The Sunday Supplement
Quiz Of The Week
2010-2022 saw real house prices increase in 80% of countries. Before you take a look at this handy visualisation of the Bank of International Settlements’ data, can you guess which countries bucked the trend? Half of the countries below saw real house prices decline — which ones?
Australia. Brazil. Iceland. Japan. Finland. Malaysia. Mexico. South Africa.
Answers below, after the crossword
From The Browser 8 years ago:
Economic Geography And Basic Income
Steve Randy Waldman | Interfluidity | 30th November 2016
Cities are efficient places to do many kinds of business — but this may help them to capture wealth, rather than to create it. “For an individual, immigration to high productivity cities will lead to higher wages even for lower productivity workers. But it’s a fallacy of composition to imagine that can scale. How much of the apparent productivity effect is due to improved collaboration in production, and how much of it is due to improved collaboration in contesting for economic rents?” (2,100 words)
From The Browser 8 Years Ago:
Lego Is The Perfect Toy
Genevieve Smith | Science Of Us | 1st December 2016
A decade ago the company was nearly bankrupt. Now Lego is more popular than ever, bonding parents and children in “a space shared by childhood imagination and parental ambition”. Lego is “the vegetable your kid actually requests and then eats in heaping mounds — a toy that’s also a building block for future creativity, a mechanics lesson that doesn’t feel like schoolwork, a wholesome embodiment of Scandinavian craftsmanship, something tactile in a world that is increasingly pixelated” (4,040 words)
Question Of The Week
November Book Club has rolled around; a fitting follow-up to last week’s question about the uses of reading. What did you read this month? (If you’re looking for your next read, past Book Club editions might help...)
Last week’s question
This week we shared Sam Jennings’ On Bonfire Night, considering the future of reading. He asks:
...do we really know why we’re reading? Have we thought enough about what we want from reading? Perhaps we haven’t even begun to read well.
An arresting question for Browser HQ. Why do you read? What is it you want from reading?
A beautiful mailbag this week for fans of fiction and non-fiction alike. You read for world-expansion, understanding, escape, entertainment, new perspectives, love of words, and the ability to sleep at night. Or as Oregon Curmudgeon writes: “The reason we read is to figure it all out. As I have not yet figured it all out, I continue to read.”
Performance Of The Week
New York, New York | Liza Minnelli and Luciano Pavarotti
Liza Minnelli coaxes a giggling Pavarotti through New York, New York. Joyful.
Book Of The Week
Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide | Keith Payne
Recommended by Cal Flyn at Five Books:
“Keith Payne’s Good Reasonable People feels very timely: it’s a study of partisanship in contemporary America, from the perspective of a social psychologist from rural, Christian Kentucky whose own family splits along political lines. We have, he argues, ‘psychological immune systems’ that swing into action to neutralise information that threatens our self-identity and beliefs. In this way, we may all believe our tribe to be the good, reasonable people of the title—and those who disagree with us to be reckless fools.”
Image Of The Week
Illustrations and maps | J. R. R. Tolkien
A gallery recommendation this week: the Tolkien estate have made an online gallery of illustrations and maps drawn by Tolkien during his development of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. A treat for fans of the books, and interesting for anyone intrigued by the creative process.
Poem Of The Week
Becune Point | Derek Walcott
St Lucian landscape viewed with “two worlds of associations, or references” — Africa and Europe. Sumptuous writing.
Stunned heat of noon. In shade, tan, silken cows
hide in the thorned acacias. A butterfly staggers.
Stamping their hooves from thirst, small horses drowse
or whinny for water. On parched, ochre headlands, daggers
of agave bristle in primordial defense,
like a cornered monster backed up against the sea.
Read Becune Point and more by Derek Walcott at Poetry Foundation
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Proud to present the 200th Browser Crossword! We've brought you a brand-new cryptic almost every Sunday since January 2021, and look forward to many more –Dan Feyer
Quiz Answers
Real house prices declined in Brazil, Finland, Malaysia and South Africa. Iceland in fact topped the table, with a 103% real price increase.
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