Новости за 13.04.2016

At the end of Othello Emilia exposes her villanous husband Iago, redeems the reputation of her murdered friend Desdemona — and dies. “Emilia and Desdemona weren’t killed for being unfaithful or foolish or too trusting or too weak—they were killed because they hung around too many damn men”. Othello is not primarily a play about sexual jealousy; it is about “control, and what happens to women who resist or subvert that control”

Collins was a lawyer and a laudanum addict. He called his genre of fiction “the secret theatre of home”. His novels were much concerned with the legality and force of marriage; as was Collins himself, maintaining long-term relationships with two women outside marriage. Like his friend Dickens, Collins filled his books with weird characters; but Collins, unlike Dickens, gave his marginal figures real agency; they are the ones who run his stories

Restaurants that claim to sell strictly local produce are lying, mostly. They can charge more, the customers like it, and who is going to call them on it? In this rare case, a food critic. “How do you know the Dover sole on your plate is Dover sole? Only that the restaurateur said so. Your purchases are unverifiable unless you drive to that farm or track back through a restaurant’s distributors and ask for invoices. I did”. They were all lying

Roughly speaking, nobody can forecast the price of oil. Why so? First, because demand for oil depends on global GDP growth, which is too complicated to forecast. Second, tech­nological innovation delivers supply shocks, and innovation is by definition unpredictable. Third, political crises move oil markets, and nobody cares to forecast those. Which invites the question: Why do we bother to forecast the oil price at all?

Academic publishers have priced themselves out of their own market. Pirating articles from learned journals has become normal practice among scholars. A “black market” on Twitter uses the hashtag #ICanHazPDF: you ask for a paper, then delete your tweet. Particular disciplines have their own listservs and private sites. An online archive in Kazakhstan called SciHub contains 48m pirated papers to which more are added every day

Lancunian overview of Bitcoin, prefaced by a disquisition on the history and philosophy of money in general. Bitcoin’s technology has proved robust. Beneath the exchange-rate volatility there has been “a consistent trajectory of growth”. Bitcoin has moved from the margins of finance to the mainstream. It is being co-opted by the banks that it sought to replace. We are at the beginning of the Bitcoin story, not the end

Pages from the diary of a Magnum photographer covering the wars of the Arab Spring. Here, a helicopter crash: “I don’t remember the precise moment we took off, or how soon after the helicopter went down. All my senses were focused on taking pictures. In the moment of impact, I closed my eyes, and for a split second the world went silent, as if someone had suddenly pressed the mute button at the height of a thunderous drum solo”