Nelson Mandela

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pages: 641 words: 147,719

The Rough Guide to Cape Town, Winelands & Garden Route by Rough Guides, James Bembridge, Barbara McCrea

affirmative action, Airbnb, blood diamond, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, colonial rule, F. W. de Klerk, gentrification, ghettoisation, haute cuisine, Maui Hawaii, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, out of africa, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, transfer pricing, young professional

The top floor, accessed via a ramp, accommodates the Penguin Exhibit, featuring a small breeding colony of endangered African penguins (which you can see in their natural habitat at Boulders Beach) and the rockhopper penguins. Nelson Mandela Gateway Clock Tower Precinct • Daily 7.30am–5.30pm • Free • 021 413 4200, robben-island.org.za The imposing Clock Tower by the Waterfront’s swing bridge was built as the original Port Captain’s office in 1882. Adjacent to this is the Nelson Mandela Gateway, the embarkation point for ferries to Robben Island and sometimes referred to as Jetty 1. Here, the Robben Island Museum has installed a number of exhibitions that are open to the public and free of charge.

Elizabeth was the young wife of the Cape’s acting governor in 1820, Sir Rufane Donkin; she died of fever in India in 1818. The nineteen Donkin Houses, built in the mid-nineteenth century and declared National Monuments in 1967, reflect the desire of the English settlers to create a home from home in this strange, desiccated land. Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum 1 Park Drive • Mon & Wed–Fri 9am–5pm, Tues 2–5pm • Free The Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, situated in two buildings framing the entrance to St George’s Park, sounds grander than it is, but has a collection of contemporary local work, visiting exhibitions and a small shop selling postcards and local arts and crafts.

Advocate, police-reserve sergeant and award-winning novelist, Brown paints a gritty, and sometimes witty, picture of life on the beat, tackling the mean streets of Cape Town. Richard Calland Anatomy of South Africa: Who Holds the Power. An incisive dissection of politics and power in South Africa today, from one of the most respected commentators in the country. John Carlin Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that made a Nation. Gripping account of Nelson Mandela’s use of the 1995 Rugby World Cup to unite a fractious nation, in danger of collapsing into civil war. It was also published as Invictus, the title of the Clint Eastwood film, which starred Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman. Andrew Feinstein After the Party: Corruption, the ANC and South Africa’s Uncertain Future.


One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B. J. Novak

Bernie Madoff, carbon-based life, citation needed, dark matter, do what you love, F. W. de Klerk, Nelson Mandela, Saturday Night Live

We can make everything what it was, now that you understand the significance of everything that happened. And then they put her on the phone, and she says one more thing. The Comedy Central Roast of Nelson Mandela The following is a transcript of excerpts from the unaired 2012 special The Comedy Central Roast of Nelson Mandela. There is currently no broadcast date for this special. ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Comedy Central Roast of Nelson Mandela! With Jeffrey Ross! Lisa Lampanelli! Archbishop Desmond Tutu! Archbishop Don “Magic” Juan! Winnie Mandela! Sisqo! Anthony Jeselnik! Pauly D! Former South African prime minister F.

Sustained standing ovation. GILBERT GOTTFRIED: NELSON MANDELA IS ONE OF THE GREAT MEN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. (Applause) AND ONE OF THE GREAT MEN OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AND OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY AND OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY AND OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY AND OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY AND OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY AND OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY AND OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY. NELSON, LOOK AT YOU, HOW OLD ARE YOU? NELSON MANDELA IS SO OLD, HE HATES HIS PRESIDENTIAL LIMOUSINE BECAUSE HE STILL CAN’T GET USED TO THE WHEELS! NELSON MANDELA IS ONE OF THE GREAT MEN OF THE TENTH CENTURY AND ONE OF THE GREAT MEN OF THE NINTH CENTURY AND ONE OF THE GREAT MEN OF THE EIGHTH CENTURY AND ONE OF THE GREAT MEN OF THE SEVENTH CENTURY— JEFFREY ROSS: And now, ladies and gentlemen, the man of the hour, a living legend, President Nelson Mandela!

And now, ladies and gentlemen, the “Roastmaster General” himself, JEFFREY ROSS! Jeffrey Ross enters dressed as Honey Boo Boo Child. He turns slowly to reveal his costume. He receives a standing ovation. JEFFREY ROSS: What an honor to be here roasting President Nelson Mandela. (Applause) President Mandela, you’re a good sport, thank you for agreeing to be here. All proceeds tonight go to the Nelson Mandela Foundation, which fights poverty in Africa. (Applause) Poverty in Africa—I have a feeling your charity is going to be around for quite a while, President Mandela. (Applause) President Mandela, you took one of the most unjust nations on earth and made it what it is today: one of the most violent nations on earth.


pages: 1,203 words: 124,556

Lonely Planet Cape Town & the Garden Route (Travel Guide) by Lucy Corne

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, Day of the Dead, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, load shedding, Mark Shuttleworth, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, retail therapy, Robert Gordon, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl

TOP SIGHT Robben Island Robben Island’s best-known prisoner was Nelson Mandela, which makes it one of the most popular pilgrimage spots in all of Cape Town. Set some 12km out in Table Bay, the flat island – a Unesco World Heritage site – served as a jail from the early days of VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie; Dutch East India Company) control right up until 1996. The Tour The small island, just 2km by 4km, can only be visited on a tour that starts with a ferry journey (30 to 60 minutes, depending on the vessel) from Nelson Mandela Gateway at the Waterfront. Once on the island you'll be introduced to a guide, typically a former inmate, who will lead a walk through the old prison (with an obligatory peek into Mandela’s cell).

It includes a map detailing the stories of many prominent activists and events in South Africa's 20th-century history. Path to Democracy In 1982 Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders were moved from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town. (In 1986 senior politicians began secretly talking with them.) Concurrently, the state’s military crackdowns in the townships became even more pointed. In early 1990 President FW de Klerk began to repeal discriminatory laws, and the ANC, PAC and Communist Party were legalised. On 11 February the world watched in awe as a living legend emerged from Victor Verster Prison near Paarl. Later that day Nelson Mandela delivered his first public speech since being incarcerated 27 years earlier to a massive crowd overspilling from Cape Town’s Grand Parade.

Schedule time for a hike: the park’s 245 sq km include routes to suit all levels of fitness and ambition, from gentle ambles to spot fynbos (literally ‘fine bush’, primarily proteas, heaths and ericas) to the five-day, four-night Hoerikwaggo Trail. 1Garden & Surrounds Table Mountain GUNTER LENZ/GETTY IMAGES © Cape Town’s Top 10 Robben Island 2A World Heritage site, the former prison on Robben Island is a key location in South Africa’s long walk to freedom. Nelson Mandela and other Freedom struggle heroes were incarcerated here, following in the tragic footsteps of earlier fighters against the various colonial governments that ruled over the Cape. Taking the boat journey here and the tour with former inmates provides an insight into the country’s troubled history – and a glimpse of how far it has progressed on the path to reconciliation and forgiveness. 1Green Point & Waterfront Robben Island MARK HARRIS/GETTY IMAGES © Cape Town’s Top 10 Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens 3There’s been European horticulture on the picturesque eastern slopes of Table Mountain since Jan van Riebeeck’s time in the 17th century, but it was British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, owner of Kirstenbosch Farm and surrounding properties, who really put the gardens on the map when he bequeathed the land to all Capetonians.


pages: 325 words: 97,162

The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life. by Robin Sharma

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, dematerialisation, epigenetics, fake news, Grace Hopper, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, index card, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Rosa Parks, telemarketer, white picket fence

“This is a special day for them,” remarked the pilot, his voice getting louder. “These people have come a long way to see the prison cell where Nelson Mandela was jailed. They have come to view the limestone quarry where he was forced to hack away at stones for over a decade, in the torturous sun that reflected off the rock to the point where it damaged his eyesight permanently. They want to view the courtyard where the statesman would exercise and throw tennis balls with confidential messages inside to his fellow political prisoners in the next cell-block. They need to go to the spot where Nelson Mandela’s manuscript for Long Walk to Freedom, his autobiography, would be secretly buried in the dirt after he’d spent many hours working on it.

Everything we go through as we travel through a life is, in truth, a fantastic orchestration designed to introduce us to our truest talents, connect us with our most sovereign selves and deepen our intimacy with the glorious hero that lives inside each of us. Yes, within every single one of us. And that does mean you. The tour guide, who also happened to be a former political prisoner, was a large man with a gruff voice. As he led his guests toward the cell where Nelson Mandela was forced to live for so many long and harsh years, he answered each of the questions they asked. “Did you know Nelson Mandela?” queried The Spellbinder thoughtfully. “Yes, I served with him for eight years here on Robben Island.” “What was he like as a person?” asked the artist, appearing overwhelmed by the emotions that he was feeling as they walked down the main corridor of the jail that had been home to so many atrocities during the apartheid era.

