Equivocality

Is captialism inherently flawed, violent and unfair? Are the WTO, World Bank, and IMF to blame for huge amounts of the world’s misery? Is transnational capital flow or multinational corporations an inherently bad idea? I don’t know. Read that again. I don’t know. This is what I am saying that the author of the above quoted paragraph is not. The world is big and very, very complex. I’m seeing as much as I can personally; for the rest I must rely on second-hand accounts.

I am in Budapest, staying in an apartment on the top floor of a building constructed in 1897. The ceilings are vaulted, the floor is hardwood, the central courtyard is lined with intricate wrought iron railings. When I stick my head out of the French windows, I can see that the entire block is full [...]

Is this guy still writing books? Well, I can see why. I Am Charlotte Simmons was published in 2004 when he was 73 years old. It’s a story set in contemporary American college life. It matches well my own university experience of ten years ago, and for the most part it reads as completely real.

I have just finished Alexander McCall Smith’s novel The Kalahari Typing School for Men. This is one of the books in a series called The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, and like all of the books in this series, it is set in Botswana, where Smith was born.

It’s a pleasant enough read, apparently aimed [...]

Eventually I realized that I knew nothing about Africa.

I’d heard something about millions of people starving, about AIDS, about war, corruption, and drought. I’d seen the infomercials. I’d caught snippets of Live-8 on television, and I couldn’t avoid the GAP’s huge advertising campaign. Donate money to the cause, Bono told me. But all of it was just a bit too mythical, heavy on pathos but shy on fact. There remained for me the central unanswered question: what is wrong with Africa?

So I went there.