Category Archives: Links

Lady Gaga talks to Stephen Fry

In FT: I ask if […] she has in fact created Gaga, so that she can have a grandiose alter ego to absorb all the attention, criticism, adulation and insanity while the quiet, steady, industrious Stefani Germanotta gets on anonymously with the professional nuts and bolts in the background. I couldn’t be more wrong. “I… Read More »

Friday links

Islamic finance in Nigeria – BusinessDay Why mobile money arrived in Africa before the UK – BBC What DSK’s fall says about transatlantic differences in attitudes to sex, power and the law – The Economist A new freight train route connects Antwerp in Belgium to the western Chinese city of Chongqing, 11,000 kilometers away –… Read More »

A profile of Werner Herzog

In GQ: To propose to his first wife, Herzog traveled on foot about a thousand miles, across the Alps. (Herzog, who had made several other such journeys, is insistent that this not be referred to as walking. “Traveling on foot,” he says. “Walking is something different.”) He went because he had something important to ask.… Read More »

Wednesday Links

Cynicism and the Nigerian state – NigeriansTalk The Un-Shock Doctrine: A defense of communism – Slavoj Žižek The Political Relevance of the Internet in Developing Countries – The Monkey Cage Time to avoid the dictatorship v democracy debate in Africa – David Booth Eurozone and the Greek debt – “Overindebted countries with their own currencies inflate. But countries… Read More »

Kwame Appiah reviews Peter Firstbrook’s book on Obama’s family

In The New York Review of Books: Many years ago, the Belgian anthropologist Johannes Fabian identified a tendency he called “the denial of coevalness.” “The history of our discipline,” he wrote, reveals the use of time for “distancing those who are observed from the Time of the observer.” But this isn’t just a professional deformation of… Read More »

On social networks, democracy and fundamentalism

Niall Ferguson in Newsweek: In Samuel Huntington’s version of the post–Cold War world, there was going to be a clash between an Islamic civilization that was stuck in a medieval time warp and a Western civilization that was essentially equivalent to modernity. What we’ve ended up with is something more like a mashup of civilizations,… Read More »

Monday links

My years as Gaddafi’s nurse – Oksana Balinskaya ‘…what will ultimately replace today’s dollar-centric international monetary and financial system is a tripolar system organized around the dollar, the euro, and the Chinese renminbi’ – Barry Eichengreen ‘The left love being provoked by me … they think I’m a reactionary imperialist scumbag’ Niall Ferguson Why about 75% of… Read More »

Friday links

Google’s page for Nigerian elections Why Africa may never produce a Facebook, Groupon, Zynga or Google The seeds of the euro crisis are as old as the euro itself – Wolfgang Münchau Are German nuclear worries both wrong and harmful?