“As we go through life we endure our own trials and injustices. Nothing as severe as what went on here, of course. I read that Nelson Mandela said his greatest regret was not being allowed out of this prison to attend the funeral of his eldest son after he was killed in a car accident,” expressed the billionaire. He looked up to the sky. “I guess we all have our regrets. And no one gets out without their own ordeals and tragedies.” The tour guide pointed to the fourth window, to the right of the entrance into the courtyard. “There,” he stated. “That’s Nelson Mandela’s cell. Let’s go in.” The cell was incredibly small. No bed. A small wooden table that the prisoner would kneel at to write in his journal as there was no chair, a concrete floor and a brown woolen blanket, with green and red flecks in it.


pages: 475 words: 156,046

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them by Philip Collins

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, collective bargaining, Copley Medal, Corn Laws, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Great Leap Forward, invention of the printing press, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rosa Parks, stakhanovite, Ted Sorensen, Thomas Malthus, Torches of Freedom, World Values Survey

In Bombay, the sirens of hundreds of mills and factories, the whistling of railway engines and hooting from ships ushered in independence at midnight. There was, indeed, a mountain of hard work ahead, and it is not done yet, but Nehru’s words defined the possibility of the nation that India is in the constant process of becoming. NELSON MANDELA An Ideal for Which I Am Prepared to Die Supreme Court of South Africa, Pretoria 20 April 1964 Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) became, for a generation of people, within South Africa and far beyond, the captain of their soul. There is a case for suggesting that Mandela’s incarceration was a blessing for his political reputation. Deprived of the capacity to speak and make public errors, Mandela emerged from a quarter of a century in prison as a candidate for sainthood, which his subsequent grace justified.

Kennedy: Ask Not What Your Country Can Do for You, Washington DC, 20 January 1961 Barack Obama: I Have Never Been More Hopeful about America, Grant Park, Chicago, 7 November 2012 Pericles: Funeral Oration, Athens, Winter, c. 431 BC David Lloyd George: The Great Pinnacle of Sacrifice, Queen’s Hall, London, 19 September 1914 Woodrow Wilson: Making the World Safe for Democracy, Joint Session of the Two Houses of Congress, 2 April 1917 Winston Churchill: Their Finest Hour, House of Commons, 18 June 1940 Ronald Reagan: Tear Down This Wall, The Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, 12 June 1987 Elizabeth I of England: I Have the Heart and Stomach of a King, Tilbury, 9 August 1588 Benjamin Franklin: I Agree to This Constitution with All Its Faults, The Constitutional Convention, Philadelphia, 17 September 1787 Jawaharlal Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny, Constituent Assembly, Parliament House, New Delhi, 14 August 1947 Nelson Mandela: An Ideal for Which I Am Prepared to Die, Supreme Court of South Africa, Pretoria, 20 April 1964 Aung San Suu Kyi: Freedom from Fear, European Parliament, Strasbourg, 10 July 1991 William Wilberforce: Let Us Make Reparations to Africa, House of Commons, London, 12 May 1789 Emmeline Pankhurst: The Laws That Men Have Made, The Portman Rooms, 24 March 1908 Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez (La Pasionaria): No Pasarán, Mestal Stadium, Valencia, 23 August 1936 Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream, The March on Washington, 28 August 1963 Neil Kinnock: Why Am I the First Kinnock in a Thousand Generations?

The great causes, at least in the rich, fortunate democracies, have gone. If there are fewer uplifting speeches today than there once were, then the chief cause is a heartening one. Momentous speeches are always given in answer to a signal injustice or crisis – think of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. The success of the developed democracies means injustice is less acute than it once was. The great questions – the entitlement to vote, material and gender equality, freedom of association and speech, war and peace – are not entirely resolved, but the first decades of the twenty-first century show progress that would have been unimaginable two centuries before.


pages: 195 words: 58,462

City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World by Catie Marron

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, do-ocracy, fixed-gear, gentrification, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, plutocrats, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning

But I’m not an expert in how the Grand Parade fits into the life and architecture of Cape Town, so I called someone who is: a distinguished professor of urban studies at the University of Cape Town, Vanessa Watson. Watson lives in the same suburb where she was living when Nelson Mandela dropped by her house on his way to the Grand Parade. The baby boy whom Nelson Mandela held is now a twenty-four-year-old law student. Watson speaks in a firm voice with a strong South African accent. She says it was logical that the ANC would have chosen Grand Parade: “It’s the largest and most important public space in Cape Town. It’s the most iconic meeting place.

Rory Stewart tells the story of a square in Kabul, which has come and gone several times over five centuries, due to both the local culture and, equally, the will of one individual, the latest iteration involving Rory himself in the leadership role. Ari Shavit describes the changes of central Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square, which began as a forum for rallies and assemblies, then became the symbolic site of a national tragedy, and is now an almost empty void, even as hectic urban life bustles with energy around its edges. Rick Stengel recounts Nelson Mandela’s choice of the Grand Parade, Cape Town, a huge market square that was transformed into a public space of historic magnitude when he spoke to the world right after his release from twenty-seven years in prison. In Euromaidan, Tahrir, and Taksim squares, social media—the new virtual square—summoned people to the physical square.

There is a mystique to the place that carried the memories, the nobility, and the pride of the people who stood their ground to create a new Egypt. They created a conscious space that pulled people in and made them see beyond their limits. We often see the greatest hits of change. We see Martin Luther King, Jr., lead a march on Washington; we see Nelson Mandela freeing South Africa. But we don’t see the process of change. We don’t experience the agony of King’s family over the years, and we don’t spend twenty-seven years in prison with Mandela. In the square, I saw the quiet, determined, and relentless fight for change. Change does not happen overnight.


pages: 288 words: 90,349

The Challenge for Africa by Wangari Maathai

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, deliberate practice, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, sustainable-tourism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

The reintroduction of multipartism in many African nations resulted from demands by donor nations, as well as from the many years of struggle by African civil society for better governance. Another powerful sign that the Cold War was over and that entrenched systems could change was the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 after twenty-seven years in prison, followed by the formal end of apartheid in South Africa four years later. Mandela's release also fulfilled one of the main aims of the much-maligned Organization for African Unity: the political decolonization of the entire African continent.

No nation has developed these three pillars without the people themselves chiseling them, sometimes at a great price. In Africa, independence movements throughout the continent struggled to free their fellow citizens from colonialism and imperialism—including those led by Jomo Kenyatta, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela, and Walter Sisulu. One is reminded of the courage and determination of those who fought for women's suffrage in the early part of the twentieth century; Mahatma Gandhi's campaign for Indian independence, which mobilized hundreds of thousands of individuals in nonviolent resistance to British rule; and the civil rights movement in the United States, for which many people gave their lives.

It should not be impossible to find leaders in Africa willing to raise the standard of leadership and to nurture them so that they be come beacons for the continent. To be sure, some leaders tried, often at great personal sacrifice, to give that hope to their people and to the African people at large—men such as Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Seretse Khama in Botswana, Léopold Senghor in Senegal, Ahmed Ben Bella in Algeria, and even Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana in his early years. Will their example ever be followed by leaders and would-be leaders in Africa today and in coming decades? The exercise of good leadership would end government violations of human rights and restrictions on freedoms such as the right to move, assemble, access information, and organize.


pages: 202 words: 8,448

Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World by Srdja Popovic, Matthew Miller

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, British Empire, corporate governance, desegregation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Rosa Parks, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, urban sprawl

Gene Sharp de nes this all-important principle: Gene Sharp, There Are Realistic Alternatives (Boston: Albert Einstein Institution, 2003), 21. 3. “the conception of how best to achieve objectives in a con ict”: Ibid., 21. Chapter IX: The Demons of Violence 1. “At the beginning of June 1961”: “ ‘I Am Prepared to Die’: Nelson Mandela’s Opening Statement from the Dock at the Opening of the Defence Case in the Rivonia Trial,” United Nations website for Nelson Mandela Day, www.​un.​org/​en/​events/​mandeladay/​court_​statement_​ 1964.​shtml. 2. the Spear launched almost two hundred attacks: Janet Cherry, Spear of the Nation (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), 23. 3. “We should have the ability to defend ourselves”: Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas (New York: Vintage, 2002), 109. 4.

Riahi) 8.1 Hundreds of thousands of protesters were preparing for the nonviolent takeover of the Serbian Parliament Building in Belgrade on October 5, 2000. (Igor Jeremic) 8.2 “2000—This is the Year”: Otpor!’s campaign following the group’s Orthodox New Year Concert in January 2000. 8.3 Celebrating OPTOR’s victory in the October 5 revolution, Slavija Square, Belgrade. (Igor Jeremic) 9.1 Nelson Mandela’s cell in Robben Island Prison in South Africa. (Paul A. Mannix) 9.2 Nonviolence sculpture by Carl Frederick Reuterswärd. (MHM55) 10.1 A Muslim holding the Koran and a Coptic Christian holding a cross in Tahrir Square. Cairo, February 6, 2011. (Dylan Martinez) 10.2 “We Are Watching You”: Otpor!’

