Yesterday afternoon we went to Eyup, an old mosque and graveyard which lies further up the Golden Horn than we’ve been to date. We got a ride to the foot of the cable car that takes one up to the top, to find a really, really long queue. We waited about 30 minutes, during which […]
Faulty defence
Read an interview with someone arguing for court packing the US Supreme Court. I have to say, it has rather convinced me the other way, though admittedly I already had a somewhat regressive fondness for norms and steering ships slowly rather than running through and breaking (other people’s) things. Though the argument that climate change […]
Incentives for childbearing
Shared by a Facebook friend who works in Silicon Valley: Someone told me once that becoming a mother can make you a better employee because it increases your ability to prioritise what is important and manage your time. I think there is some truth in that. – Lauren Freeman, some other woman who works in […]
The Greatest American
I woke up this morning to the news that Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died. What a incredible person she was, a qutb of her country in this age. She leaves behind an abiding sense of fear and dread. It is going to be a terrible few months up to the election, and to the inauguration, […]
Astonishing
The Republican National Convention is on this week, and the party has decided that instead of having a manifesto it is supporting Trump. This is really remarkable, really dangerous. Clearly time for a USAID funded project to develop democratic institutions in that country – I worked on one a few years ago (funded by another […]
Why vote for Biden
Metafilter has had one of its ugly circular firing squads about the Democratic convention, with some saying that they will not vote for Biden because of the neoliberal establishment nastiness. I wrote a comment making the argument from outside the US to vote for Biden, then decided not to post it: if there is one […]
Man on a boat
I joined in the collective global snigger when Steve Bannon was arrested for fraud whilst on an absconding Chinese billionaire’s superyacht. I then joined in the global raised eyebrow that the arrest was conducted by the US Postal Service’s police force. I mean… how militarised is that country that the post office has an armed […]
Monkey say, monkey do
There is something destabilising about the playacting in politics these days, so much of it seems to take place in a no man’s land. On one hand, there is a dismissal of norms that normalises new ones, and on the other hand there is this peculiar monkey-say-monkey-do business, a robot or an alien creature pretending […]
Least, most, best, worst
A curiosity of Americans is that they much always be the most or least. The best, but if not the best, they are the absolute worst. This strikes me quite often on Metafilter, but most recently during a discussion of the caste system in India which, for a while, became a discussion of how the […]
Protest in the park
This morning, the GF and I went to 228 Park to join the Black Lives Matter protest there. It was a curious affair. Every foreigner in Taiwan (excluding migrant workers) seemed to be there – the crowd was about 90% non-Taiwanese, and I suspect many of those who appeared Taiwanese were Americans of Taiwanese origin. […]