George Weidenfeld, born into a Jewish family in Vienna, in 1919, fled to England in 1938 to escape the Nazi regime, and then began a career in publishing that would make him one of the most influential figures in the industry. During his long and illustrious career he championed some of the most important voices of the twentieth century, from Vladimir Nabokov, Mary McCarthy and Saul Bellow to Harold Wilson, Isaiah Berlin and Henry Kissinger. Weidenfeld was the world’s best networker, the publisher’s publisher and a great intellectual. His lifelong effort to be the world’s most famous host a cover … Continue reading Titan of Culture

Washington Post ace reporter Taylor Lorenz delves into social history of the internet- takes the lid off and reveals how online influence and the creators who amass it have reshaped our world online and off. Internet platforms like Facebook with over 2, 958m, YouTube 2,514m, WhatsApp 2m, Instagram 2, 000m, WeChat 1, 309m, TikTok 1,051m, Douyin 715m, Telegram 700m, Snapchat 635m, as Meta platforms owns four biggest social media platforms each over one billion active users. Internet invented by English computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-lee from London after graduating from Oxford University became a software engineer at CERN, advanced in … Continue reading Extreme practical jokes for online hits

Author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, Walter Isaacson charts Elon Musk’s leap from humble beginnings to one of the wealthiest people on the planet – Is Musk a genius or a Jerk? Elon Musk, the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era – a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of Electric vehicles, private space exploration and artificial intelligence, and of course control of Twitter. As a kid in South Africa, Elon Musk was regularly beaten by bullies.  One day. A group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until … Continue reading Tale of a titan

This is the story of how the United States has turned the most vital pathways of the world economy into tools of domination over foreign businesses and countries, rivals or allies allowing to maintain global supremacy.  This underground empire has allowed the United States to eavesdrop on other countries and isolate its enemies. Efforts by China and Russia to untether themselves from this coercive US-led system are turning the global economy into a battle zone. Trade wars, sanctions, and controls on technology exports are merely tremors hinting at far greater seismic sifts beneath the surface , as we sleepwalk into … Continue reading US exploitation of digital system

You will soon live surrounded by Ais, which will organize your life, operate your business and run core government services.  You will live in a world of DNA printers, and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weaponise, robot assistants and abundant energy. South Korean  President Kim Dae-Jung who was previously jailed for two years in the early 1980s when he was a political activist, he read over 600 books while imprisoned. One book stood out was The Third Wave by futurist Alvin Toffler, who explained about the information revolution which could transform the world as profoundly as the preceding agricultural … Continue reading Forging a narrow path between Catastrophe and dystiopia

Anansi’s Gold is a riveting account of Cold War entanglements and African dreams revealing the untold story of the grifter who beat the West at its own thieving game.   A high-rolling Ghanaian fraudster committed acts  that most people find repulsive. Yepoka Yeebo, a British-Ghanaian journalist, with her debut Anansi’s Gold, tells a remarkable story of John Ackah Blay-Miezah, a charismatic Ghanian huckster who for two decades masterminded  “one of the greatest con artists of all time”. Blay-Miezah had multiple aliases,  who claimed to be ,  diplomat, doctor, banker, Harvard professor and a UN consultant. He was also fond of … Continue reading Low profile swindler dupe high-flyers

Spies is an inspiring story of the best and worst of mankind: bravery and honour, treachery and betrayal. From the freezing streets of St. Petersburg in 1917 to the bloody beaches of Normandy, from coups in faraway lands to present-day Moscow, where troll farms weaponise social media against Western democracies. The West has a long-term Russia problem, not a Putin problem. Spies mines hitherto secret archives and exclusive interviews with former agents to tell the history of the war that Russia and the West have been waging for a century. The secret report about Ukraine reached British intelligence in February, … Continue reading Spy war

Hedy Lamarr  born  Hedwig Kiesler the daughter of a Ukrainian banker father and a Hungarian aristocratic pianist mother, both assimilated Viennese Jews shot to central European infamy as the first woman to feign orgasm on screen in the 1933 film Ecstasy and dubbed as “the mother of Wi-Fi” and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the development of her frequency hopping technology in 2014. Her husband, the rich Austrian industrialist Friedrich  Mandl, was not impressed, when he went on to make weapons for the Nazis. She drugged her maid … Continue reading Did Vienna Invent the world as we know it

When the first Chinese labourers began to sojourn and settle abroad, restaurants appeared in their wake. Yet Chinese food has the curious distinction of being both one of the world’s best-loved culinary traditions and one of the least understood. For over a century the overwhelming dominance of simplified form of Cantonese cooking ensured that few foreigners experienced anything of its richness and sophistication – but today that is beginning to change. James Beard Award-winning cook and writer Fuchsia Dunlop explores the history, philosophy and techniques of china’s rich and ancient culinary culture. Fuchsia Dunlop once cooked 350 duck tongues for … Continue reading Lured by exotic ingredients