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The Story Of The Anglo-Yugoslav Café

Natasha Tripney | Vittles | 23rd August 2021

On "Yugonostalgia" and how food can keep a national identity alight long after the nation is gone. There are few Yugoslav restaurants now in the UK, but the food survives through home cooking. "Flaky pastry, hot from the oven, seeping grease through its paper bag, accompanied by a drink of yoghurt and, almost inevitably, a cigarette, remains the ex-Yugoslavian breakfast of choice" (2,295 words)

A New Look At The Hobo

Jason Christian | LA Review Of Books | 20th August 2021

The tramping tradition of the American hobo has all but disappeared from popular culture. In the early 20C, these free spirits had their own unseen society, even their own newspaper, and many stayed in motion on the US's rail freight network. The scene then overlapped anarchism and punk. Even when romanticised, the life is hard: "My hunger was my constant companion," one writes (2,581 words)

Drunk And Disorderly

Alexander Lee | Engelsberg Ideas | 11th August 2021

Can a statue be drunk? Can a statue be "too gay"? Michelangelo's Bacchus may have been both — shocking the Cardinal who commissioned the masterpiece, then rejected it. "The god, who has obviously had one too many, is struggling to keep his balance. As he tries to lift his right foot off the ground, his weight slips clumsily onto the left. His mouth flops open and his eyes flash lasciviously" (1,200 words)

Video: The Art Of The Focus Pull | Philip Jozef Brubaker. Succinct visual essay about an under-appreciated technique in cinema — the sudden and skilful change of focus mid shot that a director can use to direct the viewer's gaze (4m 39s)

Podcast: A New Raptor From Tajikistan | I Know Dino. Enthusiastic conversational podcast about dinosaurs, which keeps listeners abreast with all the latest news in the field of palaeontology (53m 17s)

Interview: Jordan Schneider In Conversation With Baiqu Gonkar. Jordan shares the joy of Chinese landscape painting whilst listening to Anna Karenina, learning to dribble like Devin Booker, and staging Hamilton in Beijing (20m 57s, or read the transcript here).

Afterthought:
"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done"
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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Emotional Support Peacocks

Wesley Yang | Year Zero | 12th August 2021

Notes on the rise and fall of emotional support animals. US airline regulators finally decided in December that all pets, however supportive, must travel as cargo. "The move came after a year of lobbying by the airlines in the wake of zany news stories such as the case of the emotional support peacock that was forbidden entry on to a flight, and the 80-pound pig that defecated in the aisles" (1,630 words)

Tech Industry Idioms

Karina Chow | Gitconnected | 30th July 2021

Glossary. Five tech idioms deserving wider currency. I knew about bikeshedding and dogfooding. Rubber-duck debugging and bus factors were new to me. Yak-shaving had long puzzled me, and now I understand: It means roughly the same as going down a rabbit hole — when one task leads to another, and then to another and another, taking you ever further from your original objective (1,900 words)

The Case For Loud Music

Marc Ribot | LitHub | 13th August 2021

A noise guitarist writes in praise of distortion. He loves to push an amplifier as far as it will go, and then some more. "The truth about playing really loud is this: on a really good night, nothing hurts — not howling volume, not airless rooms at sauna temperatures, not bleeding callouses, not a fever of 103, not a bottle in the head, not a recent divorce. Nothing much. Not till later" (1,940 words)

Book Of The Week: Afghanistan

by Thomas Barfield | Courtesy of Five Books

A cultural and political history of Afghanistan, notable for how accessible and witty it is. Originally published in 2009, this single volume has since become a reference point for Afghanistan both among scholars and among officials in the US Army (408 pages)

Interview Of The Week: Laura McInerney

Browser Interviews | 14th August 2021

Laura McInerney is an education journalist, app founder and former high school teacher. She was once taken to court by the UK government for asking a question. This week Laura and Baiqu discuss teaching teenagers, how the London Olympics brought people together, and tornados in Missouri (32m 18s, or read the transcript here).

