Tag: politics

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People who stood up to Elon Musk’s mission 

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Michael Lewis drills into the early days of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, as told by public servants it targeted and one of America’s best storytellers. In the new Washington, it was the worst thing you could be- especially if you worked in the federal government and wanted to keep your job. A Blocker was a holdover, an impediment someone who didn’t get the message- and most of all, someone who didn’t belong. Blockers is the story of people who believed they had a calling, who are convinced they were doing something the country could not do without, and then … Continue reading People who stood up to Elon Musk’s mission 

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Waves of undersea cables vulnerable to attack

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Every nation, button, house and financial market depends on a massive, unseen hidden web of cables across the ocean floor, that sustains our world, but it’s no longer safe. Power cables and pipelines on the seafloor provide the world with energy. This is the newest battlefield where countries must protect their interests – and the functioning of daily life- while rivals test their limits. From the Baltic to the Pacific, sinister ruptures, mysterious vessels and submarine incursions mark a conflict already under way. Elisabeth Braw captures the fragility of an infrastructure that underpins everything from mortgages to cancer research and … Continue reading Waves of undersea cables vulnerable to attack

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Intertwined lives of those who experienced age of extremes

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In The City Without Jews, award-winning historian Douglas Smith,  explains what Viennese meant stepping beyond the limits of one’s identity into a cosmopolitan world of Kultur, where race and religion could be hidden behind a veil of refinement and achievement. Vienna was once a city in which Jews did not have to be Jews, and singular story of the destruction of Jewish Vienna as seen through the letters and diaries of an extraordinary woman who witnessed it all. In 1922, Hugo Bettauer published the novel The City Without Jews, a satirical critique of Austrian antisemitism. Three years later he would be … Continue reading Intertwined lives of those who experienced age of extremes

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Discover the invisible shifting trade world

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Ed Conway, Economic Editor at Sky News, award-winning and Sunday Times bestselling author of Material World, whose latest book Trade World, focuses from ancient civilizations, empire and globalisation through to the most influential geopolitical issues of our times. This is the story of humanity. From the copper in Mesopotamian ploughs to the silicon atoms within the chip inside your smartphone, intricate global trading networks have evolved over millennia to fulfil the distinctly human desire to buy and sell. Trump’s traffics hasn’t reined in global commerce, In fact, it is growing every further and stronger. This surge is doubly surprising, given … Continue reading Discover the invisible shifting trade world

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Legitimacy was borrowed from a future time…

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Francis Fukuyama, a leading public intellectual, for the first time, charts his political and intellectual evolution across fiv3e transformative decades. We follow him from the circle of students around the conservative intellectual Allan Bloom at Cornell, into the halls of power in Washington and at the RAND Corporation, and into private conversations with world leaders from Muammar Qaddhafi to China’s powerful elite. Fukuyama touches on his family’s story, including his relatives’ internment during World War II along with other Japanese Americans. And, in surprisingly personal terms, he reflects on the experiences that led him to reevaluate his own thinking, most … Continue reading Legitimacy was borrowed from a future time…

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New era of statecraft, its successes, its failures.

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Russia foreign policy analyst Hanna Notte in “We Shall Outlast Them”, tells a story that has long been obscured: that the Kremlin is waging a war not only on Ukraine, but over global order. Blending critical analysis with reportage from over a dozen countries, Notte takes readers on a panoramic journey through this new era of statecraft, with its successes and its failures. From the comedy of Russia’s antics at the UN to the melodrama of the outrageous nuclear threats, Notte renders an astonishing portrait of a newly outwardly-facing Russia. With sensitivity and depth, she shows why the country enjoys … Continue reading New era of statecraft, its successes, its failures.

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Can leaders steer the course of history

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American scientist, historian and Pulitzer Prize winner, Jared Diamond poses the big question whether leaders or luck play a greater part in steering the course of history. In Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings, Diamond announces at the start that he will pursue a middle path- more realistic than taking one side, but a warning that what follows will fall short of a resounding theory. Researching the life of one striking individual creates a temptation to attribute more influence to them than is justified. Inspired by the rigour of laboratory scientists using controls, he cites as a natural experiment- thrown up by … Continue reading Can leaders steer the course of history

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Cohn’s feistiness, surly defiance and charm of a rogue lawyer

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Roy Cohen is a super-lawyer and political fixed, whose shocking exploits over four decades have shaped the modern political era, most prominently the ascent of Donald Trump. In October 1973, Donald Trump was an ambitious 27-year-old from Queens trying to push his way into the world of Manhattan real estate. He met Roy Cohn, the notorious New York lawyer whose clients included mobsters and celebrities, one evening at the members-only Le Club Restaurant. Trump and his developer father had just been sued by the US government for discriminating against Black people seeking apartments in their properties. Trump asked Cohn “What … Continue reading Cohn’s feistiness, surly defiance and charm of a rogue lawyer

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New Dawn: Imperial wreckage, war’s chaos, and suffering supercharged anti-colonial movements

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Sinologist at the University of Cambridge, Hans van de Ven, in Blood Dawn, complains while Western histories of the second World War, focuses on the events in Europe, the US and the Russia, Asia remains “insufficiently examined, inadequately narrated, and rarely remembered in public discourse”.  In Blood Dawn, he offers a vital corrective restoring the Asian war to its proper place, and tracing the destruction of empires and the emergence of the nation-state in Asia. van de Ven tells the Asian story deftly, including the depression which helped finish off the parliamentary experiment of Taisho democracy in Japan, empowering soldiers for … Continue reading New Dawn: Imperial wreckage, war’s chaos, and suffering supercharged anti-colonial movements

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Engage with the place to tend and to mend

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Amid women facing backlashes across the world, growing dangers for women, as their safety is being threatened and their freedoms are under attack, with authoritarian states, online misogyny and climate breakdown, wildfires burning in Europe and drought ravages harvests and apocalyptic summer of 2026. Academic and activist author Natasha Walter after decades of her advocacy work alongside refugee women: “When heat rises, so does male violence. The ecological crisis is amplifying every threat to women. Women’s bodies and the body of the earth in danger at one on the same time.” She wrote, The New Feminism ( 1998), an upbeat, … Continue reading Engage with the place to tend and to mend