October, 2009

Ouch: John Julius Norwich is an earnest and somewhat stiff-backed editor. So it’s not entirely surprising that he reveals in his introduction that he is “braced for objections” over his selections for “The Great Cities in History,” a collection of essays and images. He anticipates that readers will ask, for instance, why Timbuktu is included [...]

The much-heralded Copenhagen conference looks like it is about to be dealt a fatal blow, with the Obama administration in ‘lowering expectations’ mode.

Barbara Ehrenreich: It’s an old story: If you want to sell something, first find the terrible affliction that it cures. In the 1980s, as silicone implants were taking off, the doctors discovered “micromastia” — the “disease” of small-breastedness. More recently, as big pharma searches furiously for a female Viagra, an amazingly high 43% of women [...]

Immigration can improve the national gene pool: Geneticists have shown that there is literally such a thing as American DNA, not surprising when nearly all of us are descended from immigrants. We therefore carry an immigrant-specific genotype, a genetic marker expressing itself—in some environments, at least—as energetic risk-taking and competitive self-promotion. Even when famine, warfare, [...]

Before ABC managing director takes his organisation down the path of the so-called pro-am model (no-one knows what this means but the words sound ‘inclusive’), he should have a chat to film-maker Oliver Stone who told Terra’s Orbita US 2009 conference in New York on Tuesday night: “I’ve heard the democratic argument [for the internet] [...]

Promise was that I Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver; Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves … – John Milton, Samson Agonistes In a speech this week, ABC Managing Director, Mark Scott, strangely compared the media revolution (currently ongoing) to the fall of the [...]

A passionate argument for re-integration (and a longer version here): This is not to say that the macroeconomic model-building of the past generation has been pointless. But I do think that modern macroeconomists need to be rounded up, on pain of loss of tenure, and sent to a year-long boot camp with the assembled monetary [...]

Awarding Obama the Nobel peace prize seems emblematic of the triumph of celebrity over substance. I’m an Obama fan, but the reality is that his achievements lie ahead of him not behind him, and you can’t help thinking that the Nobel judges were more than a little ‘previous’ in awarding the prize to a guy [...]