Think about it: how many movies have you seen about World War II or the Vietnam War? Plenty, I’m sure. But try to count the number of major lms that have been made about famous nonviolent struggles. There’s Gandhi, of course, with Ben Kingsley; Milk, with Sean Penn; plus a few moving tributes to Nelson Mandela. But that’s pretty much it. We revere the warriors, but have the warriors really shaped history? Consider the following: the main outcome of World War I was World War II, and the main outcome of World War II was the Cold War, which in turn gave us Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the war on terror, and so on.


pages: 270 words: 87,864

Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Nelson Mandela, white flight

He puts his head down and fights. When the colonial armies invaded, the Zulu charged into battle with nothing but spears and shields against men with guns. The Zulu were slaughtered by the thousands, but they never stopped fighting. The Xhosa, on the other hand, pride themselves on being the thinkers. My mother is Xhosa. Nelson Mandela was Xhosa. The Xhosa waged a long war against the white man as well, but after experiencing the futility of battle against a better-armed foe, many Xhosa chiefs took a more nimble approach. “These white people are here whether we like it or not,” they said. “Let’s see what tools they possess that can be useful to us.

The last thing I wanted to do that Sunday morning was climb into some crowded minibus, but the second I heard my mom say sun’qhela I knew my fate was sealed. She gathered up Andrew and we climbed out of the Volkswagen and went out to try to catch a ride. — I was five years old, nearly six, when Nelson Mandela was released from prison. I remember seeing it on TV and everyone being happy. I didn’t know why we were happy, just that we were. I was aware of the fact that there was a thing called apartheid and it was ending and that was a big deal, but I didn’t understand the intricacies of it. What I do remember, what I will never forget, is the violence that followed.

Before apartheid, any black South African who received a formal education was likely taught by European missionaries, foreign enthusiasts eager to Christianize and Westernize the natives. In the mission schools, black people learned English, European literature, medicine, the law. It’s no coincidence that nearly every major black leader of the anti-apartheid movement, from Nelson Mandela to Steve Biko, was educated by the missionaries—a knowledgeable man is a free man, or at least a man who longs for freedom. The only way to make apartheid work, therefore, was to cripple the black mind. Under apartheid, the government built what became known as Bantu schools. Bantu schools taught no science, no history, no civics.


Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower by William Blum

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, collective bargaining, Columbine, disinformation, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, it's over 9,000, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing

For several years, Haiti and its supporters in the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and in the General Assembly have tried to bring to a vote a resolution calling for the United States to return the documents. But the US delegation has been able to maneuver the proceedings to block such a vote.11 CHAPTER 23 : How the CIA Sent Nelson Mandela to Prison for 28 Years When Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990, President George Bush personally telephoned the black South African leader to tell him that all Americans were "rejoicing at his release".1 This was the same Nelson Mandela who was imprisoned for almost 28 years because the CIA tipped off South African authorities as to where they could find him. And this was the same George Bush who was once the head of the CIA and who for eight years was second in power of an administration whose CIA and National Security Agency collaborated closely with the South African intelligence service, providing information about Mandela's African National Congress.2 The ANC was a progressive nationalist movement whose influence had been felt in other African countries; accordingly it had been perceived by Washington as being part of the legendary International Communist Conspiracy.

George Bush, 1992 3 How can they have the arrogance to dictate to us where we should go or which countries should be our friends? Gadhafi is my friend. He supported us when we were alone and when those who tried to prevent my visit here today were our enemies. They have no morals. We cannot accept that a state assumes the role of the world's policeman. Nelson Mandela, 1997 4 When I came into office, I was determined that our country would go into the 21st century still the world's greatest farce for peace and freedom, for democracy and security and prosperity. Bill Clinton, 1996 5 Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, kitted or "disappeared", at the hands of governments or armed political groups.

A Concise History of United States Global Interventions, 1945 to the Present 125 18. Perverting Elections 168 19. Trojan Horse: The National Endowment for Democracy 179 20. The US versus the World at the United Nations 184 21. Eavesdropping on the Planet 200 22. Kidnapping and Looting 210 23. How the CIA Sent Nelson Mandela to Prison for 28 Years 215 24. The CIA and Drugs: Just Say "Why Not?" 218 25. Being the World's Only Superpower Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry 227 26. The United States Invades, Bombs and Kills for It...but Do Americans Really Believe in Free Enterprise? 236 27. A Day in the Life of a Free Country 243 Notes 274 Index 305 About the Author 310 Author's Foreword: Concerning September 11, 2001 and the Bombing of Afghanistan Shortly after the publication of this book, the momentous events of September 11, 2001 occurred.


pages: 410 words: 101,260

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

Malala Yousafzai was moved: Jodi Kantor, “Malala Yousafzai: By the Book,” New York Times, August 19, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/books/review/malala-yousafzai-by-the-book.html. King was inspired by Gandhi: Rufus Burrow Jr., Extremist for Love: Martin Luther King Jr., Man of Ideas and Nonviolent Social Action (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014). as was Nelson Mandela: “Nelson Mandela, the ‘Gandhi of South Africa,’ Had Strong Indian Ties,” Economic Times, December 6, 2013, articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-12-06/news/44864354_1_nelson-mandela-gandhi-memorial-gandhian-philosophy. Elon Musk . . . Lord of the Rings: Tad Friend, “Plugged In: Can Elon Musk Lead the Way to an Electric-Car Future?” New Yorker, August 24, 2009, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/24/plugged-in.

field of evidence-based management: Trish Reay, Whitney Berta, and Melanie Kazman Kohn, “What’s the Evidence on Evidence-Based Management?,” Academy of Management Perspectives (November 2009): 5–18. 8: Rocking the Boat and Keeping It Steady “I learned that courage”: Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (New York: Little, Brown, 1995). Instead of visualizing success: Personal interview with Lewis Pugh, June 10, 2014, and personal communication, February 15, 2015; Lewis Pugh, Achieving the Impossible (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010) and 21 Yaks and a Speedo: How to Achieve Your Impossible (Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2013); “Swimming Toward Success” speech at the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, January 23, 2014.

But we can locate role models in a more accessible place: the stories of great originals throughout history. Human rights advocate Malala Yousafzai was moved by reading biographies of Meena, an activist for equality in Afghanistan, and of Martin Luther King, Jr. King was inspired by Gandhi, as was Nelson Mandela. In some cases, fictional characters may be even better role models. Growing up, many originals find their first heroes in their most beloved novels, where protagonists exercise their creativity in pursuit of unique accomplishments. When asked to name their favorite books, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel each chose Lord of the Rings,, the epic tale of a hobbit’s adventures to destroy a dangerous ring of power.


pages: 299 words: 87,059

The Burning Land by George Alagiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, fear of failure, gentrification, land reform, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, pre–internet, urban decay, white flight, éminence grise

He knew that everything else that was wrong in their marriage had grown out of this one central accusation – that he had forgotten where they had both started out. They had met in the seventies. Josiah Motlantshe was the most prominent in a new generation of activists that was emerging inside South Africa, carrying the mantle of leadership while the likes of Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Joe Slovo were either jailed or in exile. He was an extrovert, a fiery orator. Priscilla was the opposite, but what she lacked in public presence she more than made up for with a quiet determination. When Motlantshe and some others were jailed it was said that, of all the women who were left behind, Priscilla would cope best.

That was in the days when she was a junior diplomat at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a position she owed to her fast-track appointment straight out of university. Because of her family’s links to South Africa, Lindi had been asked to prepare a draft paper on what South Africa might look like post-Nelson Mandela. Among other things, her report contained the memorable, if dramatic, assessment that if land ownership became an issue, the ensuing agitation would ‘make what happened in Zimbabwe look like a picnic’. She’d argued that apartheid’s legacy of white ownership might be eclipsed by the more recent land purchases: everyone from Gulf sheikhs, Chinese government agencies and private-equity magnates, many of them based in London, had been at it.

There must have been a dozen desks, each cluttered with PC screens, TV monitors and headphones. On one wall a line of clocks showed the time locally and in Lagos, Nairobi, London, Washington and Beijing. Underneath them, as if surveying the newsroom, was a life-size cut-out image of a beaming Nelson Mandela, his right arm raised in an iconic closed-fist salute. The great man had signed the picture. Lindi saw that its wooden base was screwed to the floor, presumably because it was the kind of memento for which there was a lucrative market. On another wall there was a row of screens, each tuned to a different channel – CNN, ENCA, BBC World and Al Jazeera.


pages: 401 words: 115,959

Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop, Michael Green, Bill Clinton

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, business process outsourcing, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital divide, do well by doing good, don't be evil, family office, financial innovation, full employment, global pandemic, global village, Global Witness, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Dyson, John Elkington, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, lone genius, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market bubble, mass affluent, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working poor, World Values Survey, X Prize

If they ask, the superrich can usually get face time with both global experts and those people on the ground who know what is really going on. When wealthy donors from the Global Philanthropists Circle visited South Africa in 2002, they were shown around the jail on Robben Island by its most famous former inmate, Nelson Mandela. In short, “richesse oblige” and a belief in hyperagency are the driving spirit of philanthrocapitalism today. The multibillion-dollar question is whether that spirit will be enough to change the world. CHAPTER 4 Billanthropy “ARE WE BIG ENOUGH TO PLAY OUR role in AIDS? Are we big enough to play our role in malaria?

