Posted by Adrian Toll on April 8th, 2009 - Add a comment
Reading about the unfolding credit crunch, a name which now seems rather quaint given the burgeoning catastrophe throughout world markets and personal finances, has been rather like rubbernecking a car crash around the corner, only to realise too late that the car in front has slammed it’s brakes on and you’re about to plough into it. As the consequences of the crisis in financial markets trickle down into everybody’s lives (”trickle down economics” never before contained such bitter irony), it seems an appropriate time to survey some of the more readable and enlightening articles about the crisis, while taking a look at what happened, what’s happening now, and what might happen in the future.
In the first of three articles we take a look at what happened and how, despite the financial arrangements being characterised as almost immeasurably complicated, it is in fact pretty easy to understand what happened.
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Posted by Adrian Toll on September 6th, 2008 - Add a comment
We start with a commentary on the Olympic opening ceremony as seen from Egypt by Lelyn Masters, Our Man In Cairo:
Envy is at the root of much racism, against China, against America, against the Jews.
I saw the Chinese spectacle. The Arabic commentator, in the dress of a sheik, explained to us that the Chinese were using the spectacle to intimidate the world. It was quite interesting to me how the Chinese adapted the Greek ceremony. It was as if the far east and the west had joined together and skipped the Arab world.
When the commentators spoke of Arab competitors they spoke of competitors from the “united Arab nation.” They didn’t speak of them as if they were from individual countries. The broadcast was from Dubai, of course, and there was no rhetoric of Emirate superiority in sports, the way it was no doubt spoken of in the US. Again, the key phrase was “Arab unity.”
PanArabism is an interesting movement, often at odds with Islamists, but equally enraged at the existence of Israel. It is in a spirit of Panarabism that Egyptians would feel personally threatened by Israel and the US, whereas these two countries are doing nothing against Egypt, but rather are giving tons of financial aid.
So actually, all this talk of Arab unity could be read as antisemitic, anti-Chinese (who are trying to intimidate us) and ultimately an expression of one thing: envy.
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Posted by Adrian Toll on March 1st, 2008 - Read comments and add your own
The 6th March edition of the London Review of Books includes Riots, Terrorism etc. a review by John Lanchester of what appears to be a fantastic book – Flat Earth News by Nick Davies. John Lanchester has been writing some excellent articles for the LRB over the last year, including Warmer, Warmer about climate change, and Cityphilia about the current crisis in the financial markets.
Essentially Riots, Terrorism etc. is a précis of the entire book, with some observations along the way – and it makes both fascinating and depressing reading. Hyperbole generally disgusts Lanchester, but he starts the review with a bold claim:
‘Important’ is a cant word in book reviewing: it usually means something like ‘slightly above average’, or ‘I was at university with her,’ or ‘I couldn’t be bothered to read it so I’m giving a quote instead.’ Very occasionally it might be stretched to mean ‘a book likely to be referred to in the future by other people who write about the same subject’. Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, however, is a genuinely important book, one which is likely to change, permanently, the way anyone who reads it looks at the British newspaper industry.
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