Should we save consumers from consumer choice?
A few years ago a colleague and I went into a highly-recommended sandwich shop for lunch, the kind that offers a stunning variety of non-traditional combinations of meats and cheeses and sauces and breads. While my friend ordered his usual,…
Sinuosity, undulation, and joy
Organizations typically put a lot of work into the development of their logos, the hoped-for ubiquity of which drives their designers to incorporate as many distinct brand values and moods as possible into the final image. Investments in this process…
Exuberance and repulsion
Since the attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, much mental effort has been spent on the justification of war. This effort has most often revolved around the medieval theory of “just war”, and its…
Multitasking and the world brain
Given the uncountably immense number of events happening in the world, and the almost as uncountably immense number of journalists and writers covering and commenting on events, one might expect an equally diverse range of articles and topics to appear…
North Korea’s politics of governing
It is normally a good practice, particularly when dealing with foreign countries one might end up at war with, to try one’s best to understand how they work and how they think. Some nations are more difficult to understand than…
A people and their land
Guest post by Zach Kuehner An old high school teacher of mine used to feign inspiration by scribbling the phrase, “Don’t memorize, understand” on the blackboard at the beginning of every school year. It was simple advice, but decidedly hard…
The Raghu Dixit Project
From the outside, success seems to come fast. A former graduate student in microbiology, Raghu Dixit is a self-taught guitarist and singer from Bangalore in south-west India; the first CD released by his band, The Raghu Dixit Project, was the…
Where have the guardians gone?
Guest post by Sandra Janus Among other worthy endeavours, World Press Photo (in concert with Angola’s Banco Espirito Santo d’Angola) created a special photography exhibition for the United Nations Year of the Planet in 2008, an exhibition that has continued…
Would you like a bank with that football club?
It will come as no surprise to avid followers of European football that many of its most illustrious clubs are financially supported today, in part or in whole, by sovereign wealth funds, corporations, and private investors from outside the continent….
The things our father taught us
Guest post by Luke Grundy Mexican cinema sets the bar high. In the last twenty years we’ve seen talents as diverse as Guillermo Del Toro, Salma Hayek, Gael García Bernal and typist’s nightmare Alejandro González Iñárritu emerge from Central America’s…
The social Noguchi
Before social media made staying in touch with acquaintances on a mass scale a trivially easy exercise, human beings had to do sordid-sounding things like “meeting for drinks” and “working together” in order to achieve the same end. For all…
What the turtle stands on
There’s an old but apocryphal anecdote (or very funny joke, if your sense of humour is similar to mine) about a scientist or philosopher (in some accounts Bertrand Russell, in others William James) giving a lecture on modern cosmology. As…