WE WILL NEVER know how close British billionaire Sir Richard Branson came to preventing the bloody war in Iraq, but the instantly recognizable bearded boss of Virgin certainly tried. In early 2002, he recalls, “I was thinking, ‘How can we find a graceful way out for Saddam Hussein?’ I happen to know Nelson Mandela well. He had spoken out against the war. We talked about him going to Iraq, speaking to Saddam, confronting him with the truth. Maybe he could go into exile in Libya, the same way [1970s Ugandan dictator Idi] Amin went to Saudi, and we could avoid war.” If anyone could talk sense to Saddam, surely it was Mandela, the saintlike statesman who, as South Africa’s first black president, had overseen the country’s miraculously peaceful postapartheid transition to majority rule after his release from jail.

(for all Turner’s efforts). But Branson understood that launching a self-appointed group presented a huge branding challenge—along the lines of “who do these people think they are?” Wisely, he did not include himself as an Elder, nor the other philanthropists who agreed to back the group. Instead, he asked Nelson Mandela and his wife, Graça Machel, to appoint the first Elders. Branson describes the Elders group as an attempt to extend the brand of Mandela beyond his current frailties and limited remaining lifespan: “Mandela is not going to live forever. How do we replace, continue him?” This strategy certainly worked in the recruiting phase.


pages: 578 words: 131,346

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbnb, Anton Chekhov, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Broken windows theory, call centre, data science, David Graeber, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Easter island, experimental subject, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Garrett Hardin, Hans Rosling, invention of writing, invisible hand, knowledge economy, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nocebo, placebo effect, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey

‘As things stand now,’ Constand replies, ‘we have only one option, and that is to fight.’17 Then Braam makes a proposal, a plan he and Nelson Mandela have hammered out together in the utmost secrecy. What would Constand say, Braam asks, to sitting down with the ANC leadership for direct talks about the position of his people? By this point, Constand has already rejected nine such overtures. But this time his response is different. This time it’s his brother asking. And so it transpires that a pair of identical twins arrive together on the doorstep of a villa in Johannesburg on 12 August 1993. They expect to be greeted by household staff, but standing before them with a big grin is the man himself. Nelson Mandela. It’s a historic moment: the hero of the new South Africa standing eye to eye with the hero of the old.

In a pile of old notes, I found the brothers’ names, and after that, I wanted to know everything about them. 2 The story of the brothers is inextricably bound up with one of the most renowned figures of the twentieth century. On 11 February 1990, millions of people sat glued to their televisions to see him. Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for twenty-seven years, became a free man on that day. Finally, there was hope for peace and reconciliation between black and white South Africans. ‘Take your guns, your knives and your pangas,’ shouted Mandela shortly after his release, ‘and throw them into the sea!’1 Four years later, on 26 April 1994, the first elections were held for all South Africans.

Because if we have a better memory for bad interactions, how come contact nonetheless brings us closer together? The answer, in the end, was simple. For every unpleasant incident we encounter, there are any number of pleasant interactions.24 The bad may seem stronger, but it’s outnumbered by the good. If there’s one person who understood the power of contact it was Nelson Mandela. Years earlier, he had chosen a very different path – the path of violence. In 1960, Mandela had been one of the founding members of the armed wing of the ANC. But twenty-seven years behind bars can utterly change a person. As the years passed, Mandela began to realise what scientists would later show: nonviolent resistance is a lot more effective than violence.


pages: 530 words: 147,851

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism by Ed West

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Bullingdon Club, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, replication crisis, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, twin studies, urban decay, War on Poverty, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

Yet by aiming low, to paraphrase Michelle Obama’s expression, conservatives are only further helping to make their brand irredeemably vomit-inducing to almost anyone under the age of forty. It is a view summed up by the thirty-something Bridget Jones when she said: ‘Labour stands for sharing, kindness, gays, single mothers and Nelson Mandela as opposed to braying bossy men having affairs with everyone shag shag shag left right and centre and going to the Ritz in Paris then telling all the presenters off on the Today programme.’18 Bridget Jones is a fictional character, obviously, but the words reflect widespread middle-class thinking, and apply even more so today than when they were written in the 1990s, at a time when the Tory party seemed to disgrace itself with sexual peccadilloes while they were lecturing the rest of us on morality.

Like many public schoolboys of his generation, Dad embraced socialism as a young man and when he was stationed in Trieste for national service fell in love with Tito’s Yugoslavia. Any youthful ideals, however, were soon knocked out of him by his experience of decolonialisation in Africa. By the time I was around he was deeply pessimistic and cynical, and seriously out of step with the prevailing mood over South Africa. Although he respected and admired Nelson Mandela, he thought the ANC a venal and extreme organisation that would eventually make the country even worse off than it was under apartheid (which he nonetheless thought morally indefensible). This was, to put it mildly, an unpopular opinion during the 1980s, which despite the popular image of yuppies in pinstripes shouting down brick-sized mobile phones was a time of Left-wing cultural dominance in Britain.

Look at him – he’s cool, he’s sexy, he’s obviously kind and caring, you wouldn’t find him standing at a bar ranting about immigrants or writing incoherent comments below MailOnline articles. He’s a winner, and a charming winner too. Look at the line-up of people who represent liberalism in the modern imagination: Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, JFK, Martin Sheen in West Wing, Pope Francis, Oscar Romero, (younger, popular) Tony Blair and Barack Obama. Contrast with what people picture when they think of the Right: Richard Nixon looking sweaty and suspicious, racist 1970s comedians, South African security forces gripping their salivating Alsatians, semi-literate rednecks shouting at black people, five-foot South American dictators with their trophy wives, sleazy ‘back to basics’-era Tory MPs forcing their families to pose with them after they’d been caught engaged in sexual depravities with a dominatrix.


pages: 484 words: 155,401

Solitary by Albert Woodfox

airport security, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, full employment, income inequality, index card, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, means of production, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, side project

See also Free the Angola 4 beginning of, 261–65 creating the support and legal teams, 288–96 effectiveness of efforts, 329 King working outside with, 313, 373 protesting Camp J conditions, 284 selling candy to support, 277 support for AW, 286 support for habeas corpus petition, 275 support for Herman Wallace release, 355 support from Amnesty International, 331–32 National Commission n Correctional Health Care, 354 National Football League, 408 National Prison Project (ACLU), 341 National Rainbow Coalition, 68 national Registry of Exonerations (NRE), 409–10 National Rifle Association (NRA), 69 Native American Housing Committee, 68 Native Americans, 162 Native Son (Wright), 170, 208 Nazi Germany, 71 “Nelson Mandela Rules,” 411 Nelson Mandela’s Institute for Global Dialogue, 287 Neville, Charles, 37 New Orleans 6th Ward, 3–4, 46 13th Ward, 195–96 as “prison capital of the world,” 345 AW birth and living in, 1–2, 221 AW family departure to LaGrange, NC, 2–3 AW family escape from Daddy’s abuse, 3–4 AW friends in lockup from, 25, 27–28, 37, 91, 195–97 AW making a home in, 4–9, 318 AW relocation to Harlem, 58 AW return from lockups, 38, 46, 402 Civil War-era “convict-leasing,” 24–25 Contemporary Arts Center, 328 dealing drugs, 48 gangs/gang activities, 14–16, 18–19, 24, 46 habitual felon law, 54–55 Herman transferred to hospital, 365–66 Hurricane Katrina, 342 Mardi Gras, 4, 7 NAACP Legal Defense Fund, 349–50 national hearing on penal reform, 91, 306 police misconduct, 321, 342 presence of ACLU, 263 presence of Black Panthers, 80–81, 104, 126–27, 236–40, 263, 402 segregation and Jim Crow, 7–9 VOTE activist group, 409 New Orleans Legal Assistance (NOLA), 168 New Orleans Times-Picayune, 105, 120, 283, 345 New York City AW drug buying trips, 48 AW escape from New Orleans, 56–58 AW extradition to New Orleans, 79 AW plea deal and Rikers Island, 78–79 Black Panther presence, 58 incarceration at the Tombs, 58–60, 79, 410 incarceration in New Queens, 76–78 number of prisoners incarcerated, 74 prisoner riots, 74–78 New York Times, 63, 411 Newton, Huey P., 67–69, 72, 91, 126–27, 405, 407 “nigger” (racial slur), 7–8, 24, 30, 35, 77, 100–101, 228 “nigger lover,” 90 Nigger Miles (inmate guard), 42 Nightly News (TV program), 316 19th Judicial District Court, Baton Rouge, 169, 218, 234, 277, 289–92, 296, 350, 373 90-day review board.

