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November 29, 2017

From The Economist:
Alipay is now used by about 520m people, not just to shop on Taobao or Tmall but to pay bills, buy lunch or send money to family. Amazon has nothing of this kind. Most American and European consumers have stuck with their tried-and-trusted credit cards. Last year Alipay had 2.5 times as many users as PayPal and more than 11 times as many as Apple Pay.

From The New Yorker:
In many towns, the most enterprising kids leave for college and stay away rather than starting businesses at home, which means that there are fewer jobs at home, which means that even more people leave; and, over time, the town’s population gets smaller and older, shops and schools begin to close, and the town begins to die.

From The New York Times (on Omar El Akkad's American War):
This haunting debut novel imagines the events that lead up to and follow the Second American Civil War at the turn of the 22nd century.

From The Economist:
“We will know you as well as you know yourself,” says Zhang Chen, JD’s chief technology officer. Tencent can gather data from social-media feeds and payments both online and in stores, and Alibaba recently introduced a “unified ID”, which collects data on individuals across Alibaba’s many businesses. These data give companies greater insight into what consumers want so they can adjust their marketing accordingly. Big Brother, it turns out, is a capitalist who wants to sell you blue jeans.

From The TLS (Stephen Brown on Books of the Year 2017):
Two Spanish novels, one set just prior to Franco, one in the waning days of his regime: Eduardo Mendoza’s An Englishman in Madrid (Quercus; translated by Nick Caistor) is the best sort of escapist fiction, a Buchanish plot against the backdrop of a country coming apart at the seams, insights on art and politics littered along the way. In his short and bittersweet María Bonita (Anagrama), Ignacio Martínez de Pisón somehow occupies the voice of a woman who in turn voices her younger self, innocent, then losing innocence. It was a little like a David Mamet play in that it all seemed utterly artless while I was reading it, and only in retrospect did the artfulness of its construction come clear. The novel has been translated into Italian but not, as far as I can tell, into English. It deserves to be.
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