from The Economist
Short answer: because the clients were not consulted.
Set between the llamas and the Land of the Lions, the penguin pool in London Zoo is a mini-modernist masterpiece. Built in 1934 and designed by Berthold Lubetkin, it is sleek, swooshy and perfectly proportioned; its cantilevered concrete ramps, slender as apple peelings, were revolutionary… There was just one problem with this piece of modernist perfection. The penguins didn’t like it.
The refurbished concrete hurt their feet. The elegantly shallow pool was too shallow. The minimalist white walls were too white, and hurt their eyes. London Zoo’s keepers do not like to talk about penguins being “happy” or “unhappy” (it is anthropomorphising). But, says Jessica Fryer, team leader of penguins and flying birds at the zoo, some of the penguins’ feet became “so sore”. They developed a foot disease that, in its severest form, can lead to penguins being put down. It may not be possible to say whether penguins are “happy” or “unhappy”. But “dead” is definitely worse than “alive”.
Then the killer line
The penguin pool has become a white elephant.
Andrew O’Hagan writing in the London Review of Books
Andrew O’Hagan · Push Me Pull You: Creating the Beckhams
The Beckhams are British in a new way, a way that wealthy people who live most of the time in places like Dubai and Miami are British, loving the royal family and hating income tax while deploring the press they relentlessly deploy. They fill their days topping up their self-pity and complaining that they haven’t yet got the knighthood they so clearly deserve.
Let’s be clear about Beckham. He likes pineapple on his pizza. He can’t get enough of The Lion King. He admits that he has never read a book in his life, almost certainly including the ones he wrote himself. (He didn’t make it all the way through Posh’s either.) It is said he once posed wearing an Adolf Eichmann T-shirt and carrying a bottle of Moët, without realising who the guy on the T-shirt was, though he recognised the champagne. In his best moments, he’s a reverse Dorothy Parker, curving another déclaration folle into the back of the net. ‘We’re definitely going to get Brooklyn christened,’ he said, ‘but we don’t know into which religion.’
Oodles of noodles: how a global favourite became an economic red flag
They are a portable, resilient and long-lasting store of nourishment in times of need — from dire to impulsive and all points between. There is a reason that instant noodles have replaced cigarettes as the primary currency of the informal economy in dismally catered US prisons. This ready-to-eat grub, pioneered in the late 1950s to feed a ruined Japan in the protracted aftermath of war, takes the prize for being cheap and fast, but delicious.
I may dissent from this this view. YMMV.
Japanese men have an identity crisis
Not as unpleasant as that other material you occaionally step in
The great extent to which Japanese men are encouraged to commit themselves to work is another barrier to change. Retired workaholic men are described as a nureochibazoku, or “wet fallen leaf”, because, lacking hobbies or friends, they follow their wives around like a wet leaf stuck to a shoe. A staple magazine article offers advice to wives suffering a severe case of “Retired Husband Syndrome”. For men, the pain of being considered a nuisance by their lifelong spouse can be immense. Mr Fukushima laments that “so many men sacrifice themselves for work to provide for their family—only to realise later in life that they don’t belong at home.”
Europe’s monarchies are a study in dignified inanity
From the Economist.
Every family has an heirloom which is too precious to throw away yet of little practical use. A dozen European countries have the constitutional equivalent. ….Like the human appendix, Europe’s royal highnesses are essentially vestigial: they serve little obvious purpose, but few think there is much reason to excise them until they cause trouble.
And who would have thought…
“Bicycle monarchies” mostly replaced fusty aristo balls. The Dutch king has been a part-time pilot for klm for over two decades. Princess Victoria, next in line to the Swedish throne, married her personal trainer.
The Notional Health Service.
Heading in last week’s Economist (13/1/2024). Sad, but true.
The Economist on pogonophobia and pogonophilia.
Many also believed that not shaving offered health benefits. In 1854, more than 400 members of the Dublin police force petitioned to be allowed to join the beard movement on the ground that “almost all, if not all, diseases of the respiratory organs are in great part, if not altogether, caused by the practice which obtains of shaving off the beard.” Beards were even thought to bring productivity gains. An article in the British Medical Journal in 1861 calculated that America lost 36m working days each year to shaving.
The beard craze petered out in the 1890s as fashions shifted, better razors became available and doctors took to warning against facial hair (a damp beard was thought to spread germs). Beards became the preserve of older men as the young rejected the fashions of their fathers. The army was slower to adapt. The requirement for moustaches lasted until 1916; some regiments maintained a stockpile of artificial ones for those unable to grow their own.
Note the tendency to take tenuous and marginal observations and multiple by a big number to make them seem important. Epidemiology 101, sadly, (but beloved by all grant writers).
