- Almanac: Nero Wolfe on dignity
“To assert dignity is to lose it.” Rex Stout, The League of Frightened Men Continue
Paul Graham writing about more than he admits to be writing about.
I am happy to see StatNews expanding, they were earlier winners of an Emergent Ventures prize
Edna O’Brien on turning 90: ‘I can’t pretend that I haven’t made mistakes.’
Where many writers retreat into themselves as they age, O’Brien has instead embraced risk, something she attributes to her short-story writing, in particular a story about an Irish workman, which saw her conduct interviews across north London pubs. “It changed the way I wrote – everything I’ve written since then I’ve researched intensely,” she says. “I would hope that the pulse of my writing is about feeling, about going inside it and bringing it back out. The authors I love [who include everyone from Russian master Anton Chekhov to experimental Scottish writer David Keenan], they do it too. I do think one has to keep learning and it does get harder because you are harder on yourself. You don’t want to repeat yourself – it has to be fresh.”
What Art Restoration Might Have To Teach Us About Repairing The Environment
“I discovered that there are important parallels between the theory and practice of repairing damaged art and that of repairing damaged nature. But there’s an important difference. The environmental sciences investigate processes of nature that have endured billions of years, and yet scientific thinking about the repair of ecosystems is but decades old. Artistic production is, on the other hand, of relatively recent origin, yet systematic thinking and writing about the repair of tarnished art is centuries old. It seems very likely that ecological restoration can learn a considerable amount from this senior literature.” – Aeon
“Steer clear of adjectives!” is an ancient piece of writerly wisdom. And yet adjectives are what reveal the genius of writers like Nabokov and Borges moreadjectives
It Sure Got Easier To Binge-Watch Shows This Year
A show with 121 episodes? Sure. What’s going to interrupt you – your baking plans? In addition, of course, there’s the comfort-watch of familiar characters like the cast of Friends or Living Single. Then there’s the pleasant idea of things changing. “Character-driven shows about crime soon became my balm for the unrelenting sameness of daily life. These worlds follow a consistent storytelling logic. The plot changes as time moves along, and time—unlike in real life—always moves along.” – The Atlantic
Herd immunity in Manaus, Brazil
64 reasons why Paul McCartney is underrated. The funny thing is, I could come up with yet another 64. Ian Leslie doesn’t even mention that McCartney ended up as an excellent classical music composer (after some effort and also false steps). Or how about his shrewd business acumen in buying up musical rights at the correct time?
For Barbara Guest, writing poetry meant no planning — just waiting for a poem to compose itself spontaneously... Guess Who
Data on Chinese social science funding. And UAE data on the Sinopharm vaccine are looking pretty good (Bloomberg)
Can you teach your dog how to talk?
Coyne and Boettke creation on Austrian economics, also includes some videos
“Influential mountain climber dies at 90.”
Japan to fund AI matchmaking to boost birth rate. What would Malthus say?
An article in the Financial Times: China pulls back from the world: rethinking Xi’s ‘project of the century.’ It discusses how China has substantially dialed down its once much-trumpeted Belt and Road initiative, in which it planned to fund massive infrastructure projects, largely along the former Silk Road, so as to provide land routes for exports and imports. It looked to be a geopolitical masterstroke, simultaneously reducing China’s exposure to having the US mess with China’s trade in the China Sea and other naval choke points; creating a co-dependency sphere (similar to what the US has with NATO) via directly funding important development projects in emerging economies.1
So what happened? The article keys off a recent report by Boston University’s Global Policy Development Center, titled Scope and Findings: China’s Overseas Development Finance Database. It has gotten some criticism (more on that shortly), but the Financial Times got confirmation of the thesis from multiple sources as well as other corroborating data points. So it’s reasonable to treat the Boston University account as directionally correct even though it arguably missed other funding channels that render its account less stark.
The high level recap of the Boston University report flags two major findings. The first is that China’s official development lending has fallen off sharply in recent years: