‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (May 29, 2023) – Three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, why Donald Trump is very likely to be the Republican nominee for president, how to fix Britain’s National Health Service (09:55) and companies’ “away days” are getting unnecessarily creative (17:15).
Category Archives: Opinion
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – June 5, 2023
The Case For and Against Ed Sheeran
The pop singer’s trial for copyright infringement of Marvin Gaye and Ed Townsend’s “Let’s Get It On” highlights how hard it is to draw the property lines of pop.
The Trials and Triumphs of Writing While Woman
From Mary Wollstonecraft to Toni Morrison, getting a start meant starting over.
When the critic Joanna Biggs was thirty-two, her mother, still in her fifties, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “Everything wobbled,” she recalls. Biggs was married but not sure she wanted to be, suddenly distrustful of the neat, conventional course—marriage, kids, burbs—plotted out since she met her husband, at nineteen. It was as though the disease’s rending of a maternal bond had severed her contract with the prescribed feminine itinerary. Soon enough, she and her husband were seeing other people; then he moved out, and she began making pilgrimages to visit Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave.
Preview: New York Times Magazine – May 28, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (May 28, 2023) –
Welcome to Vienna, where a whopping 80 percent of residents qualify for public housing, and once you have a contract, it never expires, even if you get richer. What can America learn from a city that has largely avoided the housing crisis?
Imagine a Renters’ Utopia. It Might Look Like Vienna.
Soaring real estate markets have created a worldwide housing crisis. What can we learn from a city that has largely avoided it?
Seeing Beyond the Beauty of a Vermeer
The violence of his era can be found in his serene masterpieces — if you know where to look.
The afternoon I discovered Vermeer, I was passing time by browsing the books and publications piled up on the shelves at home in Lagos. I was 14 or 15. Amid the relics of my parents’ college studies (Nigerian plays, French histories, business-management textbooks), I found something unfamiliar: the annual report for a multinational company. I don’t remember which company it was, but it must have had something to do with food or drink, because on the front cover was a painting of peasants in a rolling field and on the back was a painting of a woman pouring milk.
Previews: The Economist Magazine – May 27, 2023
Ron DeSantis has little chance of beating Donald Trump
Hopes of depriving the former president of the Republican nomination are fading
Belatedly and nervously, the would-be assassins have been lining up. On May 22nd Tim Scott, a senator from South Carolina, became the latest Republican to announce a run for president. Greater fanfare accompanied the official declaration (on Twitter) on May 24th that Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is joining the race for the Republican nomination. He has been widely heralded as the candidate with the best chance of defeating the favourite, Donald Trump. But even as more plotters step forward, the chances of a successful coup to overthrow Mr Trump are growing slimmer by the day.
What would humans do in a world of super-AI?
A thought experiment based on economic principles
In “wall-e”, a film released in 2008, humans live in what could be described as a world of fully automated luxury communism. Artificially intelligent robots, which take wonderfully diverse forms, are responsible for all productive labour. People get fat, hover in armchairs and watch television.
Hungary is becoming more important to China
Viktor Orban and Xi Jinping bond over their anti-Americanism
To ears accustomed to a swelling chorus of China-scepticism in the European Union, the language of Hungarian diplomats is striking. Not for them the common talk of European officials about the need to “de-risk” relations with China and to treat it as a “systemic rival”. Co-operation between Hungary and China presents “opportunities rather than risks”, said Hungary’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, in Beijing on May 15th. Wang Yi, China’s foreign-affairs overlord, told him that relations between the countries had entered their “best period in history”.
Politics: The Independent Review – Spring 2023
Independent Institute (May 22, 2023) – In this issue: A tongue-in-cheek playbook for the national-security elite on how to run wars; monetary policy during the Great Depression and Great Recession; a critical review of child support enforcement; the history of labor rights in Brazil; and more.
Crisis and Credit Allocation: The Effect of Ideology on Monetary Policy during the Great Depression and the Great Recession
By James L. Caton
The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy
By Christopher Leonard
The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War
By Nicholas Mulder
Opinion: Kissinger’s World Order, Digital Payments, Taliban’s Animal Welfare
‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (May 22 , 2023) – A selection of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, Henry Kissinger on the new world order, how the fight for digital payments is going global (10:50) and why the Taliban is going big on animal welfare (17:10).
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – May 29, 2023
Stephen Satterfield Puts Black Cuisine at the Center of U.S. History
The host of Netflix’s “High on the Hog” draws seductive stories from a bittersweet legacy.