Afterthought:
"Life without industry is guilt. Industry without art is brutality"
— John Ruskin

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Trotsky After Kolakowski

Branko Milanovic | Global Inequality | 5th August 2021

Trotsky's early life was one of the most brilliant of the 20th century. How many intellectuals might be "sipping coffee in Café Zentral in Zurich on a Friday", then "leading to victory the largest army of workers and peasants in the world next Monday"? So where did it all go so wrong for Trotsky after Lenin's death? What were the weaknesses that made him so helpless against Stalin? (1,000 words)

Inside Pro Bowling Balls

Stan Horaczek | Popular Science | 27th July 2021

I had no idea the inside of a bowling ball looked anything like this, nor of the physics involved. "The rotational forces generated by the asymmetrical chunky green block inside the Intense wouldn’t be able to influence the orb’s trajectory as well if the cover couldn’t firmly grip the lane. Crushed mica mixed into the surface of this ball increases friction once it hits dry boards near the pins" (585 words)

An Ode To Marmara

Kaya Genç | Eurozine | 5th August 2021

On "sea snot", a suffocating film of organic matter that can develop on the sea's surface. The Marmara Sea in Turkey is badly affected; in a sense, it has stifled the inland lagoon's history. It's a shocking sight. "I first saw it in June, on my way to a ferry: a mirage, as if land began to extend into the sea. All that was liquid had turned solid. It also resembled the skin of a terminally ill patient" (3,315 words)

Podcast Of The Week: The Last Generation To Die

70 Over 70 | Pineapple Street Studios | 6th July 2021

Interview series devoted to people over the age of 70. Although the show resists the impulse to look entirely on the bright side of getting older, there is something uplifting about the way experiences — good and bad — are related without hesitation or fear. This episode features both a Texas barbecue pitmaster and the physicist Michio Kaku, co-founder of string field theory (38m 29s)

Interview Of The Week: Stella Zawistowski In Conversation With Baiqu Gonkar

Browser Interviews | 6th August 2021

Stella is a cryptic-crossword evangelist and puzzle maker for The Browser and the New Yorker. She tells Baiqu how she comes to be "the only person in the world, man or woman, who can say both of those things: that they've solved in New York Times crossword in under five minutes, and can lift 325 pounds"  (19m 22s, or read the transcript here).

Afterthought:
“The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies”
— James Bryce

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Lying Eyes

Gayan Samarasinghe | New Humanist | 28th July 2021

We no longer believe that physiognomy can reveal innate criminality, as claimed by Lombroso. But how people look in a court of law can still have a big impact on how they are judged. Jurors and judges may be swayed by defendants' and witnesses' posture, clothing, body language and facial expression. Can demeanour provide useful information, or is it always a dangerous distraction? (2,600 words)

The Four Hours Rule

Oliver Burkeman | 29th July 2021

How to manage your time like Darwin or Dickens. Use the control you have over your schedule not to "maximise your time" or "optimise your day" in some vague way but "specifically to ringfence three or four hours of undisturbed focus" each day to do your best work. "Just focus on protecting four hours – and don't worry if the rest of the day is characterised by the usual scattered chaos" (700 words)

The Bet

Anton Chekhov | Berfrois | 15th Jul 2021

A short story, and a chilling one too, reproduced here in Constance Garnett's translation. A Russian dinner-party conversation about the relative merits of life imprisonment and capital punishment gives rise to a bet between the host and a guest. If the guest can voluntarily endure 15 years of solitary confinement, the host will pay him a great fortune. The experiment begins (2,800 words)

Audio of the Week: The Cost Of Power

Think African | Sound Africa | 18th June 2021

Power is a hot topic on the African continent, as this documentary explains. African countries are grappling with the same environmental pressures to reduce emissions as everywhere else, but in many cases without the same resources. Nuclear is a popular choice, although at the moment the continent's only nuclear plant is in South Africa and is now nearly forty years old (19m 27s)

Interview of the Week: Ian Leslie On Creating The Adversary You Want

Browser Interviews | 1st August 2021

Ian Leslie, author of Conflicted and editor of The Ruffian, talks to The Browser's Baiqu Gonkar about the Darwinian nature of disagreements, how to create the adversary you want, and the joy of small gadgets. (23m 16s, transcript here).

