Reprint of classic column from 2008. Waiters should not pour your wine: “The vile practice of butting in and pouring wine without being asked is the very height of the second kind of bad manners. Not only is it a breathtaking act of rudeness in itself, but it conveys a none-too-subtle and mercenary message: Hurry up and order another bottle. Imagine this same tactic being applied to the food”
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President Kennedy’s assassin was caught without locking down Dallas. Why the over-reaction in Boston? “Governor Patrick has signaled future terrorists that when they attack American targets they will likely get twice the bang for their buck. Not only will they kill and maim innocents in the immediate vicinity of the bombs; they’ll have the added satisfaction of seeing millions of free people cowering far from the scene of the crime”
(862 words)
Portrait an Aboriginal village, and of its matriarch, Batumbil. “She does not like sand flies and she has no qualms about killing them. But she does believe she’s related to them.” Diet includes sea turtle, dugong, tree worms. “During the two weeks I’m in the bush, two people are eaten by crocodiles, a seven-year-old girl and a nine-year-old boy. I express my grief about this to Batumbil, but she remains unperturbed. These things happen”
(4,886 words)
“We’ve come a long way, as a species. We’re better at many things than we ever were before – not just slightly better, but unimaginably, ridiculously better. We’re better at transporting people and objects, we’re better at killing, we’re better at preventing infectious diseases, we’re better at industrial production. But in some areas, we haven’t made such dramatic improvements. And one of those areas is parenting”
(1,162 words)
Not sure what genre to assign this to. Satire? Whimsy? Anyhow, it’s a very nice piece of writing, inspired by a new Arizona state law stipulating that no weapon collected during a buyback program can be destroyed. “When does life begin for a gun? Is it first casting, first barrel boring, first test fire? Is it before the gun is formed when the metal is mined, or the carbon fiber manufactured? The Bible is mostly silent on firearms”
(747 words)
Interview. Health care in the developing world. “When you’re running a poor country health-care system, you can’t treat a year of life as being worth more than, say, $200, or else you’ll bankrupt your health system immediately. But here’s the good news: If you spend less than 2 percent of what rich countries spend, but you spend it on vaccinations and antibiotics, you get over half of all that healthcare does to extend life”
(2,884 words)
Nominally a review of Norman’s biography of Burke, but largely given over to a stinging critique of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatism. “By insisting that economic progress must come before anything else, she turned social institutions into more or less efficient means of achieving whatever is presently desired. Institutions ceased to be places in which people could find meaning and became mere tools”
(1,948 words)
Shipping containers delivered a huge boost to globalisation by cutting the time taken to load and unload cargo. “In 1965 dock labour could move only 1.7 tonnes per hour on to a cargo ship; five years later a container crew could load 30 tonnes per hour. This allowed freight lines to use bigger ships and still slash the time spent in port.” Journey times halved, cargo was secure from pilferage, dock workers lost their bargaining power
(994 words)
On the lives of street children, and the conflicting emotions they arouse within us. So well done as to be almost unbearable. “They’re forced to exist in a world parallel to ours, and, out there, in their other world, in their bus stations and gutters, in the filth and vileness of their refuse dumps, they survive as best they can, with the same emotions we all share. We diminish ourselves by refusing to look them in the eye”
(4,300 words)
After the financial crash of 2008, rich countries tried to restore growth with government spending. Not enough, but they had the right idea. Why did they reverse course in 2010, cut spending and worsen their recessions? Answer: a few economists — Kenneth Rogoff, Carmen Reinhart, Alberto Alesina, Silvia Ardagna — swayed elite opinion with arguments for austerity which were as persuasive as they were wrong
(5,130 words)
“His career overlapped with an enormously chaotic period in the history of soccer. He was a working-class socialist who furthered the aims of billionaires. He was a traditionalist with deep local roots who facilitated the commercial globalization of the game. He was a loyalist who destroyed his own allies. He was a bully and a thug, at times, with what seemed, at times, like a strangely beautiful way of looking at the world”
(2,154 words)
Apple’s move to raise $17bn through a bond issue, despite having cash reserves of $145bn, highlights the changing relationship between business and capital markets. Companies don’t raise capital for investment. They raise it for exercises in financial engineering — tax minimisation, share buybacks, hedging. “Capital markets are no longer mechanisms for putting money into companies, but mechanisms for getting money out”
(705 words)
Introduction to Glass for non-tech readers. It’s likely to be a monster hit, because it’s full of useful and attractive features. But it comes with big downsides. It turns users in on themselves even more than cellphones already do; and it makes covert recording too easy. “Technology and privacy have had many skirmishes in the past, but the coming generation of wearable computing has the potential to escalate the conflict to all-out war”
(1,640 words)
François Hollande’s first year as French president has been a catastrophe for him and a wasted year for France. The source of his incompetence: “an incomprehension of the subtle norms and exigencies of the office he holds; in a word, he and all the people around him do not understand the republic they are in charge of”. He wants to be “simple” and “normal”. But that’s not how you lead a country. And his girlfriend doesn’t help
(4,452 words)
Ranbaxy, one of the world’s biggest generic drug manufacturers, produced sub-standard products for years, and faked the clinical data needed to get regulatory approval abroad. It wasn’t an aberration, or a failure of controls, it was the business model. You might think the scandal would have ruined Ranbaxy. But it has paid a fine, and prospered. Has it reformed? Its millions of customers can only hope so
(9,842 words)
On the mathematics of evolution. A species flourishes best when it has a life-cycle out of sync with that of its main predator. Optimally, a prime number of years. “A cicada that emerges every seventeen years and has a predator with a five-year life cycle will only face a peak predator population once every eighty-five (5 x 17) years, giving it an enormous advantage over less well-adapted cicadas”
(797 words)
Growth requires innovation. Innovation is risky. The bigger the risk, the more you need a visionary chief executive — a Sergei Brin, a Jeff Bezos — to grasp the possibilities, quell the doubters, see it through. That’s why private equity firms are bad for growth: “They will come in, crunch the numbers, see that the whole thing is madness and put the silly business of growth to an end. Rational stagnation results”
(604 words)
We worry — now and then — about climate change, but we don’t act, because rich countries don’t want to jeopardise their wealth, nor poor countries their hopes of growth. “There is no point in making moral demands. People will not do something on this scale because they care about others, even including their own more remote descendants. They mostly care rather too much about themselves for that” (Metered paywall)
(1,246 words)
