Новости за 21.06.2016

A short history of staple foods in London. In the mid-19C, “436,800 sandwiches were sold on the streets of London every year, but all of them were ham”. Londoners were “fish-mad”: Billingsgate market sold 9.8 million eels and 7.5 million herrings a year. London bread was a four-pound loaf made with boiled potatoes. And now? There is no staple, save perhaps fast-food. Seventy pence buys a portion of chips con­taining 1,950 calories, “close to the total energy needed in a day”

It may seem as though television advertising has survived the internet era undamaged: “Advertising’s share of GDP has remained consistent for 100 years. TV’s share of advertising, after growing for 40 years, has also remained consistent at just over 40% for the last 20 years”. But perhaps the real threat is coming from another direction. The top 25 television advertisers are traditional consumer-goods and services companies. What happens if and when the internet sweeps them away?

Most Britons think their country “has got worse in 70 years of peace and prosperity since the war”. They are nostalgic for empire and victory. They blame relative decline “not on globalization, but on ‘Brussels’, which stands for the unfairness of a world which no longer operates to the benefit of the English people.” Brexit supporters are a populist movement with an easier task than most. “The coalition does not have to hold together. All it has to do is to win this one referendum”

He was a hero to rebellious American students, and to Pentagon procurement officers. He was everything to everyone. Fuller’s geodesic domes hid American radar stations from Russian bombers long before they became an icon of the counter-culture. Jonathon Keates’s biography portrays Fuller as genius of sorts — but in self-promotion, not science. His life was “a sprawling TED talk lasting for hours with dozens of ideas, concepts, and neologisms projected in a manic torrent of words”

Imagine the 2020 race after one “wretched” term of President Trump. Kanye West is the Democrats’ best hope, running against Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty for the GOP. “I could continue, but you get the gist”. This absurdist scenario “is a linear extrapolation of trends on vivid display right now.” Political parties are collapsing into chaos. “Trump, however, didn’t cause the chaos. The chaos caused Trump. What we are seeing is not a temporary spasm of chaos but a chaos syndrome”

The history of Britain’s reluctant relationship with Europe. For most of the post-war period the Conservatives were the pro-Europe party, with Labour against. Hugh Gaitskell, Labour leader in the 1950s, said that joining what was then called the “Common Market” would be to turn British backs on “a thousand years of history” Edward Heath’s Conservative government “took us into Europe” in 1973. When a first referendum on British membership was held in 1975, Margaret Thatcher campaigned to stay in