Author Archives: Olumide Abimbola

Friday links

1.Immigrant networks are a rare bright spark in the world economy. Rich countries should welcome them – The Economist 2. What’s your flavour? Italian or Spanish? – BBC Business Editor 3. Black France – Africa is a country 4. The dangerous cocktail of global money and local politics – Moisés Naím 5. On Nigeria’s Petroleum… Read More »

Werner Herzog talks to Jian Ghomeshi of Studio Q

Werner Herzog, whose movie Nosferatu the Vampyre I saw over a long train ride a couple of weeks ago, talks at length about film-making, his new movie Into the Abyss, his hatred of capital punishment (one of the reasons he doesn’t want to apply for American citizenship), and how movies don’t change anything (he says that his… Read More »

European leaders are ditching democracy to save the Euro

I’d been waiting for the first major newspaper columnist to write something about this. Here it is, from Evans-Pritchard of The Telegraph: As I long feared, the flood of cheap credit into Southern Europe and the slow death of Club Med industry by currency asphyxiation have together created such a dangerous situation for world finance… Read More »

On the “informal economy”

From a WSJ review of Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy: Mr. Neuwirth introduces us to a woman named Jandira who for a decade has peddled coffee and homemade cakes to the unlicensed vendors at São Paulo’s early-morning wholesale market for pirated movies. Her street-corner business, she proudly tells him, has enabled… Read More »

David Graeber on #OWS

On naked capitalism: My first take on the question came when The Guardian asked me to write an oped on Occupy Wall Street a few days later. At the time I was inspired mainly by what Marisa Holmes, another brilliant organizer of the original occupation, had discovered in her work as a video documentarian, doing… Read More »

Being an Oktoberfest waiter

I have sadly never visited the Oktoberfest, and it seems that the longer I stay in Germany the more difficult it is to find any of my Berliner friends who thinks it is worth visiting. Something about it being too touristy and the beer being ridiculously overpriced. Plus there is some distance between Munich and… Read More »

Elder’s Corner: A documentary about Nigeria’s musical icons

This is a synopsis: Elder’s Corner is musical journey through pivotal moments in the colorful history of Nigeria as told through the lives and careers of the nations foremost music legends. It is a story about the eroding effects of colonialism, bitter ethnic clashes, politics, oil, power, money and their combined effects on a nation… Read More »

On the case of disappearing penises

A couple of weekends ago we hosted a friend who had just returned from Nigeria. She mentioned that penises were currently being ‘disappeared’ in the country. We smiled, we laughed, and I told the story of how I first learnt about disappearing penises. Like a good, self-respecting, PhD-holding anthropologist, I concluded by insisting that I… Read More »