Afterthought:
"Simplicity is the hallmark of truth, but complexity continues to have a morbid attraction"
— E.W. Dijkstra

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Two Decades Without Money

Tori Marlan | Capital Daily | 14th July 2021

Conversation with a Canadian man, David Johnston, who claims to have lived relatively comfortably for almost twenty years without using money, and destroying any cash that comes his way. "Johnston throws found change into garbage bins and cuts out serial numbers on bills. Before 2011, when banknotes were made of paper instead of polymer, he could just burn them" (6,690 words)

The Last Black Stage

Harmony Holiday | Believer | 1st June 2021

Joyous and sad, angry and lyrical, the writing ripples outwards from its literal premise that "backstage" is the best place to be at jazz and blues clubs, to its wider argument that the sub-set of Black life performed in a mostly-white public gaze merely hints at an infinitely richer Black life going on "backstage". Illustrated with cameos of John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone et al (2,800 words)

The Leakage Problem

Alon Levy | Pedestrian Observations | 23rd July 2021

Exemplary. A seemingly dull subject made gripping: The difficulties of funding infrastructure efficiently. Even when the money is there, you have to buy off bad actors and rival interest groups to get good things done. A tribute also to the general excellence of Pedestrian Observations, sure to reward the attention of any reader interested in public transport and public choice (1,960 words)

Audio of the Week: Before They Met Their Inevitable Fate

41256 | An Audio Commonplace | 25th November 2018

Short collage made out of snatches overheard on BBC radio. The whole feed functions like an audio commonplace book. Each extract is skilfully reedited, with the originals linked if any pique your interest. This one connects together three different but impassioned monologues. For the ultimate union of medium and message, the last clip is from a programme about editing audio (4m 14s)

Interview Of The Week: Dan Wang In Conversation With Baiqu Gonkar

Browser Interviews | 25th July 2021

Dan Wang is a Shanghai-based writer who covers technology at Gavekal Dragonomics. He talks here to The Browser's Baiqu Gonkar about understanding Xi Jinping, the development of cities in China and America, why Cosi Fan Tutte is Mozart's best Italian opera, the joys of Yunnan cooking, and what board games reveal about human nature. (26:14, or read the transcript here)

Afterthought:
"I have never been modest enough to demand less of myself"
— Friedrich Nietzsche

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In Castoria

Justin E. H. Smith | Substack | 18th July 2021

Towards a cultural history of the beaver. "Every mention of beavers is the prelude to a joke", in part because the main association of the animal in antiquity was with male genitalia. Subsequently, as ideas of labour evolved, it began to symbolise the virtues of hard work. Jean-Paul Sartre enjoyed referring to Simone de Beauvoir as le castor, "no doubt because of her remarkable industry" (3,930 words)

The Big Bang: What We Know

Matt von Hippel | 4 Gravitons | 9th July 2021

Brief and highly readable introduction to the "big bang" theory of the origin of the Universe, and to the observations and inferences on which it relies. We may balk intuitively at the proposition that matter could emerge spontaneously from an "empty" universe, but physicists schooled in the equivalence of mass and energy embrace the idea easily. "Mass is just energy you haven’t met yet" (995 words)

Who Wants To Be A Cop?

Lane DeGregory and John Pendygraft | Tampa Bay Times | 11th July 2021

Beginning of a series following new police recruits in Florida. Despite the outcry about policing tactics and violence in the last year, these 30 people still showed up for training. This initial look at their motivation reveals a variety of intentions: several see the job as a way to help people, some want to change the system from the inside, and one former Marine just wants to be a hero (2,134 words)

Audio of the Week: Summer Of Soul

Object Of Sound | Sonos | 9th July 2021

Look-back on the Harlem Cultural Festival, a six-concert series held in New York City in the summer of 1969, when artists including Nina Simone, B.B. King and Gladys Knight played to crowds of up to 300,000. Woodstock, held in the same year, became an instant pop-culture reference. But only now, thanks in part to Questlove, is Harlem's equivalent getting the memory it deserves (26m 51s)

Interview Of The Week: Soumaya Keynes In Conversation With Baiqu Gonkar

Browser Interviews | 18th July 2021

Soumaya Keynes, Europe Economics Editor at The Economist, on the best way to learn economics, how to combine home treadmills with insightfully trashy TV, and the value of cheesy-sounding self-improvement habits  (23m 22s, or read the transcript here).

