The Sunday Supplement: Nero Wealth
From The Browser 5 years ago:
A Newer, Nicer, Nero
Joshua Levine | Smithsonian | 20th September 2020
What if Nero “wasn’t such a monster”? We have no eyewitness testimony from his reign, no first-hand account of his supposed atrocities. The sources we do have date from some years after Nero’s suicide in A.D. 68. “Most of what Nero is accused of doing, he probably didn’t do, with a few exceptions that fall well within the grisly standards of ancient Roman political machinations” (6,600 words)
From The Browser 9 Years Ago:
How To Hide It: The Wealth Managers
Brooke Harrington | Guardian | 21st September 2016
“Wealth managers are estimated to direct the flows of up to $21 trillion in private wealth, resulting in about $200 billion in lost tax revenues globally each year. In effect, these professionals detach assets from the states that wish to tax and regulate them. The wealthy and the professionals who serve them have created a parallel world of selective lawlessness: the super-rich can enjoy the benefits of laws that suit their interests while ignoring laws that inconvenience them” (4,090 words)
Question Of The Week
This week we recommended Daisy Christodoulou’s Are we living in a stupidogenic society?, in which she considers the implications for our intellectual fitness as we offload to ever-more competent machines. Of schools, she argues they should become “mental gymnasia”:
“They should be places that allow you to practice and acquire the basic skills that are no longer directly rewarded in daily life, but which are still vital. However, many people have drawn the exact opposite conclusion. They see the development of powerful artificially intelligent thinking machines as an opportunity for students to stop doing the basics, and to “focus on the things that machines can’t do”.”
What do Browser readers think? As machines become more competent:
(a) Schools should be mental gymnasia, and teach us to do the tasks machines do
(b) Schools should drop the basics that machines can do, and focus on the things that machines can’t do
(c) Other (please tell us more!)
Last week’s question
We shared Elsie Morales’ Why Do We Collect Things?. What do Browser readers collect? And could you articulate why?
An eminently collectable set of collections in this week’s mailbag. From the useful to the cultural to the purely sensory: we collect, it seems, for as many reasons as there are collectors.
Performance Of The Week
NPR Tiny Desk | Fanfare Ciocarlia
Incredibly tight musicianship from this huge brass band. If you don’t have time for the whole thing, hurry to 8.11 for the joyful Asfalt Tango.
Book Of The Week
Twenty Letters to a Friend | Svetlana Alliluyeva
Recommended by Sheila Fitzpatrick at Five Books:
“Stalin had three children, but the one he was closest to when she was young was Svetlana. She was born in 1926, so there are many early pictures of her with him and other members of the Politburo, out at the dacha, and so on... The Letters are written after Stalin’s death, but also after Khrushchev’s dethronement of Stalin in 1956, when he criticized the excesses of Stalinism...
[Svetlana] went to the American embassy and defected... this book was written after the first defection. It was her arrival present to the West, as it were.”
Image Of The Week
John B. Moisant and Mademoiselle Fifi
Moisant, pictured here, piloted the first passenger flight across the Channel - one of the two passengers was his cat Mademoiselle Fifi. Moisant is a startling figure, who turned to aviation after his coup attempts in El Salvador failed, designed two aircrafts before obtaining his license, and died in a flying accident less than a year and a half after taking up aviation.
Poem Of The Week
Bread and Butter | W. S. Merwin
On our unpaid debts to “the gods of abandon”. Obliquely resonant.
I will not bow in the middle of the room
To the statue of nothing
With the flies turning around it.
On these four walls I am the writing.
Read Bread and Butter and more by W. S. Merwin at Poetry Foundation
Quiz Of The Week
Editor’s note: Last week’s 'Egypt’ quiz contained a clue for Thebes which referenced Thebes in Greece, not Thebes in Egypt - apologies!
What common factor unites the places in each group? All the answers belong in turn to a common theme...
(i) Mason County, West Virginia; South Jersey Pine Barrens, New Jersey; Mawnan, Cornwall
(ii) Lake Champlain, New York/Vermont/Quebec; Loch Ness, Scotland; Gloucester, Massachusetts
(iii) Exmoor, England; Bodmin Moor, England; Blue Mountains, Australia
(iii) Rendlesham Forest, England; Phoenix, Arizona; Roswell, New Mexico
(iv) Kaiwi Point, Hawaii; Kiryat Yam, Israel; Mawgan Porth, Cornwall
Answers below, after the crossword
Click here to print this week’s puzzle
Click here to load this week’s puzzle in Across Lite
Click here for past puzzles and solutions
Keshav Sriram returns with his first solo published puzzle, a smooth and clever offering taking us from Canada to Hanoi to Ashgabat –Dan Feyer
Quiz Answer
All of these are places where strange sightings have been reported:
(i) Mason County, West Virginia; South Jersey Pine Barrens, New Jersey; Mawnan, Cornwall - Flying cryptids
(ii) Lake Champlain, New York/Vermont/Quebec; Loch Ness, Scotland; Gloucester, Massachusetts - Serpentine water monsters
(iii) Exmoor, England; Bodmin Moor, England; Blue Mountains, Australia - Large cats
(iii) Rendlesham Forest, England; Phoenix, Arizona; Roswell, New Mexico - UFOs
(iv) Kaiwi Point, Hawaii; Kiryat Yam, Israel; Mawgan Porth, Cornwall - Mermaids
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