1. Jay Z Has the Room – A Vanity Fair profile of Jay Z 2. ‘Ebony and Ivy,’ About How Slavery Helped Universities Grow 3. Why Scandinavian Prisons Are Superior 4. Now We Are Five – David Sedaris on his family and the death of his sister 5. Henry Gustave Molaison: The Basis for ‘Memento’ and the World’s Most… Read More »
1. Keith Hart and Horacio Ortiz are reviewing the anthropology of money and finance 2. “she arrived with a gift of bespoke lingerie: a camisole with an image of Sigmund Freud printed on it—a Freudian slip”. A profile of Claire Danes 3. A profile of Paul Kagame. And a critique of the profile 4. An economics-sociology… Read More »
1. Teju Cole’s Letter from Lagos: Madmen and Specialists 2. How Advertisers Convinced Americans They Smelled Bad 3. Challenging neoliberal population control 4. “As it turns out, high-functioning sociopaths are full of handy lifestyle tips.” You really shouldn’t take it too seriously 5. “The National Security Agency has an intelligence problem: It won’t admit how dumb it is.”
1. George Bush, Nicholas Kristof and the Hunger Games 2. On the rich symbolism and ribald comic vitality of Pedro Almodovar’s I’m So Excited 3. Transnational Gender Vertigo (deserves a post all to itself. highly recommended) 4. The Man of Steel is no-one’s fictive kin 5. Ed Carr wonders whether ethnographies should have an expiration date. Tobias Denskus responds.
1. Sub-Saharan Africa’s Subprime Borrowers. See also Ken Opalo’s comment on the issue 2. Defeating global poverty is the latest start-up trend. But is there really an app for that? And Felix Salmon comments on the piece 3. “Ghanaians Like Sex Too Much to Be Homophobic” 4. Indian cotton textiles in the eighteenth-century Atlantic economy 5. A Surprisingly Moving Performance… Read More »
The comment boards of articles about immigration are often filled with heart-wrenching stories of American engineers who can’t find employment. They too blame foreigners for their woes. So what gives? Could there indeed be a vast conspiracy by the technology industry to exclude Americans from the innovation economy? The truth is we’re not seeing the… Read More »
1. The Late James Gandolfini, Star of The Sopranos, Appears on Inside the Actors Studio (2004) 2. ‘Jews Aren’t Allowed to Use Phones’: Berlin’s Most Unsettling Memorial 3. Oil companies in emerging markets 4. The case for an African customs union 5. How English sounds to non-English speakers
Been quite busy these past few months. Which does not mean that I haven’t been reading a lot of great articles that are worthy of sharing, or even that I haven’t been sharing quite a bit of them. I’ve been sharing, but mostly on FB (‘friend’ me if you use FB) and Twitter (follow me… Read More »
Mariya Ivancheva in CriticAtac To make an analogy between Chávez’s social democracy and the “totalitarian” socialism in Eastern Europe is an easy task mostly for the representatives of organizations and media who side with the Venezuelan opposition. Students and NGO activists sponsored by international organizations have traveled across the Western world campaigning against the so-called… Read More »
Rebranding as Racism – Africa is a Country Apparently, Naija men are very romantic – Vibeweekly How the internet killed porn – Guardian Where there’s no such thing as an illegal download – via Worldcrunch Zadie Smith on libraries – NYRblog