To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality—all with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human and each of us who we are. Our survival depended on understanding what the authorities were attempting to do to us, and sharing that understanding with each other. —Nelson Mandela Nothing had changed at Angola. Sexual slavery was still a part of prison culture. Violence was still a constant threat. Armed inmate guards were still in use, on cellblocks, in guard towers, on horseback in the fields. Stabbings and beatings happened every day. Angola was the same. But I was different.

We knew that we were not locked up in a cell 23 hours a day because of what we did. We were there because of who we were. Sacrifice was required in order to achieve change. Neither of us had any regrets. We never talked about it again. Around this time, Goldy was released from Angola. Months later we heard he died on the street using dope. 1980s Nelson Mandela taught me that if you have a noble cause, you are able to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. Malcolm X taught me that it doesn’t matter where you start out; what matters is where you end up. George Jackson taught me that if you’re not willing to die for what you believe in, you don’t believe in anything.


pages: 337 words: 87,236

Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History by Alex von Tunzelmann

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, colonial rule, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Donald Trump, double helix, Easter island, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Earth, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Suez crisis 1956, the map is not the territory, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

., ‘Students Daub UCT statue’, The Argus, 14 Sep. 1979, quoted in Brenda Schmahmann, ‘The Fall of Rhodes’, p. 96. 27Quoted in Paul Maylam, The Cult of Rhodes, p. 39. 28Author’s interview with Simukai Chigudu, January 2021. 29Paul Maylam, ‘Monuments, memorials and the mystique of empire: the immortalisation of Cecil Rhodes in the twentieth century: The Rhodes Commemoration Lecture delivered on the occasion of the centenary of Rhodes’ death, 26 March 2002’, African Sociological Review, vol. 6, no.1 (2002), p. 143. 30Isabel Wilkerson, ‘Apartheid is Demolished. Must Its Monuments Be?’, The New York Times, 25 September 1994. 31‘Our story: Nelson Mandela and the Rhodes Trust’, Mandela Rhodes Foundation, https://www.mandelarhodes.org/about/story/. 32Nelson Mandela, remarks at the Mandela Rhodes Banquet, 2003, available at the Nelson Mandela Foundation Archive, https://atom.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/za-com-mr-s-993. 33Quoted in Nita Bhalla, ‘South Africa’s #RhodesMustFall Founder Speaks Out on Statues That Glorify Racism’, Global Citizen, 17 June 2020, available at https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/rhodes-must-fall-founder-racist-statues/. 34Quoted in Mphutlane Wa Bofelo, ‘Fallism and the dialectics of spontaneity and organization: Disrupting tradition to reconstruct tradition’, Pambazuka News, 11 May 2017, available at https://www.pambazuka.org/democracy-governance/fallism-and-dialectics-spontaneity-and-organization-disrupting-tradition. 35Andrew Harding, ‘Cecil Rhodes Monument: A Necessary Anger?’

Yet some local Ndebele people (formerly known as the Matabele) opposed the grave’s removal on the grounds that it brought tourism to the region. ‘Rhodes had ceased to be venerated,’ the historian Paul Maylam observed, ‘but he was still of some commercial value.’29 For now, Rhodes is still in his grave, with Jameson at his side. In South Africa, apartheid finally fell in the early 1990s. The activist Nelson Mandela, imprisoned since 1964, was freed in 1990. The Population Registration Act was repealed in 1991. South Africa had its first post-apartheid elections in 1994. Mandela became its first black president. Statues of apartheid figures were pulled down: many officially, though there were instances of ad hoc removal.

‘So now to see this renewed wave, which is gaining far more momentum, far more sympathy and being treated with far more nuance than our original cause, it’s quite frankly miraculous.’51 The reaction from Britain’s political leadership, though, echoed 2015. ‘We cannot rewrite our history,’ said the Universities Minister, Michelle Donelan.52 Oxford’s vice-chancellor, Louise Richardson, took a similar view, telling the Daily Telegraph that taking the statue down would be ‘a refusal to acknowledge our past’. She attempted to use Nelson Mandela’s 2003 remarks on Rhodes as an argument for keeping the statue, saying that Mandela ‘was a man of deep nuance who recognised complex problems for what they were. I don’t think he sought simplistic solutions. Hiding our history is not the route to enlightenment.’53 Fourteen Oxford professors wrote to the newspaper to deplore her ‘inappropriate ventriloquising’ of Mandela.54 The Mandela Rhodes Foundation issued a critical statement: ‘To use the partnership to justify the continued display of colonial symbols is to fundamentally misunderstand it.’55 ‘I would take it down,’ said Valerie Amos, the incoming master of University College, and the first black person to become head of an Oxford college in the institution’s 900-plus year history.


pages: 391 words: 117,984

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World by Jacqueline Novogratz

access to a mobile phone, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business process, business process outsourcing, clean water, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Hernando de Soto, Kibera, Lao Tzu, low interest rates, market design, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, tontine, transaction costs, zero-sum game

(April 16, 1963) The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (General Assembly of the United Nations, December 10, 1948) LIBERTY AND SOCIAL ORDER “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer” by Wendell Berry in Farming: A Hand Book (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich) “Democracy” by Langston Hughes Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes “Message to the Congress of Angostura, 1819” by Simón Bolívar The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli “Two Concepts of Liberty” by Isaiah Berlin (address before University of Oxford, October 31, 1958) EQUALITY AND THE QUEST FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela by Nelson Mandela (Little, Brown and Company) “O Yes” by Tillie Olsen in Tell Me a Riddle (Random House) The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau COMMUNITY AND THE SEARCH FOR HUMANITY The Book of Genesis The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism “How to Write about Africa” by Binyavanga Wainaina (Granta 92, Winter 2005) On Identity by Amin Maalouf (Harvill Panther) Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (Houghton Mifflin) “Speech upon Receiving the Philadelphia Liberty Medal” by Václav Havel (July 4, 1994) PROPERTY AND PRODUCTIVITY Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen (Anchor) Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff by Arthur M.

They allowed me to believe we could—and therefore must—create a world in which every person on the planet has access to the resources needed to shape their own lives. For this is where dignity starts. Not only for the very poor, but for all of us. CHAPTER 1 INNOCENT ABROAD “There is no passion to be found playing small in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.” —NELSON MANDELA It all started with the blue sweater, the one my uncle Ed gave me. He was like Santa to me, even in the middle of July. Of soft blue wool, with stripes on the sleeves and an African motif across the front—two zebras walking in front of a snowcapped mountain—the sweater made me dream of places far away.

CHAPTER 9 BLUE PAINT ON THE ROAD “There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.” —BUDDHA In 1994, along with the rest of the world, I witnessed the horror of the Rwandan genocide, as well as the brilliant inspiration of Nelson Mandela’s forgiveness of his captors and historic inauguration in South Africa. Coupled with an unfortunate encounter with personal violence on the beach in Tanzania, these contradictory events solidified a worldview that was growing more complex, grounded in the recognition of the potential for both good and evil in each one of us.


pages: 437 words: 115,594

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, colonial rule, creative destruction, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, export processing zone, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off grid, oil shock, out of africa, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

Where old dictators stayed in place, or new tyrants stepped in to replace the old, political and economic systems remained rigged. Strong leadership, smart policy choices, and committed and courageous action at the village, local, and national levels made all the difference in beginning to build the institutions needed to ignite and sustain progress. New national leaders such as Nelson Mandela of South Africa, Cory Aquino of the Philippines, Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, Lech Wałesa of Poland, and many others worked to build new and more inclusive political systems while introducing stronger economic management. Civil-society and religious leaders like Rigoberta Menchú Tum of Guatemala, Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh, Jaime Sin of the Philippines, and Wangari Maathai of Kenya gave greater voice to everyday citizens and pushed for expanded economic opportunities for the poor.

The push to democracy was on. THE SPREAD OF DEMOCRACY Changes began to unfurl around the world. Namibia gained its independence from South Africa and held its first elections for a new assembly the same day that the Berlin Wall fell. In February 1990—just twelve weeks later—South Africa released Nelson Mandela from jail. The apartheid government, propped up for so long by anticommunist fervor, followed its arch-nemesis the Soviet Union into the dustbin of history. Democracy spread across Africa: to Benin, Mali, Zambia, Lesotho, and Malawi. Czechoslovakia launched its Velvet Revolution against the ruling Communist Party just a week after the Wall fell, and just eleven days later, the government announced it would relinquish power and dismantle the single-party state.

