Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
To add some color to my previous post, it looks like office dwellers on Avenue Faria Lima move around on kick scooters and bikes: To avoid the jams, office workers venture out on rented bikes and scooters. Making up around…
Another tweet related to Brazil and Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Faria Limers Bolsonaristas vão ficar bravos com você Taleb. It took me a few minutes to figure out those Limers: Bolsonarists from Faria Lima Avenue are going to get mad at…
I should have posted this two days ago, on March 5. Better late than never: March 5 is the day Stalin died in 1953, the so-called Cheyne-Stokes Day. In 2016, I wrote two more posts about that day of deliverance:…
From N. N. Taleb’s Twitter feed, a retweet: Imagina quando o Taleb descobrir que a pelegada bolsonarista que prega o não uso da máscara se diz antifrágil? Which, I think, translates approximately into this: Imagine when Taleb discovers that the…
Looking away from the feisty conservatives to the opposite side of the political campground, consider Corey Robin’s tweet: Physical attractiveness is a charged topic. The ancients thought it was part of the social order, dividing elite from commoner. In the…
David P. Goldman gained a large-scale following as the Spengler of Asia Times. Apart from being a well-immersed observer of China with strong opinions, he is also a well-trained musicologist with strong opinions. He has argued that Wagner’s deepest anti-Semitism…
Jethro Bithell wrote in Contemporary French Poetry (1912): That poem is worth more than all the commentaries on symbolism. “Le chanson grise” (whether it means “gray song,” as some of my friends say, or “drunken song,” as others say —…
The Congo, I Presume? is a sculpture group by Tom Frantzen in the garden of the AfricaMuseum in Brussels. Zoey Poll writes in Lapham’s Quarterly: It’s hard to imagine that a passerby would pick up on the work’s supposed anticolonial…
A name from the poetic anthology mentioned in this post of mine has surfaced in a comment to a post at Language Hat: Elinor Wylie. Velvet Shoes was the only poem by Wylie I could recall. In the comment linked…
Reviewing Evgeny Boratynsky and the Russian Golden Age by Anatoly Liberman, Sibelan Forrester remarks: Russians who read Anglophone poetry in the Soviet period turned to the works available, which were largely translations or original editions of poetry from the era…
For English-language coverage of the protests in Russia, I’d probably recommend Kevin Rothrock‘s Twitter feed as a starting point. What’s different about this year’s Navalny-triggered protests are the high participation rate (relative to the population) outside of Moscow and St.…
Putin appointed Andrei Illarionov as his senior economic adviser in April 2000. Illarionov remained in that position until late December, 2005. Those were good years for the Russian economy. Simply put, it was growing, and would keep growing until 2007.…