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The Centre Can Hold World Pick of the day

Perry Anderson | New Left Review | 7th June 2017

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Big analytical account of the recent French presidential election. Victory was handed to Emmanuel Macron by the unknown leaker who gave Le Canard Enchainé a dossier incriminating his centrist rival Francois Fillon. The hard right and hard left — Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon — both polled strongly but cancelled one another out. France is in relative decline; Macron will not be able to change that; but a cyclical economic upturn is getting him off to a good start (7,900 words)

The Trouble With Optionality Money

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Keeping your options open seems like a good approach to life, but the downside is that you never fully commit to anything. “The Yale undergraduate goes to work at McKinsey for two years, then comes to Harvard Business School, then goes to work at Goldman Sachs, and leaves to work at Blackstone. This individual has acquired safety net upon safety net. These safety nets don’t end up enabling big risk-taking — the individual just becomes a habitual acquirer of safety nets” (920 words)

One Man’s Rum Quest Tech

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Los Angeles distiller Bryan Davis claims to have found a way to make six-day-old rum taste like 20-year-old rum, by subjecting it to intense light. “If you increase the light to two or three times the brightness of the sun at noon at the equator, the polymers degrade infinitely faster than in regular sunlight”. Now he wants speed-age Scotch whisky, a trickier task. His pilot whisky “has a flavour profile with no known natural relatives, like a whiskey made by a team of Disney engineers” (4,100 words)

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The Centre Can Hold World Pick of the day

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The Trouble With Optionality Money

One Man’s Rum Quest Tech

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