Within two years, new governments swept into power in Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and several other countries. The effects went well beyond Eastern Europe. In South Africa, within days of the fall of the Wall, President F. W. de Klerk called together his cabinet to discuss legalizing the African National Congress Party and freeing Nelson Mandela. They did so twelve weeks later. When Mobutu Sese Seko—one of Africa’s most ruthless dictators—watched television coverage of Ceauşescu’s execution, he reportedly concluded that his own regime was in trouble. He soon announced steps toward “democratization.” Augusto Pinochet, who had grabbed power in Chile in a US-supported 1973 coup d’état against the Socialist-Marxist leadership of Salvador Allende, was forced to relinquish power to a new elected government in December 1989.


pages: 297 words: 69,467

Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, elephant in my pajamas, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Jane Jacobs, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, W. E. B. Du Bois

So here it is, hopefully for the last time in all our lives, though I doubt it: Highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector. Oh la la, one is intended to merrily note, is Nelson Mandela really an eight-hundred-year-old demigod and a dildo collector? Oh la la, I note, even if one sets a series comma, as in: Highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod, and a dildo collector. Mandela can still be an eight-hundred-year-old demigod. Some sentences don’t need to be repunctuated; they need to be rewritten.*7 7.

*6  The Times is a U.K. newspaper whose name is not, never has been, and likely never will be The London Times. The New York Times is an American newspaper that you may refer to, familiarly, as “the Times,” no matter that it persists in referring to itself, grandly and pushily, as The Times. *7  “Highlights of his global tour include encounters with a dildo collector, an 800-year-old demigod, and Nelson Mandela.” Was that so hard? And seriously: What sort of global tour was that? *8  When Alan Bennett’s 1991 play The Madness of George III was filmed, we’re told, the title was tweaked to The Madness of King George so as not to alienate potential attendees—especially ignorant Yanks—who hadn’t seen The Madness of George and The Madness of George II.


Because We Say So by Noam Chomsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, Chelsea Manning, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, high-speed rail, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Slavoj Žižek, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Captured at age 15, Khadr was imprisoned for eight years in Bagram and Guantánamo, then brought to a military court in October 2010, where he was given the choice of pleading not guilty and staying in Guantánamo forever, or pleading guilty and serving only eight more years. Khadr chose the latter. Many other examples illuminate the concept of “terrorist.” One is Nelson Mandela, only removed from the terrorist list in 2008. Another was Saddam Hussein. In 1982 Iraq was removed from the list of terrorist-supporting states so that the Reagan administration could provide Hussein with aid after he invaded Iran. Accusation is capricious, without review or recourse, and commonly reflecting policy goals—in Mandela’s case, to justify President Reagan’s support for the apartheid state’s crimes in defending itself against one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups”: Mandela’s African National Congress.

The dominant theme is the pain about the sacrifices, in vain, of the American soldiers who fought and died to liberate Fallujah. A look at the news reports of the U.S. assaults on Fallujah in 2004 quickly reveals that these were among the most vicious and disgraceful war crimes of that aggression. The death of Nelson Mandela provides another occasion for reflection on the remarkable impact of what has been called “historical engineering”: reshaping the facts of history to serve the needs of power. When Mandela at last obtained his freedom, he declared that “during all my years in prison, Cuba was an inspiration and Fidel Castro a tower of strength. . . .

., 31 Mearsheimer, John, 158 Meir, Golda, 77 Menachem Begin, 69 Mexico, 39, 42–43, 116, 147, 154 Miami, 124, 137 Micronesia, 86, 141 Middle East, 35–36, 58, 60, 65, 74, 83–87, 117, 153–154, 176, 183, 190 Mill, John Stuart, 145, 149 Mladic, Ratko, 46 Molina, Perez, 42 Monroe Doctrine, 41 Montt, Rios, 110, 111 Morales, Evo, 121–122 Morgenthau, 129–130 Morsi, Mohammed, 74, 75 Moscow, 55, 61 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 132 Moyn, Samuel, 47–48 Mozambique, 99 Mubarak, Hosni, 74 Mukhabarat, 99 Murray, William, 138 Namibia, 156 Nasr, Hassan Mustafa Osama, 124 National Defense Authorization Act, 32 Negev, 27–28 Nelson Mandela, 155 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 185 Nevada, 86 New Spirit of the Age, 53 Nicaragua, 111, 113, 180–181 Nicolaides, Kypros, 47 Nile Valley, 189 Nixon, Richard, 24, 64 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), 60, 84 Norman Ornstein, 135 North American Free Trade Agreement, 116 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 25, 160, 163–164, 171 Northern Laos, 31, 108 NPT, 35, 65, 84, 86, 139–141 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 35, 65, 84, 139 Nuremberg Trials, 31, 131, 155 Nystrom, Paul, 54 Obama, Barack, 32, 52, 63, 65, 85–86, 105, 107, 128, 129, 131, 139, 140, 154, 158, 159, 166, 169, 171, 174, 175, 179, 181, 185, 186 Okinawa, 55 Oklahoma, 166 Olmert, Ehud, 71, 73 Olstrom, Elinor, 53 Open Society Institute, 124 Operation Cast Lead, 70, 71, 186 Operation Gatekeeper, 116 Operation Mongoose, 56 Operation Pillar of Defense, 79, 184 Operation Protective Edge, 185 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 62 Organization of American States (OAS), 41, 121 Orwell, George, 26, 29 Oslo, 125 Oslo Accords, 70, 73, 75, 82, 125, 127 Oslo process, 127 Owl of Minerva, 189 Pacific Rim, 53 Pakistan, 35, 57, 106–107, 116, 153, 160, 192 Palau, 86, 128, 141 Palestine, 71, 79, 99, 101, 103, 117, 127–128, 161, 184–185 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 125 Panetta, Leon, 59 Pantucci, Raffaello, 81 Parry, Robert, 110 Pashtuns, 116 Peace Union of Finland, 85 Pearl Harbor, 29 Peck, James, 45, 48 People’s Summit, 54 Peres, Shimon, 127 Peri, Yoram, 69 Petersen, Alexandros, 81 Petrov, Stanislav, 164 Philippines, 108 Phoenicia, 189 Portugal, 42, 121 Powell, Lewis, 39 Power, Samantha, 132 Pretoria, 156 Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, 158 Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), 21, 22 Putin, Vladimir V., 129, 169, 171 Rabbani, Mouin, 183 Rabin, Yitzhak, 125, 127 Rafah Crossing, 74, 75 Raz, Avi, 77 Reagan, Ronald, 32, 109–111, 163, 175 Red Crescent, 46 Reilly, John, 23 Republicans, 28, 135–136 Riedel, Bruce, 35 Rio+20 Conference, 54 Roberts, Leslie, 106 Rocker, Rudolf, 146, 149 Romney, Mitt, 64, 83 Rose, Frank, 141 Ross, Dennis, 87, 126, 128 Rousseff, Dilma, 121 Roy, Sara, 72, 101 Rubinstein, Danny, 127 Rudoren, Jodi, 141 Rumsfeld, Donald, 178 Russia, 23, 25, 33, 56, 61, 140, 163–164, 171–172 Ryan, Paul, 62 Sakharov, Andrei D., 47 Samidin, 76 San Diego, 158 Sanger, David E., 141 Santos, Juan Manuel, 42 Saudi Arabia, 23, 60, 166, 190 Scahill, Jeremy, 107 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., 55, 138 Schlosser, Eric, 164 Schneider, Nathan, 147 Seko, Mobutu Sese, 180 Shafi, Haidar Abdul, 125 Shalit, Gilad, 27, 79 Shane, Scott, 52 Shehadeh, Raja, 70, 99 Sick, Gary, 57 Silk Road, 85 Sinai Peninsula, 77 Singapore, 91 Smith, Adam, 38, 91, 146 Snowden, Edward J., 121–123, 157, 173–176 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I., 47 Sourani, Raji, 71, 74, 82, 183 South Africa, 21, 25, 110, 155–156 South Vietnam, 29–30, 45 Soviet Union, 48, 164, 175 Spain, 121, 147 Sponeck, Hans von, 189 Stearns, Monteagle, 107 Stevenson, Adlai III, 161 Stiglitz, Joseph E., 38 Stratcom, 164–165 Stratfor, 46 Summer Olympics, 45 Sweden, 61 Swift, Jonathan, 62 Sykes-Picot Agreement, 115 Syria, 117, 131, 154, 177, 180, 189–190 Taiwan, 37, 91 Taksim Square, 118–119 Taliban, 178–179 Tehran, 65, 84, 141 Telhami, Shibley 141, 159 Tigris, 189 Trans-Pacific Partnership, 159 Trilateral Commission, 39 Tripoli, 137 Truman Doctrine, 175 Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar, 105 Turkey, 25, 33, 49, 56, 85, 118, 140, 170 U.K., 35 Ukraine, 169, 171 Union Carbide, 46 Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), 121 United Nations (U.N.), 30, 128, 132, 137 U.N.


pages: 403 words: 105,550

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark, Will Louch

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, high net worth, impact investing, income inequality, Jeffrey Epstein, Kickstarter, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, trade route, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, young professional

Abraaj Investment Management Limited and Arif Naqvi, United States District Court, Southern District of New York, Case 1:19-cv-03244-AJN, August 16, 2019. CHAPTER 12: HEALTHY LIVES Africa for the first time: Bill Gates, “Giving the Mandela Lecture,” Gates Notes, July 17, 2016, www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Nelson-Mandela-Annual-Lecture organized the trip: Joss Kent, as told to Charlotte Metcalf, “Bill Gates and Me,” The Spectator, July 18, 2009. “we couldn’t ignore”: Bill Gates, “Giving the Mandela Lecture,” Gates Notes, July 17, 2016, www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Nelson-Mandela-Annual-Lecture Bill wrote: Bill Gates, “Warren Buffett’s Best Investment,” GatesNotes, February 14, 2017, www.gatesnotes.com/2017-annual-letter health at the center: Nicholas D.

