Новости за 21.03.2016

The future will include cameras everywhere, transmitting everything, always, and we will gradually cease to care. “As they become ubiquitous, I doubt we will think of these things as cameras much longer. We hardly think of the tiny quartz wafers inside every integrated circuit as ‘clocks’, if we think of them at all. We don’t fear or reject time, it is simply part of our reality. We have already become clocks. We will soon become cameras. What we do with that power is up to us”

Sweeping overview of China’s economic and political history, starting with the proposition that China did not know it was a country until Westerners told it so. Ming-dynasty Chinese saw themselves as various peoples answering to a single ruler: “They had trouble even understanding the question of what ‘country’ they were from, as there were no clear indigenous correlates to the concept”

Action-packed review of Luke Harding’s Very Expensive Poison, about the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. The killer, Andrei Lugovoi, “brought his family with him on the trip. After he had slipped Litvinenko some polonium-laced tea, Lugovoi introduced his victim to his son, who had just returned from a trip to Hamley’s. And then the family hurried off to watch the Arsenal-CSKA Moscow game at the Emirates”

History remembers Giorgione as “an outstanding artist, a Venetian counterpart to Leonardo”. But what did he paint? He has been credited in different centuries with entirely different works. Scholars continue to debate attributions, but they would do better to acknowledge ignorance. “It is impossible to say how much influence Giorgione had on his contemporaries and successors, and what that influence might have involved”

Transcript. Interesting throughout. Occasionally surreal. Topics include sheetrock, hands, China, Baltimore, Gawker. A Nixonian approach to foreign policy: “I always say we have to be unpredictable. We’re totally predictable. And predictable is bad. Sitting at a meeting like this and explaining my views … If I do become president, I have these views that are down for the other side to look at. You know, I hate being so open”

Notes from a shopping trip to Kapital in Tokyo. “The clothes they sell are new but appear to have been previously worn, perhaps by someone who was shot or stabbed and then thrown off a boat. Everything looks as if it had been pulled from the evidence rack at a murder trial. If I had to use one word to describe Kapital’s clothing, I’d be torn between ‘wrong’ and ‘tragic’. These are clothes that go out of their way to insult you” (Metered paywall)

We are “running out of punishments”. We no longer mutilate or torture or flog. Prison is “the only serious punishment left” — with the result that we imprison people excessively and unthinkingly. Prison terms should be “credible and well-understood punishments” that deter crime and encourage reform. One improvement might be the reintroduction of hard labour: “Work is good for mental and physical fitness. And a good preparation for life outside prison”