Stephen Satterfield, the host of the Netflix food-history series “High on the Hog,” was bent over the stove in his parents’ kitchen, near Atlanta. It was one o’clock on a February afternoon, and he was preparing Sunday dinner for the family. Most of the meal was canonical Black Southern food: turnip greens simmered for hours, cheese grits, biscuits baked in a cast-iron skillet.
What We Owe Our Trees
Forests fed us, housed us, and made our way of life possible. But they can’t save us if we can’t save them.
By Jill Lepore
The woods I know best, love best, are made of Northern hardwoods, sugar maple and white ash, timber-tall; black and yellow birch, tiger-skinned; seedlings and saplings of blighted beech and striped maple creeping up, knock-kneed, from a forest floor of princess pine and Christmas fern, shag-rugged. White-tailed deer dart through softwood stands of pine and hemlock, bucks and does, the last leaping fawn, leaving tracks that look like tiny human lungs, trails that people can only ever see in the snow, even though, long after snowmelt, dogs can smell them, tracking, snuffling, shuddering with the thrill of the hunt and noshing on deer scat for dog treats.
Two Weeks at the Front in Ukraine
In the trenches in the Donbas, infantrymen face unrelenting horrors, from missiles to grenades to helicopter fire.
A twenty-two-year-old Ukrainian sniper, code-named Student, stuffed candy wrappers into his ears before firing a rifle at the Russians’ tree line. He’d been discharged from the hospital two weeks earlier, after being shot in the thigh.Photographs by Maxim Dondyuk for The New Yorker
Preview: New York Times Magazine – May 21, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (May 21, 2023) – Sometimes it seems as if everyone is in therapy. And the language of therapy is certainly everywhere these days. So we dedicated this year’s Health Issue to a topic on all our minds.
THE THERAPY ISSUE
Does Therapy Really Work? Let’s Unpack That.
Research shows that counseling delivers great benefits to many people. But it’s hard to say exactly what that means for you.
In my late 20s, living alone in New York, I found myself in the grip of a dark confusion, unclear of how to proceed — and so I started seeing a therapist. During most visits, I sat in a chair with a box of tissues on the small table beside it, but the office also held a couch, on which I occasionally reclined, staring at the ceiling as I wrestled with what I was doing with my life, and even what I was doing in that office.
Want to Fix Your Mind? Let Your Body Talk.
By Daniel Bergner
Somatic therapy is surging, with the promise that true healing may reside in focusing on the physical rather than the mental.
I had been describing a looming fear about my writing, about encroaching failure. Price sat in front of a dangling plant in her home office in Austin, Texas. With her red-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, her delicate features communicated a mix of candor and vulnerability that created a sense of shared space, of intimacy, even by Zoom. She listened, took notes and, with a gesture of her hand, suggested that we leave my account of the situation off to the side.
Previews: The Economist Magazine – May 20, 2023
Joe Biden’s global vision is too timid and pessimistic
The president underestimates America’s strengths and misunderstands how it acquired them
In the 1940s and early 1950s America built a new world order out of the chaos of war. For all its shortcomings, it kept the peace between superpowers and underpinned decades of growth that lifted billions out of poverty. Today that order, based on global rules, free markets and an American promise to uphold both, is fraying. Toxic partisanship at home has corroded confidence in America’s government.
China and the West take a step to ease Africa’s debt crisis
A deal for Ghana is the first test case for a new approach
Ghana made history when it led the wave of sub-Saharan African countries that won independence more than six decades ago. It may now be making history again, as the first test case for a new approach to debt relief. China and Western governments may have overcome one barrier to restructuring the billions of dollars owed by countries with unsustainable debts.
Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine — June 2023 Issue
Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne
From Murmansk in the Arctic to Varna on the Black Sea, the armed camps of NATO and the Russian Federation menace each other across a new Iron Curtain. Unlike the long twilight struggle that characterized the Cold War, the current confrontation is running decidedly hot. As former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former secretary of defense Robert Gates acknowledge approvingly, the United States is fighting a proxy war with Russia.
Seeing Through Maps
I was splitting wood at sunset when the cat jumped up on the chopping block in front of me, arched her back, and took a long piss. My axe hung in the sky. The cat stared at me, tail up. I put my axe down and squatted before her. I hitched my gown to my waist.
Boomers Daily 