Tag: email_newsletter

“Messoud and his unit are the doctors here. But they are also police officers, counselors, intelligence agents and intermediaries between the people here and the politicians and officials in the cities. They are the state, bringing the rudimentary services of the government on camelback to the most remote villages – places that no cars can reach and where cellphone service is nonexistent”

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/keeping-the-peace-on-camelback-mauritanias-secret-to-stability-a-223fc1f0-c4fe-4483-9815-d6040d659c91

“What we hardly talk about is how we’ve reorganized not just industrial activity but any activity to be capturable by computer, a radical expansion of what can be mined. Friendship is ground zero for the metrics of the inner world, the first unquantifiable shorn into data points: Friendster testimonials, the MySpace Top 8, friending. Likewise, the search for romance has been refigured by dating apps that sell paid-for rankings and paid access to “quality” matches. Or, if there’s an off-duty pursuit you love—giving tarot readings, polishing beach rocks—it’s a great compliment to say: “You should do that for money.” Join the passion economy, give the market final say on the value of your delights”

https://thewalrus.ca/collapse-of-self-worth-in-the-digital-age/

“That the forgery ultimately bought the thief eight months is just one of the factors that made this case so hard to solve. Lacoursière suspects the portrait was stolen by someone with contacts inside the hotel who understood its value and knew it was unprotected. He doubts organized crime was even involved. “The mafia and the bikers and the people who used to be responsible for a lot of art theft in years past have moved on to Bitcoin and other things that can be stolen and traded online in a matter of minutes,” he says.

“Art theft in Canada is now so rare that there are no longer investigators whose jobs are dedicated to tracking these things down.”

https://thewalrus.ca/churchill-portrait/

“Despite Ottawa’s insistence that everything was above board, their own numbers revealed that, between 2011 and 2023, McKinsey was awarded ninety-seven contracts totalling more than $209 million—of them, 70 percent were non-competitive contracts. Even when contracts were, technically, competitive, the review found that the government sometimes tilted the process in McKinsey’s favour.

An independent procurement ombudsman reviewed those contracts in April 2024 and came to quite a different conclusion than that of the internal audits”

https://thewalrus.ca/shadow-government/

“More stunning is their iterative powers, some holding firm since the days of Palmerston’s first premiership: the percentage of entrants whose parents’ wealth at death was in the top 1 per cent of national wealth is the same now as the 1850s. And when Friedman and Reeves traced more than 100 random families from the first editions of Who’s Who to today, 57 per cent had descendants who had later made the cut. In other words, if you have a family member in the elite, you are 120 times more likely to get there too compared with everyone else”

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2024/09/who-are-britains-new-aristocrats

“The BMI is controversial. In the 1830s, Belgian scientist and sociologist Adolphe Quetelet created what would eventually become known as the BMI to determine what body the socially ideal man would have. He based it on the measurements of white European men of his time, and didn’t intend for it to be applied to the bodies of women or people of colour. He also developed his system long before the contemporary stigma around obesity began to take root. Some doctors now apply additional measurements, like waist circumference, to determine whether a patient’s size is considered healthy. But size alone is not an effective measure of a person’s health”

https://thewalrus.ca/ozempic/

“How to have faith in the shadow of such uncertainty, where one afternoon, after you’ve had a bit of difficulty swallowing, the specialist speaks the words “stage four,” and life is a loan called back? Laurene told me that during Jim’s sixteen months of chemo, they never discussed his novel. But there must have been moments of quiet, of waiting for the doctor, of the hypnotic beeps of medical machines. And in those moments, did Jim wish that he had worked on the novel more or not at all?”

https://thewalrus.ca/i-tried-to-finish-a-dead-mans-novel/

“In retrospect, the Nintendo DS prepared the world for the iPhone, and for the explosion in touchscreen smartphone gaming that would eventually kill off the whole idea of a handheld games console. We don’t need them any more, now that we have one device that fits in our pockets and can do everything from giving us directions and taking photos to playing games. The DS was a half step between the Game Boy and the smartphone – a device that played games but could also do other things”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/nov/12/pushing-buttons-nintendo-ds-at-20-smartphone-gaming

“Anger and frustration in town have been boiling ever since: one person threatened to burn the school down with everyone inside it. A kind of madness has washed over the town, with people who otherwise led quiet lives being brought to the edge. One person told me they’d endure physical violence, even take a bullet if necessary, in order for the RCMP to lay charges against Didulo or her followers”

https://thewalrus.ca/queen-of-canada/