Donbas, Nuclear Power, Trophy Assets, Olympic Games
War In Donbas
Julian Evans | Granta | 17th August 2015
Diary of a week on the front line in eastern Ukraine with nationalist paramilitaries. "There is no ceasefire in Donbas, and there is no hope of a ceasefire; a ceasefire is just a convenient fabrication for a holding war in which neither side is willing to push forward for now. The ceasefire continues to be referred to as such so that the noise of shelling cannot be heard in Washington, Berlin, London or even Kiev" (6,300 words)
Fukushima: The Price Of Nuclear Power
Michael Ignatieff | New York Review Of Books | 12th August 2015
Notes from a walk through the town of Namie near Fukushima, contaminated by the 2011 meltdown. "This week, Japan fired up the first of its 48 remaining nuclear reactors. More will come back online in the years ahead. Those who had hoped that Fukushima would close out the nuclear era have learned, yet again, that evacuation zones like Namie remain the price most of us are still willing to pay to keep the lights on" (2,300 words)
Valuing And Pricing Trophy Assets
Aswath Damodaran | Musings On Markets | 14th August 2015
Trophy assets — sports franchises, great newspapers, famous houses — are sought for their glamour and rarity. The Economist probably did just change hands at a trophy-asset price; with the FT it's harder to say, since Nikkei can change the way the business is run. As the art market shows, scarcity has a value all its own: "If an asset class becomes a repository for trophy assets, the pricing of assets will lose connection to fundamentals" (1,700 words)
Send The Olympics Home To Greece
John Rennie Short | Washington Post | 28th July 2015
End the quadrennial cycle of splurge and scandal. Give the Olympics a permanent home — and where better than Greece? "The Greeks are in hock to around $271 billion to all official lenders. The government in Athens has agreed to transfer state assets of $80 billion to an independent fund. How about selling a permanent site in Greece for the Summer Olympics? An uninhabited island would be ideal" (960 words)
Video of the day: Inside-Out Logic
What to expect: How to make the opposite of a dodecahedron (2'30")
Thought for the day
Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe
Tom Stoppard