin Sandbu is optimistic about the outlook for globalization in 2017. While his colleague at the Financial Times Shawn Donnan recently wrote about globalization in countries' policies (on which I commented yesterday), Mr. Sandbu looks at globalization in outcomes, in the sense of growing economic integration between countries.
. . .Posted in: fdiglobalizationinternational trade
The globalization train is leaving the station buddy!
“Globalisation marches on without Trump” is a long article (“The Big Read”) by Shawn Donnan in the Financial Times of November 6, 2017. The nub is that other countries are “striking trade deals” and “launching negotiations at an accelerating pace”, while Donald Trump’s America . . .
Posted in: globalizationmexiconafta
The Boundless Bright Air
An unforgettable moment in the Iliad comes at the end of Book 8. Having beaten back the Greeks after a day of hard fighting, the Trojans determine to camp on the battlefield and press home their attack the next morning - unsuspecting that the gods have already fated them to ultimate defeat. Weary but exultant, the Trojans
Buying a Smiley
I don't now remember the sequence of clicks that brought me to the Amazon page for John le Carré’s new George Smiley novel “A Legacy of Spies”. Maybe I was set off down that path by one of the several marketing emails the kindly internet titan sends me daily. Or perhaps I was already on the site browsing idly as a . . .
Posted in: e-commercefictionstyle
Marx - Only 160 Years Too Early on China and the West
In June 1853 the New York Daily Tribune published an article by Karl Marx on "Revolution in China and in Europe." This is Marx in typical form, combining a brilliant explanatory model of the past and present with bold yet quite mistaken predictions about the future - the opposite of the damned in Dante's Inferno, who could see the . . .
Posted in: chinaeuropemarxrevolution
Cover image credit: http://Pinterest
