Новости за 13.05.2016

Interview with David Rieff. George Santayana’s claim that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is not just wrong, it is an incitement to tragedy, at least when applied to nations. Exalting the memory of past conflicts is the best way of ensuring that they will be re-enacted by later generations, as in the Balkans, and Northern Ireland, and the Middle East. Honour the dead, but don’t let them run public life. And if you get rid of a dictator, take his name off the street... Читать дальше...

Many modern industries – telecoms, cable TV, internet platforms, health insurance, pharmaceuticals, agro-business – tend more obviously towards monopoly than towards competition. The reasons are a mixture of technological, managerial, regulatory and commercial factors. The traditional free-market reassurance is that monopolies are by nature temporary; they get competed away. But today’s monopolies are increasingly robust and profitable. Have the fundamentals changed?

Mongolian-born Hakuho is the dominant sumo wrestler of the past decade in Japan and perhaps the greatest sumo wrestler of all time, having won 85 percent of his upper-division matches, a modern record. How would he fare if sent back in a time machine to the late 18C and pitted against his only real peer in sumo history, Raiden, known as “The Thunderbolt”, an “absolute monster among men” who won 96 percent of his matches using fighting moves that were later banned?

Notes from a Chinese funeral. “The family gathered at the death bed at five in the morning to perform a ceremony that involved breaking a pot to release Lao Lao’s soul from the room.” Even at 6.15am the crematorium is crowded. “Funeral keening is visceral and high-volume and it gets to you, even if you’re not grieving very much. When it started up my first thought was that something had gone dreadfully wrong or a fight had broken out”. The crematorium band plays Auld Lang Syne

Lessons learned from keeping a frog as a pet — which began as “a silly hobby to pass the time and to bond with my kids”. But life calls out to life. “It was absurd, but I started worrying about Pip”. What are one’s duties to a frog? Can one make a frog happy? “I decided that the answer to one of those questions, Pip’s happiness, was to try and make his life as Froggy as possible — without the predators and the periodic starvation, the things that kill frogs. Maximize his frog existence”