Rory Scothorne · Short Cuts: Edinburgh’s Festivalisation
The first humans settled in Scotland around 14,000 years ago. They must have arrived in summer; nobody in their right mind would choose to live here during the winter. Even as far south as Edinburgh, the sun emerges late only to disappear before 4 p.m., the rain eats umbrellas for breakfast and the Arctic gale is as rough as sandpaper. We don’t have much of a Christmas celebration to distract us from the gloom: the Scottish Reformation stamped out idolatrous Yuletide celebrations and Christmas only became a public holiday in 1958. Instead, we have Hogmanay.
(London Review of Books)
Welsh couple bereft after bomb squad detonate ornamental garden missile | Wales | The Guardian
A couple who kept a live bomb as a garden ornament have said they were sorry that their “old friend” had been detonated by a disposal unit.
The missile, which had been outside the home of Sian and Jeffrey Edwards, is thought to date back to the late 19th century. The couple, from Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, had thought it was a “dummy” bomb with no charge. Sian Edwards said she used to bang her trowel on the bomb to remove earth after gardening.
On Wednesday, a police officer informed the couple he had spotted the bomb and would need to alert the Ministry of Defence. An hour later, the officer told the couple the bomb squad would arrive the next day.
Jeffrey Edwards, 77, said: “We didn’t sleep a wink all night. It knocked us for six. “I told the bomb disposal unit: ‘We’re not leaving the house, we’re staying here. If it goes up, we’re going to go up with it.’”
The best way to invest in gold
All the gold ever dug up would fit inside a 20 by 20 metre box.
Is that all there is? I feel richer already.
I like orderly confusion very much. But this is neither orderly nor properly confused
His German is a pleasure to the ear.
Via John Naughton 10 November 2023 link
John Lanchester · Get a rabbit: Don’t trust the numbers · LRB 21 September 2023
One way of explaining how Britain got to this place is to say that we waited all this time for the worst prime minister in history, and then four came along at once.
Race to lead European Investment Bank heats up – POLITICO
DUTCH CAMPAIGN GEARING UP: From an EU perspective, Dutch elections used to be simple: about 20 parties fought a fierce campaign and in the end, Mark Rutte was back at the European Council table.
Nicholas Spice speaks of ‘the conductor demanding ever more rehearsal time, the players wanting to get home and have a life’ (LRB, 16 March). This put me in mind of Frank Zappa’s definition of conducting as ‘drawing designs in the nowhere which are interpreted as instructional messages by guys wearing bowties who wish they were fishing’.
Chris Sansom
Mary Quant launched the clothes that made the Sixties swing from The Economist
Not just because they could playfully imitate men, by borrowing men’s tailoring and their cardigans, but mostly because mini-dresses freed them to move. She designed them, she said, to be alive in. More important still, high hemlines, paired with opaque tights, let girls run for the bus in order to get to work. You could never run for the bus in a Dior dress. In Quant, women felt they could leave the house and dare a different life.
Techno-Narcissism | No Mercy / No Malice
As Sacha Baron Cohen said: “Democracy is dependent on shared truths, and autocracy on shared lies.”
Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower, dies aged 92 | US news | The Guardian
‘I’ve never regretted doing it’: Daniel Ellsberg on 50 years since leaking the Pentagon
In March, Ellsberg announced that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. Saying he had been given three to six months to live, he said he had chosen not to undergo chemotherapy and had been assured of hospice care.
“I am not in any physical pain,” he wrote, adding: “My cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet of the last six years. This has improved my life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my favourite foods!”
On Friday, the family said Ellsberg “was not in pain” when he died. He spent his final months eating “hot chocolate, croissants, cake, poppyseed bagels and lox” and enjoying “several viewings of his all-time favourite [movie], Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, the family statement added.
He was 92….
I am amused that people are slow to realise that large language models (ChatGPT etc) do not understand what they are saying, or that they make things up — that is, they hallucinate. Performance on “surface layer” testing does not equate to competence. Anybody who has taught medical students knows that humans are quite capable of exhibiting the same behaviour. It was one of the values of the old fashioned viva. You could demonstrate the large gulf between understanding (sense)on the one hand, and rote — and fluent rote at that — simulation on the other (garbage).
The medical educationalists, obsessed as they are with statistical reliability, never realised that the viva’s main function was for the benefit of teachers rather than learners. It is called feedback.
The medical student as ChatGPT
Public schools exist to create the material they need for the class they want to build. When Eton needed soldiers, it was a very harsh environment; later, when it needed shysters and chancers, it adapted successfully to produce Boris Johnson and David Cameron. The girls’ estate is no different – and in the 50s and 60s it needed hostesses and broodmares. The last thing you would have wanted them to emerge with was a bunch of O-levels.
