Новости за 29.08.2016

When Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender in a radio broadcast in 1945, his language was so formal and oblique that few understood what he was saying. When his son Akihito made an “appropriately indirect” televised address last month about his old age and failing health, listeners were almost as confused: “His vague wording initially led some to wonder if he had in fact abdicated, or whether he was simply laying down the foundation for such a move in the future”

The subject here is the privileged position of manufacturing industry in public policy, rather than the devising of new fetishes. “The idea that manufacturing is the central economic activity, and everything else is somehow subordinate, is deeply ingrained in human thinking. The perception that only tangible objects represent real wealth and only physical labour real work may have been formed in the days when economic activity was a constant search for food, fuel and shelter”

On the predatory pricing of the EpiPen. “Imagine that government creates the Furniture And Desk Association, which says only IKEA is allowed to sell chairs. IKEA responds by charging $300 per chair. Other companies try to sell stools or sofas, but get bogged down for years in litigation over whether these technically count as ‘chairs’. When a few of them win their cases, the FDA shoots them down anyway because they haven’t done studies showing that their chairs will not break”

Gripping story from 2004 Iraq of two American soldiers who fought their way back home after being caught in an ambush and abandoned by their unit. “When a little white jalopy came juddering down the road they decided to hijack it. Redus ran in front of the car with his rifle aimed at the windshield. Torres covered him from behind. They must have looked wretched in the headlights: two red-eyed gunmen, with dried blood covering their hands and faces, reeking of sewage, shouting in English”

Beautifully-drawn miniature of an early childhood in northern China. “Here, on 4 September 1985, Liu Xiao was born. She was delivered by a midwife at home, on her parents’ bed. For the first hour she didn’t cry, and everyone was beside themselves. Then she began bawling to the gods and they tearfully wished she would shut up. At the age of seven days her ears were pierced with a needle and red thread, an old tradition to bring a child good luck and health”

History may remember David Cameron only for Brexit, much as it remembers Chamberlain only for Munich. But the greater likelihood is that Cameron will be completely forgotten within a few decades, like most other British prime ministers. The difference with Cameron is that he really doesn’t seem to mind. “Most prime ministers leave office bitter, obsessive and brooding. But, like Stanley Baldwin, Cameron strolled away from the job as calmly as he had strolled into it”