Search Results for: economy

Whale Tales: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

These four stories demonstrate humans’ multi-faceted relationship with whales—where politics, the environment and the economy intermingle with love, terror and cruelty.

Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 9, 2015

Whale Tales: A Reading List

Whales: We want to watch them, to save them, to read all about them. They are so large—larger than life—that they are symbols in our literature and in our lives. Yet they remain elusive to us, due in part to their nature (deep-diving and difficult to track for sustained periods of time) and to our nature (killing what fascinates us, industrialization, greed). These four stories demonstrate humans’ multi-faceted relationship with whales—where politics, the environment and the economy intermingle with love, terror and cruelty.

1. “Chasing Bayla.” (Sarah Schweitzer, Boston Globe, August 2014)

Let’s start off strong. Sarah Schweitzer has written a masterful story, here: one of hard work, daring rescues, danger and heartbreak. Dr. Michael Moore created a sedative to calm endangered whales trapped in deadly fishing wire. But is his invention enough to free the animals he studied all his life? (I cried.) Read more…

My Undertaker, My Pimp

Photo: Wikimedia Commons (edited)

Jay Kirk | Harper’s | March 2002 | 29 minutes (7,333 words)

This essay by Jay Kirk first appeared in the March 2002 issue of Harper’s, where it was edited by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Our thanks to Kirk for allowing us to reprint it here.

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For a year I worked in an office where I spoke to dying people on the telephone every day. The office was that of a funeral-consumer watchdog, which meant that we kept an eye on the funeral industry and helped the imminently bereaved and imminently deceased to make affordable funeral plans. Above my desk I kept an index card with a Faulkner quotation, “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.” On a particularly bad day I scratched out the last word and changed it to “nothing.” Read more…

‘Playing Chicken’ in China’s Stock Market

The fact that Chinese stocks were climbing ever higher while the Chinese economy was cooling should have been an unmistakable warning of a bubble, but it caused surprisingly little concern. (Another reason to worry might have been the disparity in prices between so-called “A-shares”, which can only be purchased by investors inside China to keep the domestic market shielded from outside foreign manipulation, and stakes in the same companies available to foreign investors through the Hong Kong exchange, known as “H-Shares”. This disparity suggested Chinese investors were bidding up prices well beyond any reasonable approximation of their value.) In fact, drawn by the casino-like profits to be made in the boom, more and more small investors flocked to the thousands of brokerage houses that are now proliferating in every Chinese city in order to buy and sell while staring up at flickering electronic data boards charting the rise and fall of equity prices.

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The party might have been excused if it had simply eschewed responsibility for what was happening. After all, markets have a logic of their own that makes them both rise and fall according to their own forces. But, instead of simply saying, “Not our problem”, it launched a massive socialist-style rescue campaign, thereby making the party responsible for everything that happened thereafter.

Why did the party allow itself to become stuck in this quicksand? Leaders evidently felt themselves threatened not only by the collapsing share prices, but by what they also feared would be perceived as an erosion of their own credibility. What they seem to have concluded was at stake was their ability to continue projecting an image of omnipotence – the appearance, at least, of being strong enough to continue guiding and controlling “all under heaven” (tianxia).

—In his Guardian story, “Why China’s stock market was always bound to burst,” Orville Schell explains what led to the rout, and why the government is intervening. “It is a game of chicken,” a China strategist told Bloomberg Business in a story about China’s increasingly forceful efforts to prop up the market. “For now, it seems to be working.”

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The Latest Human Rights Crackdown in Uncle Xi’s China

Chinese authorities have recently detained or questioned more than 150 human rights lawyers and activists in an unprecedented nationwide crackdown. Some detainees are missing, and a petition is calling on the U.S. to cancel the Chinese president’s upcoming state visit. In his April New Yorker story “Born Red,” Evan Osnos profiled Big Uncle Xi (the state news agency’s nickname for the president), “China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao”:

Before Xi took power, he was described, in China and abroad, as an unremarkable provincial administrator, a fan of American pop culture (“The Godfather,” “Saving Private Ryan”) who cared more about business than about politics, and was selected mainly because he had alienated fewer peers than his competitors. It was an incomplete portrait. He had spent more than three decades in public life, but Chinese politics had exposed him to limited scrutiny. At a press conference, a local reporter once asked Xi to rate his performance: “Would you give yourself a score of a hundred—or a score of ninety?” (Neither, Xi said; a high number would look “boastful,” and a low number would reflect “low self-esteem.”)

But, a quarter of the way through his ten-year term, he has emerged as the most authoritarian leader since Chairman Mao. In the name of protection and purity, he has investigated tens of thousands of his countrymen, on charges ranging from corruption to leaking state secrets and inciting the overthrow of the state. He has acquired or created ten titles for himself, including not only head of state and head of the military but also leader of the Party’s most powerful committees—on foreign policy, Taiwan, and the economy. He has installed himself as the head of new bodies overseeing the Internet, government restructuring, national security, and military reform, and he has effectively taken over the courts, the police, and the secret police. “He’s at the center of everything,” Gary Locke, the former American Ambassador to Beijing, told me.