Afterthought:
“I am not inclined to ruin myself for the sake of hurting my enemies”
— Hermocrates

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Quarantined To Room 903

Grace Segran | The Smart Set | 12th July 2021

Writer's account of the 14-day quarantine she spent in a Singapore hotel. Gentle and touching. Despite restrictions on close contact, she forged relationships with the staff who dropped off her food and walked 117 miles around her small space. Rather than feeling shut in, she found the experience liberating. "I felt my burdens dissipate. Like I’d left them outside when I entered the room" (3,347 words)

How To Build A Small Town

Kris de Decker | Wrath Of Gnon | 6th July 2021

The optimal size for a new small town is 80 acres, preferably bounded by a wall or moat, and surrounded by productive agricultural land to a radius of one mile. Such a town can be traversed on foot within 15 minutes and can easily sustain 3,000 residents. A slightly irregular oval shape is to be preferred, "for the simple reason that the best towns and cities seems to be oval to some degree" (4,100 words)

Keeping People Out of Jail

David Byrne | Reasons To Be Cheerful | 12th July 2021

Interview with the authors of a study which suggests that if the state stops automatically prosecuting people for small, non-violent crimes like shoplifting or minor drug possession, the serious crime rate falls too. Cities that tried this during Covid are now adopting it for the long term. Not only does it reduce incarceration, it also frees up police and court time for the remaining cases (2,252 words)

Audio of the Week: Machine Learning

A History of Teaching Machines | EdSurge | 15th June 2021

Technology critic Audrey Watters traces the history of "teaching machines" in early-to-mid 20th century classrooms, before the age of personal computers. The champions of mechanisation included the behavioural psychologist B.F. Skinner, who, when not teaching ping-pong to pigeons, designed a desktop box for generating questions and collecting answers on strips of paper (35m 50s)

Book of the Week: Music Comes Out Of Silence

by Andras Schiff | Courtesy of Tyler Cowen

"A well-written and in fact gripping treatment of what makes classical music so wonderful, life as a touring concert pianist, and defecting from Hungary and later being disillusioned by a resurgent European populism. Zoltan Kocsis was at first the more brilliant pianist, but Andras Schiff was more persistent and ended up with a more successful career" (352 pages)

Afterthought:
"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it"
— Oscar Wilde

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A Puzzle About Disability And Old Age

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen | Justice Everywhere | 1st July 2021

Proposition one: Disabled people are not worse than non-disabled people, merely different in certain ways. Proposition two: Old people are not worse that young people, merely different in certain ways. Proposition three: If a young person were offered a pill that kept them physically and mentally young throughout life, they would be wise to take it. Are all three propositions congruent? (900 words)

Decrypting Indian Legalese

Bhavya Dore | Popula | 1st July 2021

Indian legalese might be one of the most joyously inventive languages on Earth, if only so much of such desperate seriousness did not depend on it. Judges spout the sort of prose you might otherwise obtain by seeding an artificial intelligence with a statute book, the Mahabharata, the works of Dickens, and a diet of LSD. No brief quotes can do justice, this is definitely a read-the-whole-thing (1,600 words)

We Learn Nothing

Tim Kreider | The Nervous Breakdown | 29th September 2012

On the aftermath of a near death experience. Following a stab wound to the throat, the author had a euphoric year free from unhappiness and self consciousness. He brewed dandelion wine, delighted in cheesy music and developed a new laugh, "the laugh of a much larger man". The feeling is hard to hold onto, though — we are prone to finding greater clarity in depression than we do in joy (1,685 words)

Audio of the Week: Where Is Mr President?

Out Of The Woods | Miran Hadžić Productions | 22nd June 2021 | Audio

Series showcasing new plays from writers in the Balkans. This one, by Pristina-based writer Agnesa Mehanolli, is a comic political satire about a fraught and chaotic Independence Day rally in Kosovo. The president doesn't appear to speak on cue, and his colleagues and staffers become increasingly paranoid and alarmed. Like The Thick of It with an eastern European twist (26m 39s)

Book of the Week: Blockchain Chicken Farm

by Xiaowei Wang | Courtesy of Asian Review of Books

A series of connected essays on what's different about the development of technology in China, and how that relates to the development of society. The leading essay discusses how the blockchain is being used to verify the origin of organic chickens: customers scan a QR code on a tamper-proof ankle bracelet to find a picture of the chicken and details of its life. Surreal and insightful throughout (256 pages)

Afterthought:
“The great human error is to reason in place of finding out”
— Simone Weil

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Bitcoin, Currency, And Bubbles

Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Academia | 23rd June 2021 | PDF

