Politics
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Writers’ Rooms
Susan Sontag: Noam Chomsky:
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How do you translate “새끼”?
At the Global Fund’s Seventh Replenishment Conference in New York City, the South Korean president was caught on a hot mic disparaging the United States Congress. He said: 국회에서 이 새끼들이 승인 안 해주면 바이든은 쪽팔려서 어떡하나? On YouTube, one must now bear witness to Korean news commentators contorting themselves into awkward shapes while reporting on how English language newspapers translated Yoon’s faux pas (this means, translating – into Korean – the English translation of the original Korean). As Dave Chappelle might say, a dubious activity to be involved in. The crux of the issue revolves around how
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From Hare to Fraternité
A very good essay by David Hare on Tory shamelessness and the 1970s TV show “Road to Freedom.” Shame, said Karl Marx, is the only revolutionary emotion. When the series climaxes with the capitulation of the French army to the Nazis in 1940, one of the greatest humiliations of modern history, you realise how refreshing it is, after years of propaganda in which people are constantly exhorted to go easy on themselves, to watch fiction in which anguish and self-reproach are finally admitted to exist and to govern our behaviour… our whole society finds itself asking
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The World is Still on Fire
Before writing a controversial book on Asian parenting, Amy Chua wrote a very good book called World on Fire – How exporting free market democracy breeds ethnic hatred and global instability (2003). Her key point in the book – borne of personal experience as well as extensive research – is that in most countries outside of the United States and Western Europe, economic power is held by an ethnic minority group. She refers to them as MDM (market-dominant minority). For instance, in Chua’s country of origin (the Philippines), the ethnic Chinese make up 1% of the population but control 60%
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To Read: Sunday, September 5, 2021
1) India’s DNA COVID vaccine is a world first – more are coming Opinion 2) We Studied One Million Students. This Is What We Learned About Masking. 3) More than 50 long-term effects of COVID-19: a systematic review and meta-analysis | Scientific Reports 4) Public human microbiome data dominated by highly developed countries | bioRxiv 5) An Irrational Party of Rational Members: The Collision of Legislators’ Reelection Quest With Party Success in the Japan Socialist Party – Ko Maeda, 2012