Новости за 13.09.2016

Scenes from life in a low-rent neighbourhood of Shenzhen, southern China. “Start with Cannery Row, then jerry-rig it to accommodate half the population of Iceland, and you’re close to Baishizhou. A tangle of damp alleyways opens at odd intervals onto wider avenues of frenzied commerce — fruit carts, shoe repair, blind massage, hot pot, pig’s feet on rice, coal-roasted sweet potato, smartphone engravers, love hotels — all of it hustling by under a sun-blocking canopy of braided telephone wires”

A brilliant American scientist formulates the evolutionary basis of altruism — then gives away everything he has. “He would seek out the homeless in Soho Square or at the nearest railway stations, Euston and King’s Cross, and give them anything they asked for, from the money out of his pay packet right down to the clothes off his back. By the end of 1974, Price had given up everything. Some time before dawn on 6 January 1975, in a squat not far from Euston, he killed himself”

Given the high incidence of war and poverty in many African countries, you might expect to find a correspondingly high level of scepticism there about the existence of an all-seeing, all-loving God. Quite the opposite: Africa is “the most religious continent in the world”. The Saharan region is dominated by Muslims, sub-Saharan Africa is largely composed of Christians. “Religious belief tends to track both poverty and wealth/income inequality, and Africa has plenty of both”

A writer must be free to borrow, impersonate, offend; identity politics threatens those freedoms. “In the latest ethos, any tradition, any experience, any costume, any way of doing and saying things associated with a minority or disadvantaged group is ring-fenced: Look but don’t touch. Those who embrace a vast range of ‘identities’ are encouraged to regard other peoples’ attempts to participate in their lives and traditions, either actively or imaginatively, as a form of theft”