March 13, 2023: A selection of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, how to avoid war over Taiwan, the mystery of 250,000 dead Britons (9:50) and the small consolations of office irritations (18:20).
Category Archives: Politics
Cover: Claremont Review Of Books – Spring 2023
He Could Spellbind and Slay
Is Willmoore Kendall’s constitutional morality still possible?
One King to Rule Them All
Cyrus should be counted among history’s greatest men.
Remembering the Answers
Lamenting the death of the
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – March 20, 2023
What Conversation Can Do for Us
Our culture is dominated by efforts to score points and win arguments. But do we really talk anymore?
There was once a time when strangers talked to one another, sometimes eagerly. “In past eras, daily life made it necessary for individuals to engage with others different from themselves,” Paula Marantz Cohen explains. In those moments of unpredictability and serendipity, we confronted difference. There were no smartphones, message boards, or online factions. Maybe because life moved at a slower pace, and every interaction wasn’t so freighted with political meaning, we had the opportunity to recognize our full humanity. Nowadays, she argues, we are sectarian and “self-soothing,” having fallen out of such practice. What we need is to return to the basics: to brush up on the art of conversation.
A Coup at the WestView News
A succession battle involving a fight for the patronage of Sarah Jessica Parker threatens to stop the presses at a Greenwich Village newspaper.
The Little-Known World of Caterpillars
An entomologist races to find them before they disappear.
Caterpillars are to lepidoptera—butterflies and moths—what grubs are to beetles and maggots are to flies; they are larvae. Even among nature lovers, larvae tend to be unloved. For every ten butterfly fanciers, there are approximately zero caterpillar enthusiasts. The reason for this will, to most, seem obvious. The worm in the apple is usually a caterpillar.
News: Biden Meets EU’s Von Der Leyen, China’s Motives, SVB Bank, Nigeria Fallout
March 13, 2023: What’s China’s standing with the West after US president Joe Biden and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen meet in Washington? Plus: unpacking the Nigeria elections fallout, a roundup of Asia-Pacific papers and all the winners and surprises on Hollywood’s biggest night.
Sunday Morning: Stories And News From London
March 12, 2023: Emma Nelson, Alex von Tunzelmann and Yossi Mekelberg on the weekend’s biggest talking points. We also speak to Karen Krizanovich about the Oscars and Mary Fitzgerald about the latest developments in North Africa.
Book Reviews: Politics & Free Markets (March 2023)
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The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes by STEFAN EICH
NOBODY HAS EVER seen the economy. We can see specific markets, but my local farmers’ market looks very different from the Diamond District in Manhattan and even the street stalls I frequented in East London.
Markets are institutions with more or less physical infrastructures, but “the market” (like “the economy”) is an abstraction, no more fixed or certain than “the Left” or “nature.” If “the economy” and “the market” are often described as though they were things out there in the world to be measured and monitored while other abstractions (such as “beauty” and “joy”) are not, that tells us as much about ways of thinking as it does about the workings of the world.
Powered by this insight, the history of economic thought (and related “new histories of capitalism”) has grown over the past 20 years to become one of the most lively and popular historical subfields.
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Free Market: The History of an Idea by JACOB SOLL
The recent controversy over Jacob Soll’s new book Free Market: The History of an Idea (2022) reveals just how attached some people are to their economic ideologies (no surprise there) and to their ideas about who gets to have “economic thoughts.”
In a sweeping text that ranges across 2,500 years in barely 250 pages, Soll argues that, for centuries, “free” markets were understood as existing only where strong, moral governments liberated trade from domination by selfish, moneyed merchants. Markets had to be set free—they were not born that way—and the danger has always lurked of commerce being recaptured to enrich the few rather than benefit the many.
This is a loosely “antitrust” way of describing market freedom, and it might have barely registered at all had Soll attributed it chiefly to Louis Brandeis, Frances Perkins (secretary of labor under FDR), or even Machiavelli. But by invoking the name “Adam Smith,” Soll seems to have violated the holy of holies.
Saturday Morning: News From London & Vienna
March 11, 2023: Georgina Godwin and the weekend’s biggest discussion topics. Terry Stiastny goes through the newspapers and Monocle’s man in Vienna, Alexei Korolyov, investigates why Austria is still doing business with Russia.
Culture: New York Times Magazine – March 12, 2023
The New York Times Magazine – March 12, 2023:
The Daring Ruse That Exposed China’s Campaign to Steal American Secrets
How the downfall of one intelligence agent revealed the astonishing depth of Chinese industrial espionage.
Inside the ‘Blood Sport’ of Oscars Campaigns
Oscar campaigns are often run by professional strategists, essentially a specialized breed of publicist. Their job begins as early as a year before the awards, sometimes before a film is even shot. They advise on which festival a film should premiere at, shape a campaign platform and hope that the film gains enough momentum to propel it into awards season.
The Quest to Restore Notre Dame’s Glorious Sound
Much of the cathedral’s restoration, projected to be completed in 2024, will address these large holes. They affect not just the structure of the building, but also something that cannot be seen: the acoustics. “Notre Dame has lost about 20 percent of its acoustics,” says Mylène Pardoen, who is the co-director of the acoustics team working on Notre Dame — under the aegis of the French Ministry of Culture and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (C.N.R.S.), a research organization from whose ranks specialists have been drawn for the restoration. The holes caused a measurable decline in the glorious resonances that gave the building its unique sound.
News: UK-France Summit In Paris, Vatican To Return Parthenon Sculptures
March 10, 2023: Can Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron mend Anglo-French relations at their summit in Paris? Plus: the Vatican returns three Parthenon sculpture fragments, the latest aviation news and the final episode of our series lifting the lid on the world of espionage.
Previews: The Economist Magazine – March 11, 2023
How to avoid war over Taiwan
A superpower conflict would shake the world
Europe is witnessing its bloodiest cross-border war since 1945, but Asia risks something even worse: conflict between America and China over Taiwan. Tensions are high, as American forces pivot to a new doctrine known as “distributed lethality” designed to blunt Chinese missile attacks. Last week dozens of Chinese jets breached Taiwan’s “air defence identification zone”. This week China’s foreign minister condemned what he called America’s strategy of “all-round containment and suppression, a zero-sum game of life and death”.
A stubbornly strong economy complicates the fight against inflation
Higher interest rates are not sufficiently slowing global growth
Emmanuel Macron’s vision of a more muscular Europe is coming true
But his allies disagree on its strategies and goals
Boomers Daily 