Another fine review of recent Thatcher biographies by Charles Moore and Robin Harris. “When people attain a certain level of fame, their notable acts have been so exhaustively described and analysed that what we crave to know about them is the banal and everyday: what they might have in common with the rest of humanity, rather than what sets them apart. This is true of the Queen, for example. It is even truer of Margaret Thatcher”
(1,450 words)
Germany accounts for one-fifth of the EU’s production and one-quarter of its exports. It has low unemployment, a balanced budget, and falling government debt. Power in Europe is shifting to Berlin. For Germany, this ought to be a time of triumph. But Germany isn’t like that, at least not yet. It has no historical experience of successful international leadership, and no great desire to lead. Can it rise to the opportunity?
(1,900 words)
Icky in parts, also funny, original, and highly informative. “You can buy a mole for a tenner on eBay. Three crows might cost you twenty. Merely searching for these things changes eBay’s profile on you and they start suggesting sheep thigh bones, dental picks and disembodied hawk feet.” Nor had it occurred to me, before reading this, that the giblets bagged up inside a store-bought chicken are not going to be the bird’s own
(2,400 words)
Essay pegged to Jeremy Adelman’s book,
Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman, centred on Hirschman’s insight that the greatest progress is made not when things go exactly as planned, but when they go wrong in a big way, and an innovative solution has to be found. “The entrepreneur does not see himself as a risk-taker, because he operates under the useful delusion that what he’s attempting is not risky”
(4,100 words)
Amazing stuff.
Spiegel rounds up the architects responsible for three national fiascos — Stuttgart’s train station, Hamburg’s concert house, Berlin’s airport — and asks them to explain. They blame contractors, clients, national character, changing regulations, and, just a little bit, themselves. “A building project doesn’t simply progress from A to Z, with everything going according to plan. Most plans start at the end”
(4,000 words)
Cardiologist sets out the medical argument that the great composer did indeed have syphilis, a claim furiously disputed by Britten’s admirers, but reported as fact in Paul Kildea’s new biography. This article pretty much settles the argument. A surgeon who performed open-heart surgery on Britten in 1973 found signs of syphilis. The surgeon told Davies, who told a colleague, who told Kildea
(1,921 words)
“Oliver Bernard, who has died aged 87, was a Communist book-packer, an RAF pilot, a gasworks fireman, a tramlines repairer, a kitchen porter, a male prostitute, a rider of freight cars in Canada, a prize-winning advertising copywriter, a drama teacher, a CND campaigner, a prisoner, a patient on the analyst’s couch and a convert to Roman Catholicism. He was, though, better known as a poet and translator of Apollinaire and Rimbaud”
(1,633 words)
Consider the names of ten popular herbicides:
Roundup; Ranger; Rascal; Rattler; Honcho; Rodeo; Escort; Bronco; Lariat; Prosecutor. Why all the brawn and bluster? “In a world where climate change and herbicide-resistance take power from farmers and into the unpredictable hands of the elements, the sense of control — or illusion of control — can mean a lot. What’s in a name? The ability to turn an anxious farmer into a self-assured head Honcho”
(700 words)
An Australian food critic goes to Outback Steakhouse. With foreseeable results. “Maybe it’s just me, but sometimes I feel as though I can taste the barely perceptible flavor of misery in a piece of meat. The cow’s misery? The cook’s misery? I’ve declared more than once that you can taste love in food, so why not misery? Still, it’s hard to argue with a $20 filet that’s as big as your head and comes with a wedge salad covered in glop”
(1,315 words)
“The real terror is the Three Sheltered Old Men because they don’t sleep and they don’t have normal conversations. They’re completely sporadic: an observation is made, perhaps it is agreed on, then anywhere from two to forty-five minutes pass before the next one. That’s the random non-rhythm your brain will feed on like an indeterminate box of small, enjoyable foreign chocolates, and you’re never going to relax or get any sleep”
(5,400 words)
Notes on privacy, curiosity, government. “The older I get the more I want what Isaiah Berlin called negative liberty, freedom from interference. I don’t want to be controlled. I don’t want to be watched. I understand the value of the vote, but I might be willing to give it up in exchange for the right to not be interfered with. There’s something increasingly attractive about anarchy, in the precise sense of no government”
(1,216 words)
Bad science, but perhaps good law. The Court preserved some scope for patents in genetics, by making a false distinction between naturally-occurring DNA, which cannot be patented, and “complementary” (in effect, manipulated) DNA, which can. The result: “An ethically appealing judgment [that] left room for private enterprise to play its role. The baby has been split — or maybe spliced — in half. Let’s hope she survives, and that we do”
(990 words)
Profile of NSA boss General Keith Alexander. “Never before has anyone in America’s intelligence sphere come close to his degree of power. He is director of the world’s largest intelligence service, the National Security Agency; chief of the Central Security Service; and commander of the US Cyber Command. He has his own secret military, presiding over the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the 24th Air Force, and the Second Army”
(7,900 words)
Clearer price signals would lead to more efficient recycling decisions, But even then, we need to dial down the moralising component of recycling, to ensure that the price signals, when given, are respected. “Every time a misguided locavore makes the world a poorer place by choosing expensive local food, it’s because she’s absorbed the false lesson that prices are generally a poor measure of social cost”
(1,400 words)
It was only a matter of time before Drew Magary wrote the best parenting piece ever. Here it is. “Single people are pathetically naive. They don’t know what it’s like to spend fourteen consecutive hours with a child. They don’t understand how that massive span of time allows for every single possible human emotion to be bared: anger, fear, jealousy, love, all of it. More to the point, they don’t realize what little assholes kids can be”
(4,400 words)
Extract from
Cotton Tenants, rediscovered precursor to Agee and Evans’s
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, on the lives of poor farmers in Depression-era Alabama. “Of the seven children the Tingles have lost, one lived to be four, and pulled a kettle of scalding water over on him. One lived to be five and ate some bad bologna sausage one night and was dead before morning. The rest died within their first year”
(2,400 words)
“
Q: Why do I often find my question missing from the F.A.Q.s?” “A: By their very definition, lists of frequently asked questions strive to include all questions that are frequently asked. If you don’t find your particular question, the most likely reason is that it isn’t frequently asked”
(625 words)
Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors discusses music industry as model of “winner-take-all” economy, microcosm of national economy. Top 1% of performers take 56% of ticket revenues, up from 26% in 1982. Ticket prices have quadrupled, pushed up by top performers to compensate for falling revenues from recorded music. Success brings its own returns: listeners like a song more when told it is already popular
(6,535 words)