She said…
Is France on the road to a Sixth Republic? | Financial Times
It was said of US President George HW Bush that he reminded every woman of her first husband. Macron reminds every French person of their boss: an educated know-it-all who looks down on his staff.
We should all be asking more questions | Financial Times
As a beloved journalism handbook of mine puts it, you have to be able to “call a spade a spade, instead of bringing in someone from Harvard to solemnly declare it a long-handled personal earthmoving implement”.
Netherlands plots return to admission lotteries | Times Higher Education (THE)
Of course, I would say that wouldn’t I? I knew that lotteries had been used for medicine in the past in the Netherlands but….
The politics of admission are layered. Much media criticism has been levelled at University Medical Center Utrecht for an alleged bias towards blonde, white women. A spokeswoman said the institution was “constantly optimising [its] selection procedures, amongst others on the basis of research on bias”.
Supporters of lotteries say they could help the student body better represent Dutch society. “We do believe it would promote equity between students,” said Terri van der Velden, president of Interstedelijk Studenten Overleg (Intercity Student Consultation), the Netherlands’ largest national student organisation. “Our biggest fear with these selection instruments is that they’re chosen at random.”
I hadn’t come across the acronym TARA before, but it seems a hopeful thought for the New Year. Life is indeed more interesting with it set as the default.
TARA: There are real alternatives
TINA: There are no alternatives
(I have forgotten the source — apologies)
The crime-writing Belgian ‘sheriff’ fighting EU corruption – POLITICO
For him[Michel Claise], financial crime has destroyed fundamental aspects of society. “White-collar crime is the cancer of democracy,” Claise wrote in one of his books, “Le Forain” (The Showman).
And prison works for white collar crime.
Belgian justice is doing what at first sight the European Parliament hasn’t done,” the country’s Prime Minister Alexander De Croo told reporters in his first comments on the scandal on Tuesday. “The European Parliament has a lot of means to regulate itself. It turns out that this is largely a system of self-regulation based on voluntary efforts, which has clearly not been sufficient.
But that peacocking would be ironic to Claise, who complained in October that Belgium’s police are under-resourced, fighting a war against modern, high-tech corruption using “catapults.” Earlier in the year, he said the Belgian government was “ on Xanax rather than Viagra.” Now it’s the European Parliament he has found dozing on the job.
Pond Life: Princeton PhD inspires campus novel | Times Higher Education (THE)
When Jack Williams heard his PhD dissertation would likely be read by just a handful of people, he decided that a novel approach to expanding its reach was needed. Literally. “On average, only five people will read a doctoral thesis – and one of them is usually your housemate – so I thought it would be good if I could smuggle something of my ideas into a book,” said Dr Williams, whose debut novel, Pond Life, is published by RedDoor Press.
I had always thought fiction was an old form evident in many theses.
Debt is the sexually transmitted disease of finance. People won’t discuss it in public.
Rich People’s Problems: My debt is becoming an albatross | Financial Times
From today’s FT online. A moment’s hesitation. Who is this fed guy?
A century ago Ludwig Wittgenstein changed philosophy for ever | The Economist
Of all the innovations that sprang from the trenches of the first world war—the zip, the tea bag, the tank—the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” must be among the most elegant and humane.
That the book ever made it into print was miraculous. Before the war, as a student at Cambridge, Wittgenstein’s talent was clear to his contemporaries, who begged him to put his many thoughts into writing. He refused, fearing that an imperfect work of philosophy was worthless. His mentor, Bertrand Russell, made a habit of taking notes when the two spoke, lest his protégé’s genius be lost to memory. Wittgenstein himself had other preoccupations, principally suicide.
Letter: Socialist historian foresaw Covid work habits in 1967 | Financial Times
Anyone who has read the socialist historian EP Thompson’s article “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism”, written in 1967 and collected in Customs in Common in 1993, will recognise his account of pre-industrial work habits in Pilita Clark’s article about modern workers’ reluctance to engage on Mondays (Business Life, May 17).
Thompson identifies a work pattern composed of “alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness, wherever men were in control of their own working lives”. He remarks that the “pattern persists among some self-employed — artists, writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with students — today [1967], and provokes the question whether it is not a natural human work-rhythm”.
Michael Williams, Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire, UK.
Nestlé document says majority of its food portfolio is unhealthy | Financial Times
Nestlé document says majority of its food portfolio is unhealthy
An internal company presentation acknowledges more than 60% of products do not meet ‘recognised definition of health’.
No surprises here, then.