Skip to main content

November 22, 2017

From The Economist:
Old age, the OECD notes, is a “leveller”.

From Oliver Burkeman's The Antidote (quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions):
Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.

From The Guardian (Nicola Barker on "My writing day"):
When I am writing a big novel my desk is covered in dozens of half-read books. Sometimes I take notes in jotters but I rarely return to them. Often I scribble in the text. I am very disrespectful. I like mini Post-its in different colours. When I wrote The Cauliflower I had about 50 books scattered around me at all times, each one with 40 or more Post-its poking out. The texts will generally be frantically underlined (I also draw little pointy fingers and scribble three stars if something is VERY IMPORTANT. There will be much NB-ing). With that novel I needed to remember where certain facts/aphorisms/biographical anecdotes were. Some days I would spend six or seven hours searching for something and not manage to locate it. That was soul destroying.

From The Economist:
In poorer ones, rising incomes and the spread of mobile phones will bring more shoppers online. In China, although growth in e-commerce has slowed, Goldman Sachs, a bank, still expects online spending to more than double between 2016 and 2020, to make up nearly one-third of total retail sales. In America, Euromonitor predicts that its share will rise from about one-tenth last year to about one-sixth in 2021. In Britain the figure may rise to one-fifth.

From The TLS (Lucy Beckett on Books of the Year 2017):
Elizabeth Buettner’s Europe after Empire: Decolonization, society, and culture (Cambridge) is a comparative study of the loss of empire and its consequences in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal. In particular it is a study of the different but parallel ways in which memories of these empires and their endings – messy, more or less protracted, more or less bloody, and resulting in major movements of people into and out of ex-imperial countries – have been blurred, distorted and manipulated, with many destructive consequences. This remembering and forgetting, overlaid by the Second World War and the EU, and reflected in both high and everyday culture, needs the intelligent dissection which this book, deeply researched but also engagingly written, richly provides. It deserves a wide readership.
John le Carré at eighty-five demonstrates in A Legacy of Spies (Penguin) his undiminished mastery of plot, tension and above all, dialogue.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

February 24, 2018

From The New York Times : We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free. As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks that remain at the old level of effort and time. When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have never had to wait in lines (whic...
Post a Comment
Read more

February 26, 2018

From The Economist : An equity is a claim on the assets and the profits of a firm; a bond entitles the investor to a series of interest payments and repayment on maturity. Bitcoin brings no cashflows to the owner; the only return will come via a rise in price. When there is no obvious way of valuing an asset, it is hard to say that one target price is less likely than another. Bitcoin could be worth $10 or $100,000. One argument made by bitcoinnoisseurs is that it is a type of “digital gold”. Stores of value are supposed to keep their value; bitcoin, by contrast, is extremely volatile. Its code ensures that no more than 21m coins can ever be created; that sets bitcoin apart from fiat money, which central banks can create at will. Yet being limited in supply is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for having value; signed photographs of Economist journalists are rare but, sadly, of negligible worth. Nor is supply really limited. Plenty of other cryptocurrencies exist. If the...
Post a Comment
Read more

February 27, 2018

From The New York Times : [Steven] Pinker contends that we should not be nostalgic for the economy of the 1950s, when jobs were plentiful and unions strong. A third of American children lived in poverty. Sixty percent of seniors had incomes below $1,000 a year. Only half the population had any savings in the bank at all. Between 1979 and 2014, meanwhile, the percentage of poor Americans dropped to 20 percent from 24 percent. The percentage of lower-middle-class Americans dropped to 17 from 24. The percentage of Americans who were upper middle class (earning $100,000 to $350,000) shot upward to 30 percent from 13 percent. There’s a fair bit of social mobility. Half of all Americans wind up in the top 10 percent of earners at at least one point in their career. One in nine spend some time in the top 1 percent. Poverty has been transformed by falling prices and government support. “When poverty is defined in terms of what people consume rather than what they earn, we find that the...
Post a Comment
Read more