Bitcoin's value has been driven mainly by the enthusiasm of miners, and will fall to zero when all Bitcoins have been mined. It will fall sooner if the near-certainty  of an eventual collapse is more widely understood and discounted. Bitcoin is a failed currency with no redeeming virtues. "With the exception of Salvadoran permanent residence (three Bitcoins) there are no prices fixed in Bitcoin" (3,200 words)

City Of Bees

Tim Maendel | Plough | 21st June 2021

Nature notes from an urban beekeeper. "I don’t understand half of what is going on. I can discover a problem only to find the bees are already halfway to fixing it themselves. I have seen a queenless hive, doomed to fail, and rushed out to buy a queen – only to find on my return that the bees were well on the way to making their own, feeding a larva with the special food that transforms her" (1,200 words)

Fat Suits In Hollywood

Hazel Cills | Jezebel | 22nd June 2021

Using padding so that thin actors can play fat characters is a practice that peaked in US entertainment of the 1990s as the "obesity epidemic" was climbing up the news agenda. It's a costuming choice that highlights the real life star's thinness while underlining the moral traits that are often linked to being overweight. The body shape, not the performance, becomes the spectacle (1,890 words)

Audio of the Week: Behind The Scenes

Episode: "The Composers" | Podcast: Mission Commission | 36m 54s

Six-part series documenting the process of creating a new work of classical music in today's arts industry. This episode introduces the three composers being profiled, who each talk eloquently about their process when starting a new piece. The finished works are also on the feed, and are worth listening to after experiencing them coming together over the different episodes (36m 54s)

Book of the Week: Entangled Life

by Merlin Sheldrake | Courtesy of Five Books

A reevaluation of the role of fungi in the natural world. Where there are plants, there are mycelial networks so small that we simply weren't aware of them. The task of unravelling what exactly fungi do requires an interrogation of many of our basic assumptions and principles about the natural world. Sheldrake takes up this task with a sense of wonder that one cannot help but be caught up in (368 pages)

Afterthought:
"Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing"
— Salvador Dali

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Dress And Decor

Witold Rybczynski | The Clothed Home | June 2021 | PDF

Essay from the catalogue for the Polish pavilion at the 2021 London Design Biennale. It explores how textiles connect interior decoration and fashion, from curtains to the Empire fashion for swagged "tent rooms". Fabrics are excellent at communicating aesthetic: "Starchly formal or comfortably casual, intensely avant-garde or resolutely traditional, cosmopolitan or homely" (1,989 words)

Are Plants Animals Like Any Other?

Enrique Utria | Books And Ideas | 5th April 2021

Is plant life worthy of respect? Surely yes, to some degree: A reasonable person will feel distress at the wanton felling of a great tree. Yet we treat the killing of plants for food as positively virtuous, because it substitutes for the killing and eating of animals. Is that just because animal physiology more closely resembles our own? Would we hear le cri de la carrotte if we knew how to listen for it? (1,800 words)

What Does Europe Have Against Halal?

John R. Bowen | Boston Review | 11th June 2021

The growing tension in European countries such as France and the Netherlands over halal and kosher products is less to do with interfaith friction than it is about conflict between religious and secular worldviews. Without clear structures that integrate faith requirements into general food safety, discontent thrives. "Halal worries provide a politically useful focus for anti-Islam politicians" (2,609 words)

Audio of the Week: Hand Waving

Episode: "Noodle Arms No More" | Podcast: Blind Guy Travels | 16m 32s

Is it possible to learn body language, if you have never seen it in action? Matthew Shifrin, blind from birth, found himself in that situation when preparing to give a TED talk. The talking part was relatively straightforward. But what should he do with his arms as he spoke? What did other people do? It proved surprisingly hard to spell out rules and principles generally acquired by observation (16m 32s)

Book Of The Week: Hieroglyphics

by Maria Carmela Betrò |  Courtesy of Five Books

A serious introduction to the study of hieroglyphics, presented almost like an art book. Every sign is given a full page, signs are grouped by category, and the signs are placed within the context of the culture and religion. If you read the book from cover to cover you'll start to feel the recurring themes: what kinds of tools people use, what kinds of plants and animals they encounter, and what significance all these things held (252 pages)

Afterthought:
"We are all curious about what might hurt us"
— Federico Garcia Lorca

