- Lily Lynch: A Tale of Two Missiles (and other stories).
Behind a paywall, but well worth subscribing to for the unusual perspective of a West coast American who has spent so much time in the Balkans that her thinking about world affairs is fresh and unique. When bombs fell in Iran and Americans started talking about regime change, all I could remember was the summer of 1999 when Nato bombs extended the Serbian zombie regime’s lifespan by a year. Lynch explains the how and why better than I ever could.
- Daniel Frank: on high context and low context environments.
You could also call this dichotomy thick and thin culture, as Chris Arnade did not so long ago. Although religion features only briefly and superficially, is it not mostly about religion?
- Christopher Butler: Modern wealth is a parlour game played by the well fed.
Summary: “Market crashes aren’t accidents—they’re board-clearing strategies that consolidate power while the rest of us lose everything.” The diagnosis is right though I can’t say that I understood Butler’s solution which was, if my reading was correct, to play dead?
- Sam Wigglesworth: Doctors should admit they don’t know.
The list of indignities Wigglesworth suffered from various dcotrors was horrifying and I wondered for a moment where in America medicine was still practiced in that way (the VA?). Then I saw that she was Dutch and things made even less sense. Say what you want about the Lovecraftian horror that is the American “health” “care” system — second in Cthulhu-ness only to its system of immigration — but doctors are for the most part the least paternalistic one can find anywhere in the world, and to a fault.