On a Wednesday evening in April 2014, Arif settled into a front-row seat at Oxford’s New Theatre to watch the opening film of the Skoll conference. Sir Ronald Cohen, the British impact investing pioneer who was inspiring governments and the Vatican to join his movement, sat next to Arif. Words appeared on the cinema screen. “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” The smiling face of Nelson Mandela, the first Black president of South Africa, flashed up. Rousing music accompanied images of human progress through history—a stone flour mill, a steam locomotive, an electric light, an astronaut walking in space. Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize laureate who pioneered providing microloans to poor people in Bangladesh, appeared on the screen.

The children in Africa were dying because they were poor. To us, it was the most unjust thing in the world.” Bill’s colossal wealth opened doors to important political leaders around the world. They briefed him and some asked for help in the distant lands where living standards were so different from America. Bill first spoke to Nelson Mandela in 1994, and the South African president and former freedom fighter asked him for funding for his country’s first democratic election. Bill and Melinda’s determination to take action to solve poverty was reaffirmed in 1997 when they read an article in the New York Times. Under the headline “For Third World, Water Is Still a Deadly Drink,” the journalist Nicholas Kristof put health at the center of the global poverty problem.


pages: 280 words: 82,393

Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes by Ian Leslie

Atul Gawande, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, data science, different worldview, double helix, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture , zero-sum game

The men were members of competing factions within the South African far right, who shared a belief in the genetic superiority of white Afrikaners. The Afrikaners, many of whom were ex-military and had fought in the war against Angola, were uniting forces against what they saw as a hostile black takeover of their country. Just over three years previously, the South African government had released Nelson Mandela from prison after twenty-seven years, following intense domestic and international pressure. They had also legalised his party, the African National Congress (ANC). Apartheid, the system that enabled the country’s white minority to rule South Africa and exclude its black majority, was on its way out.

One of the most powerful social skills is the ability to give face: to confirm the public image that the other person wishes to project. You don’t need to be selfless to think this is important. In any conversation, when the other person feels their desired face is being accepted and confirmed, they’re going to be a lot easier to deal with, and more likely to listen to what you have to say. Nelson Mandela was a genius of facework, particularly when it came to the art of giving face. His elaborate show of courtesy towards Viljoen was strategic. He knew that difficult conversations lay ahead between him and the former general, and a less sophisticated operator would have got straight into them. Mandela knew he had some work to do first

He then had to sell that vision to his own side, taking enormous risks with his ‘face’. What Mandela did was help Viljoen realise that he did not have to surrender his identity. He could be part of the nation and still be proudly himself: an Afrikaner, a military veteran, a South African citizen. Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as president in May 1994, and a new parliament opened, one that reflected the racial diversity of South Africa: two-thirds of the new representatives were black. Viljoen himself had won a seat, after his party picked up nine seats in the election. John Carlin, who was there for the opening, watched Mandela walk into a chamber that had previously been all-white and overwhelmingly male and which now embodied the diversity of South Africa.


pages: 613 words: 151,140

No Such Thing as Society by Andy McSmith

"there is no alternative" (TINA), anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, illegal immigration, index card, John Bercow, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Live Aid, loadsamoney, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sloane Ranger, South Sea Bubble, spread of share-ownership, Stephen Fry, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Dammers also devoted three years to putting together another Special AKA album, In The Studio, issued in 1984, which was a commercial failure, though one track has enduring fame. This was ‘Free Nelson Mandela’, a rare example of a popular song that called for the release of a political prisoner. The venture left the record company with heavy debts. Dammers stopped making records and diverted his energies into Artists Against Apartheid. He was the main organizer of a concert held in Wembley Stadium in 1988 to mark Mandela’s seventieth birthday. Mandela spent his birthday in prison, with no release date, which Spitting Image noted by making a spoof version of the Dammers song in which, instead of singing ‘Free Nelson Mandela’, latex puppets with Afrikaans accents sang ‘still basically locked up Nelson Mandela’.

People who were basking in the experience of having ‘loadsamoney’ may have been selfish, but they were not trying to force everyone else to be like them. Race and sexuality were the greatest social issues of the 1980s, and on both counts society was more liberal at the end of the decade than at the start. In the final years of Nelson Mandela’s long imprisonment an increasing number of white Britons saw him as a prisoner of conscience, despite the prime minister’s unchanging belief that he was the head of a terrorist organization. It is claimed that gays suffered a setback at the government’s hands with the introduction of Clause 28, which banned local authorities from ‘promoting’ homosexuality.

Mandela spent his birthday in prison, with no release date, which Spitting Image noted by making a spoof version of the Dammers song in which, instead of singing ‘Free Nelson Mandela’, latex puppets with Afrikaans accents sang ‘still basically locked up Nelson Mandela’. Elvis Costello, who had produced The Specials’ debut album, also had a huge hit in 1979 with an anti-militarist song called ‘Oliver’s Army’, and in 1983 he had a hit under the pseudonym ‘The Imposter’ with the track ‘Pills and Soap’, which was aimed at putting voters off re-electing Thatcher. The news that the government, during the Falklands War, suddenly reopened the shipyards that they had been ruthlessly running down – in order to build warships to replace those lost in the South Atlantic – inspired Costello to write a sarcastic number entitled ‘Shipbuilding’, with the lines: ‘It’s just a rumour spread around town by the women and children that soon we’ll be shipbuilding’.


When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures by Richard D. Lewis

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, business climate, business process, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, Easter island, global village, haute cuisine, hiring and firing, invention of writing, Kōnosuke Matsushita, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open borders, profit maximization, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Changing Notions of Leadership In the twenty-first century, with multinationals and conglomerates expanding their global reach, corporate governance and international teams will learn a lot about leading multicultural enterprises and workforces. The new impetus provided by fresh managers from Asia, Russia, Poland, Hungary, East European states, Latin America and Africa will change notions of leadership as will the increasing number of women in management positions. At cross-century, two of the world’s most respected leaders—Nelson Mandela and Kofi Annan—were African. The ultimate numerical superiority of nonwhite leaders, already significant in the political world, will permeate business. Based on Singapore’s commercial success and development within a given time frame, Lee Kuan Yew stakes a reasonable claim to have been the most successful “manager” of the last three decades of the twentieth century.

Japanese samurai, in their allegiance to their lord, were faithful unto death and demonstrated that quality regularly, as indeed did the cavalry and foot soldiers of Napoleon Bonaparte. Great leaders captivated willing disciples through sheer charisma—Alexander the Great, Caesar, Tamerlane, Hernan Cortés, Simón Bolívar, Kemal Atatürk, Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Chou-en-Lai and Nelson Mandela are a few who come to mind. In the modern era, business leaders have occasionally shown the charismatic and visionary leadership that attracts loyal followers; examples are Henry Ford, Akio Morita, Konosuke Matsushita and Richard Branson. Religion has also played a major role in mass-motivation throughout the historical era.

Furthermore, among the 50 percent who are already urbanized, there is a substantial and rapidly growing middle class. Their access to government posts and the international contact this will bring AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND AND SOUTH AFRICA 217 will quickly add to their experience and sophistication. Nelson Mandela himself is a shining example of a black South African politician. South Africa’s gross domestic product (GDP) is already four times that of the combined GDP of the ten other countries of southern Africa. Black South Africans Because black South Africans are playing—and will continue to play—such a vital role in the development of the nation, I will emphasize this group above the whites, Indians, and Coloureds.


pages: 393 words: 127,847

Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World by Mark Vanhoenacker

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, British Empire, car-free, colonial rule, COVID-19, East Village, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, high-speed rail, Jane Jacobs, Johannes Kepler, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, Pearl River Delta, period drama, Richard Florida, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

“Every Thursday at 4 p.m.” is widely associated with the Union-Castle liners; see, for example, The Port of Southampton, by Ian Collard. I described a little of the Union-Castle history in my first book, Skyfaring. Nelson Mandela’s description of Cape Town and Robben Island from above appears in Part 8, Chapter 59 of his Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (which I’m grateful to my stepmother for giving me, one Christmas long ago). The description of Krotoa as a “peacebroker” is by Nobhongo Gxolo in “The History of Van Riebeek’s Slave Krotoa Unearthed from the Masters’ View,” published on the website of the Mail & Guardian on September 5, 2016.