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My Sensational Drama Queen

Juli Delgado Lopera | Stranger's Guide | 28th March 2021

Diary of a Saturday afternoon in Bogota. "Señoras in full rulo realness checking the ripeness of avocados on the fruit stand in the corner. Y siempre the altiplando cundiboyacense as our backdrop, the sabana cradling our bodies. Underneath the paved cement, the history of our home whispers its violence as the wheels of the bus continue: Bogotá is Muisca, Bogotá is indigenous land" (1,800 words)

Xi Jinping And Stalin

Geremie Barmé | China Heritage | 9th June 2021

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is following the example of Stalin and Mao in making "struggle" the organising principle of his dictatorship. Xi preserves his own supreme power by engineering conflicts among potential rivals. "When an individual penchant for purblind tyranny is informed by a sophisticated political theory, a breathtaking and deeply troubling vista unfolds" (16,100 words)

Evolution Of The Dad

Elizabeth Preston | Knowable | 15th June 2021

Human fathers are rare among mammals in taking part in the care of their young. This strategy is part of our evolutionary success — it allows more children to be born closer together — but it is far from clear why other animals don't do the same. Post birth, some fathers today experience reduced testosterone levels, "which may help them be more nurturing to their newborn children" (2,034 words)

Audio of the Week: A Bridge Too Far

Episode: "The Beautiful Bay Bridge Frank Lloyd Wright Never Got To Build" | Podcast: Bay Curious | 11m 17s

Frank Lloyd Wright designed dozens of buildings for San Francisco but only a handful of them were built. Among his unused projects is the "Butterfly Bridge", a proposal for a second bridge across the bay inspired by the curved lines of an insect's thorax. Built from concrete, his bridge would have had a central hanging garden where motorists could pull over and commune with nature (11m 17s)

Book Of The Week: The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

by Benvenuto Cellini | Courtesy of  Five Books

Autobiography of an Italian Renaissance artist, with everything you might hope to find: Cellini drinks with Michelangelo (always referred to as 'the divine Michelangelo'), orchestrates murders, and even the leads defence of the Castel Sant’ Angelo, on the battlements alongside the Pope. And finally, wonderfully vivid descriptions of the process of bronze sculpting (504 pages)

Afterthought:
"I don't believe in anything you have to believe in"
— Fran Lebowitz

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The Crystal Hunters Of Chamonix

Simon Akam | Outside | 8th June 2021

Shadowing a cristallier across the Mont Blanc massif. These precarious expeditions in search of concealed pockets of rare crystals in the rock face are permitted as long as hunters use "traditional" methods — i.e. no explosives or pneumatic equipment. The climber here uses only a chisel and "a green plastic rake appropriated from his children’s sandcastle equipment" (5,794 words)

Thoughts On The Common Toad

George Orwell | Berfrois | 27th May 2021

Beguiling essay about the spawning of toads, and other joys of Spring, in post-war London. "The toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid, his body is shrunken, and his eyes abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature" (1,600 words)

Rights And Wrongs

Katrina Goldstone | Dublin Review Of Books | 1st June 2021

Review of a book about Hannah Arendt. Finding a definitive interpretation of such a complex figure is difficult; for many the lure of easy metaphor is too powerful. "Arendt’s life in microcosm symbolises in its extraordinary complexity the twentieth century’s barbarities and upheavals." Her evolution from stateless exile into "celebrity public intellectual" is still an irresistible story (1,746 words)

Audio of the Week: Prince Charming

Episode: "The Coalman Who Could Have Been A Prince" | Podcast: Life Changing | 28m 53s

Touching interview with South Wales coal merchant, "Keith the Coal", about his unexpected family history. Adopted at 13, he tracked down his birth mother in his forties and discovered that his father was a Malaysian prince. The host gently teases out whether learning that he was the firstborn son of the Sultan of Perak changed his self image; he insists he is content to have grown up Welsh (28m 53s)

Book of the Week: Black Spartacus

by Sudhir Hazareesingh | Courtesy of Five Books

A biography of the emancipated black slave who led the first successful slave revolt against a global power, and a step-by-step look at how he managed to pull it off. A brilliant military strategist and advocate of Enlightenment ideals, he also drew on voodoo and was a talented double-dealer. “I am Toussaint Louverture, you have perhaps heard my name. You are aware, brothers, that I have undertaken vengeance, and that I want freedom and equality to reign in Saint-Domingue.” (370 pages)

Afterthought:
"We can understand things better. We can never understand things fully"
— David Deutsch

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