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In Xi’s early months, supporters in the West speculated that he wanted to silence hard-line critics, and would open up later, perhaps in his second term, which begins in 2017. That view has largely disappeared. Henry Paulson, the former Treasury Secretary, whose upcoming book, “Dealing with China,” describes a decade of contact with Xi, told me, “He has been very forthright and candid—privately and publicly—about the fact that the Chinese are rejecting Western values and multiparty democracy.” He added, “To Westerners, it seems very incongruous to be, on the one hand, so committed to fostering more competition and market-driven flexibility in the economy and, on the other hand, to be seeking more control in the political sphere, the media, and the Internet. But that’s the key: he sees a strong Party as essential to stability, and the only institution that’s strong enough to help him accomplish his other goals.”

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The Missing History of Ravensbrück, The Nazi Concentration Camp for Women

Sarah Helm | Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women | Nan A. Talese | March 2015 | 48 minutes (13,071 words)

 

Below is a chapter excerpted from Ravensbrück, by Sarah Helm, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Mystery Meat, Bologna Soup and Maggots

Longreads Pick

A former prisoner describes what it’s like to actually eat the food at a Detroit-area jail; the failings of Aramark, the company the Michigan Department of Corrections contracts for food service; and the thriving underground economy that supplements state-issued meals.

Published: Jul 8, 2015
Length: 19 minutes (4,861 words)

Vagabonds, Crafty Bauds, and the Loyal Huzza: A History of London at Night

Photo by Garry Knight

Matthew Beaumont | Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London | Verso | March 2015 | 37 minutes (10,129 words)

 

Below is a chapter excerpted from Nightwalking, by Matthew Beaumont, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. In this excerpt, Beaumont describes the complex and transgressive act of nightwalking in London during the 16th & 17th centuries. He paints a vivid picture of the city at night and explains what nightwalking revealed about class, status, and the political and religious leanings of those who practiced it. The plight of the jobless and homeless poor in this era, which also witnessed the birth of capitalism, are dishearteningly familiar today.

Beaumont draws on a variety of compelling sources, which have been linked to when possible, such as Beware the Cat, a puzzling English proto-novel that features a man who attains cat-like superpowers, The Wandring Whore and The Wandring Whore Continued, and A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds, which defines, among other things, the 24 types of vagabond.  Read more…

How Apple’s Transcendent Chihuahua Killed the Revolution

Wreckage of the Zeppelin LZ4 after the crash in Echterdingen. Photo: Wikipedia Commons

Ian Bogost | from The Geek’s Chihuahua | University of Minnesota Press | April 2015 | 22 minutes (5,539 words)

 

The following is an excerpt from Ian Bogost’s book The Geek’s Chihuahua, which addresses “the modern love affair of ‘living with Apple’ during the height of the company’s market influence and technology dominance,” and how smartphones created a phenomenon of “hyperemployment.”

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Think back to 2007, when you got the first iPhone. (You did get one, didn’t you? Of course you did.) You don’t need me to remind you that it was a shiny object of impressive design, slick in hand and light in pocket. Its screen was bright and its many animations produced endless, silent “oohs” even as they became quickly familiar. Accelerometer-triggered rotations, cell tower triangulations (the first model didn’t have GPS yet), and seamless cellular/WiFi data transitions invoked strong levels of welcome magic. These were all novelties once, and not that long ago.

What you probably don’t remember: that first iPhone was also terrible. Practically unusable, really, for the ordinary barrage of phone calls, text messages, mobile email, and web browsing that earlier smartphones had made portable. And not for the reasons we feared before getting our hands on one—typing without tactile feedback wasn’t as hard to get used to as BlackBerry and Treo road warriors had feared, even if it still required a deliberate transition from t9 or mini-keyboard devices—but rather because the device software was pushing the limits of what affordable hardware could handle at the time.

Applications loaded incredibly slowly. Pulling up a number or composing an email by contact name was best begun before ordering a latte or watering a urinal to account for the ensuing delay. Cellular telephone reception was far inferior to other devices available at the time, and regaining a lost signal frequently required an antenna or power cycle. Wireless data reception was poor and slow, and the device’s ability to handle passing in and out of what coverage it might find was limited. Tasks interrupted by coverage losses, such as email sends in progress, frequently failed completely.

The software was barebones. There was no App Store in those early days, making the iPhone’s operating system a self-contained affair, a ladleful of Apple-apportioned software gruel, the same for everyone. That it worked at all was a miracle, but our expectations had been set high by decades of complex, adept desktop software. By comparison, the iPhone’s apps were barebones. The Mail application, for example, borrowed none of its desktop cousin’s elegant color-coded, threaded summary view but instead demanded inexplicable click-touches back and forward from folder to folder, mailbox to mailbox. Read more…