Wealth Management, Childcare, Philippines, Cleaning, Shakespeare And Co
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)
Don’t Leave Your Kids Near Judgmental Strangers
Virginia Postrel | Bloomberg | 12th September 2016
To leave a child alone, even for a few minutes, whether at home or in a public place, is treated in the United States as grounds for a child-abuse investigation. This bizarre social and legal norm is no more than a decade old; it is based on a wildly exaggerated and inconsistent view of risk; but it seems to have broad public support. “People don’t only think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral. They also think it is immoral and therefore dangerous” (1,100 words)
I Will Kill All Drug Lords
Sheila Coronel | Atlantic | 20th September 2016
By licensing death-squads and executing suspected criminals with his own hands, Rodrigo Duterte transformed Davao city from one of the most violent to one of the most law-abiding places in the Philippines during his 21 years as mayor. Now, as the Philippines’ newly elected president, he is applying the same approach nationally: “Already, in his first two months in office, police and vigilantes have reportedly gunned down some 2,000 suspected drug dealers” (2,300 words)
The Clean
Lizzie Feidelson | n+1 | 20th September 2016
Notes on cleaning apartments in Manhattan. “While I worked, the owner of the cleaning company followed on my heels. ‘Good pour’, she said when I tipped the bucket of gray water into the toilet. I’d catch sight of her standing at the periphery of whatever giant living space I was crouching in. While evacuating Cheerios from between the couch cushions, I saw her pick up the miniature rake in the family’s decorative tabletop Zen garden and carefully comb the sand with its tiny teeth” (4,600 words)
Shakespeare And Company
Jeanette Winterson | Literary Hub | 20th September 2016
A tribute to the Paris bookshop opened by Sylvia Beach in 1919 and re-opened by George Whitman in 1951. “The shop is like a Tardis — modest enough on the outside, a labyrinth on the inside. Every vertical space is shelved with books of every kind. A rickety staircase carries you like a fairy-tale hero to a warren of rooms on the first floor where you will find treasure. There’s a piano, a typewriter in a booth, a few armchairs, a couple of cats, a big reading room looking out onto Notre-Dame” (890 words)
Video of the day: Fjordlapse Norway
What to expect:
Magical scenes from Geirangerfjord, Hjörundfjord and Storfjord in western Norway (4’42”)
Thought for the day
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts
Henry Adams