Новости за 18.01.2016

Publication of Mein Kampf in Germany, ending a 70-year taboo, gives Germans “direct access to the early raw material of Hitler’s madness”. The new four-volume “critical edition” is aimed at scholars and libraries. The editors have “encircled” Hitler’s words with “analytical and deconstructing” footnotes. “We wanted to surround the text to demystify it and destroy it … Ironically, it will look like the Talmud”

How did one of America’s most admired retailers fall flat on its back in Canada? Two main reasons. First, Target bought 124 stores up-front, in effect committing itself to opening them fast. Second, it bought new stock-management software that it didn’t know how to use. Warehouses swelled with stock that never got to the stores. After one year Target Canada issued a public apology. After two years it filed for bankruptcy

Behaving well is a good business strategy, because there are gains from the trust and happiness to which it gives rise. “Most people would prefer to leave the office each day being able to say to themselves that they’d done something valuable for society, or at least that they’d caused no harm. Firms that can credibly offer this amenity to their employees enjoy an incredibly powerful recruiting advantage”

An instant classic. One for the anthologies. Metered paywall, but worth a year’s subscription to the New Yorker in itself. Tad Friend struggles to continue playing first-class squash — “tennis at triple speed” — after he turns fifty. The prose is so exhilarating that you don’t need any prior interest in squash to be carried along by it. “The game, above a certain level of skill, is played at a lunatic extremity of effort”

Interview. “The Germans, under the leadership of Merkel, have achieved a position of hegemony. But they achieved it very cheaply. Normally hegemons have to look out not only for their own interests, but also for the interests of those who are under their protection. Now it’s time for Germans to decide: Do they want to accept the responsibilities and the liabilities involved in being the dominant power in Europe?”

Nominally a review of Max Porter’s “compact and splendid” novel, Grief Is The Thing With Feathers — but really an essay in its own right about the representation of death in literature, with an evisceration of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and her five stages of grief at its centre, flanked by discursions on Emerson, autism, Keith Vaughan, Emily Dickinson, Dickens, crows, Crow, famous last words and Montaigne