Twitter steered me to a fascinating (and not unsympathetic) Guardian interview with Niall Ferguson who is cranking out another TV series, this time on Civilisation: The West and the Rest. Thus: "The book is partly designed so a 17-year-old boy or girl will get a lot of history in a very […]
Iran hangs two activists who joined last year’s street protests and distributed images of them on the Web and (the horror) chanted slogans. Up the road in Syria a 19-year old woman blogger has been sent to prison for five years for spying: The judge did not give evidence or details […]
Egypt faces more or less spontaneous mass unrest aimed at toppling President Mubarak, who has been in power too long for anyone’s good. Great swathes of Egypt’s Internet access has been shut down. James Cowie is following: This is a completely different situation from the modest Internet manipulation that took place in […]
Aaaaaarrrrrgggghhhhh. The BBC is cutting some language services on the World Service: The Macedonian, Albanian and Serbian services will be axed, as will English for the Caribbean and Portuguese for Africa, in a bid to save £46m a year Pa kako je to uopste moguce, bre? Sramota! One of the […]
Greetings, world. Just to let you know that I am still alive, more or less, albeit deep in boxes and packing paper. What’s strange about moving house is that the pleasure one gets from buying things to reward oneself for working is notably less than the pleasure one gets from […]
Inspired by the fine Five Books series partnered by the Browser, I have turned my own hand over at Business & Politics to analysing five classic children’s books which teach vital messages of economics. Such as Billy Bunter: It all ends badly for Bunter, of course, with a drastic caning […]
Via Browser, a superb piece by Jaron Lanier on the deeper meaning of Wikileaks: Julian Assange, in defending his actions sees a vindicating contradiction in this difference: How can information be both dangerous and inconsequential, he asks? He sees information as an abstract free-standing thing, so to him, differences in perspective and […]
Do read this fine piece by Tyler Cowen on different aspects of inequality. It’s stuffed with interesting ideas and thought-provoking arguments: First, the inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well. Bill Gates is much, much richer […]
Is hosted by Jackart. Who somewhat ungrammatically draws attention to a lefty blogger’s poor spelling and grammar in her rejection of police handling of the student demonstrations: HarpyMarx gives her perspective of the protests, and her spelling & grammar deteriorates as her anger rises… Oops. I never know quite what to make of […]
Here in Brussels the already expensive hotel charges an absurd €6+ for an hour’s Internet access, and some €5 for 24 hours’ access. I wonder how these clever hotel chains price Internet access. It’s all about price elasticity of demand – if we add on (or take off) a few more […]