To reach Robben Island on that long-ago trip, Mark and I went down to the harbor, past the stacks of shipping containers—many of which, once they’re taken out of use, are repurposed elsewhere in the city as shelters, and as small venues for shops and hairdressers—and took one of the boats that run out to it. The island had already been a notorious prison for centuries before Nelson Mandela’s incarceration there began in 1964. In his autobiography he describes the view from the windows of an unheated military plane: “Soon, we could see the little matchbox houses of the Cape Flats, the gleaming towers of downtown, and the horizontal top of Table Mountain. Then, out in Table Bay, in the dark blue waters of the Atlantic, we could make out the misty outline of Robben Island.”

The festival led to boycotts and protests, with the African National Congress and the South African Indian Congress calling instead for “A National Day of Pledge and Prayer.” Two and a half months after the tercentenary, on June 26, 1952, the Defiance Campaign was launched against apartheid, with Nelson Mandela as one of its founders. As an artistic and cultural phenomenon, blue’s ancient history is spottier than that of most colors. For example, no blue was used in Greek ceramics; indeed, William Gladstone, the British politician and classicist, once believed that the ancient Greeks—despite the stunning colors of their home skies and waters—were blue-blind, incapable of seeing the color, in part because they so rarely described the sea as such (“wine-dark” being the most famous Homeric phrasing).


pages: 346 words: 101,255

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters by Rose George

American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anton Chekhov, Bob Geldof, Celtic Tiger, clean water, glass ceiling, indoor plumbing, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, land reform, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pepto Bismol, Potemkin village, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Steven Pinker, urban planning

“I think for us to come to terms with the fact that we go to the toilet would be quite easy. It only needs a few movie stars to talk openly about it.” Talk to anyone who is trying to improve the world’s sanitation, and this idea will become a refrain. We need a champion. A Bono or a Geldof. A Nelson Mandela or an Angelina Jolie. A film star or a politician who has the courage to talk about toilets, when most people only want to talk about faucets. The Netherlands-based International Water and Sanitation Center recently listed celebrities who do charity work for water. Hollywood star Matt Damon has launched the NGO H2O, whose mission is to “bring clean water to Africa.”

HIV/AIDS killed fewer children than sanitation-related disease, but sanitation was nowhere to be seen. An impact needed to be made. At the AfricaSan conference, a video was played. It showed an old man washing the hands of a young girl. It was nothing that hadn’t been seen on a thousand UNICEF videos. Then the camera pulled away and the old man was shown to be Nelson Mandela, who said, “Now we must all wash our hands.” In the words of one audience member, the effect was “Wow. Bang.” (That a not very creative video could be “Wow” showed how stagnant and unloved the sanitation sector felt.) The effect was strengthened by colorful photo opportunities, including one that featured Richard Jolly and Ronnie Kasrils seated on toilets brandishing toilet paper.

The flight attendant says, “We have landed in Cape Town. If that’s not where you want to be, that’s your problem.” We do want to be here, partly to meet Trevor’s daughter, the presidential hopeful. We’re also here to meet Shoni, an old acquaintance who got in touch after hearing the radio interview. Shoni is a manager at Robben Island, Nelson Mandela’s former prison, and gives us free tickets to visit. “I can’t accompany you, I’m afraid,” he says over dinner. “I have to take the president of Singapore on a tour.” The next morning, we arrive at Robben Island as the president is leaving. Trevor tells people that he runs the South African Toilet Organization, though there isn’t yet any such thing.


Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley

air gap, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, cognitive bias, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Joan Didion, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Nelson Mandela, operational security, pre–internet, QAnon, Russian election interference, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, social graph, surveillance capitalism, WikiLeaks

He did not have clothes suitable for employment, but Reality would work on that; she had her mother take Carlos shopping for khakis and a polo. “Reality takes in a lot of strays,” says her mother, “and I don’t mean just animals.” She was a talented, stylish painter, and her most frequent subjects were herself, Nelson Mandela, and Jesus. She was an inveterate smasher of phones. She threw one across the room while talking to her father, who struggled with an addiction to painkillers and who she sensed was stoned, and cracked another one falling from a tree she’d climbed in a fit of whimsy. A third phone met its fate when it simply wasn’t working.

She fretted about the low calorie intake of a pregnant inmate, asked her mother to contribute to the commissary funds of the others. Joe Whitley brought her stacks of books. She began teaching herself Latin from a textbook in order to read Ovid in the original; above her bunk, stuck to the wall with toothpaste, was a picture of Nelson Mandela. She is a person who needs quiet, but the room was always loud; she got the women into Breaking Bad so she could at least have an hour’s peace when it was on. She meditated and whispered mantras: Inhale suffering, exhale sunlight. Sometimes they were directed at specific forms of suffering: Inhale hunger, exhale for families in Syria.

Still under supervised release, he had slipped beneath public view, and it was possible to imagine for him a privacy remarkably inviolate, a kind of ancient space in which he could pray and remain apart from reality. Prison is the erasure of personal context and every battle therein is a battle to reclaim it. That Reality Winner was allowed her small space in order to hang a picture of Nelson Mandela was a small mercy in that it reminded her of an identity she had once had, something that put space between her and a caged body with animal needs. Her mail helped, though nothing helped as much as the daily phone calls to Billie and Wendy and Britty. That was what made it possible to get through the long days of small cruelties from the guards and boredom and the endless hours inside.


pages: 513 words: 156,022

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Boeing 747, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, European colonialism, falling living standards, friendly fire, Global Witness, land reform, mandatory minimum, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, transatlantic slave trade, Yom Kippur War

Mugabe, who at one stage had considered entering the priesthood, was still unsure of his own future. At the age of twenty-five he won a scholarship to Fort Hare University College in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, an elite establishment that would ignite the political senses of several future African nationalist leaders. The ANC’s Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo had studied there ten years earlier, and when Mugabe arrived, he was plunged into a campus burning with anti-imperialist fervour. He devoured Marxist literature and became captivated by Mahatma Ghandi and Jawaharlal Nehru’s campaign of nonviolence in India. But Mugabe was still deeply conservative.

Gone was the quiet restraint, the gentle tug on the sleeve that counselled ‘no’ to his wildest schemes, the homely feasts of custard and tea on the veranda. In marched a princess who thought she was entitled to whatever she wished. Grace Mugabe’s marriage to the Zimbabwean president in 1996 was billed, by state-controlled Zimbabwe papers, as the ‘wedding of the century’. Six thousand guests arrived in Harare from across the world, including Nelson Mandela. It wasn’t long before the new First Lady began taking advantage of her position. Mugabe himself had toured the country searching for land for his new wife even before the wedding. Now she joined him. First to catch her eye was a 1,000-acre estate called Highfields, which she bought from a willing seller.

On the rough ground in front of the bombed-out building, he erected a defiant memorial, a 15-foot golden arm with its fist crushing an F-111. It became a backdrop for countless speeches, photo-calls and visits from international statesmen, some more surprising than others. After being released from a South African jail in 1990, Nelson Mandela was eager to visit Gaddafi to thank him personally for helping train and fund ANC fighters. Brushing aside a UN air ban on Libya, Mandela gained access by road, driving across the border from Tunisia. Gaddafi’s international reputation was at an all-time low, and he seized the moment for a PR coup: the universally admired African leader meets the misunderstood outcast.


pages: 470 words: 148,444

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, demand response, different worldview, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, intangible asset, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Paris climate accords, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

“We’re half in on Middle East peace, on Syria, on Egypt, on the pursuit of a nuclear agreement with Iran. We have to go big.” He asked me to follow him back to his private dining room, where we could continue the conversation while he ate lunch. There on the wall was a painting of Lincoln, deep in thought, consulting Grant at the height of the Civil War; a photo of Obama meeting Nelson Mandela; a pair of boxing gloves used by Muhammad Ali. Obama sat at the table while I remained standing. I worried that I was overstepping my bounds. On Middle East peace, he told me, he had tried repeatedly, but Bibi wouldn’t make a deal. On Syria, he kept asking for them, but there were no good options.

In one of the more brazen acts that I’d experienced in my job, the Emirati ambassador to the United States, Yousef Al Otaiba—a man treated as a leading voice on the affairs of the region in the corridors of power in Washington—sent me a photo of a poster that cast Patterson in this light with no other message attached. Morsi sounded tired but defiant as Obama spoke to him from the makeshift NSC office. Obama urged him to do something to reach out to his growing opposition, some gesture at a unity government that could hold the country together. “You know,” he said, “I just left South Africa, where Nelson Mandela is in the hospital and is very sick. You know when he came to power he could have gone to the white minority in South Africa and said, ‘We are now the majority and we’re going to do what we want. We’ll follow the rules but you are a small minority in this country.’ But he didn’t do this. He went out of his way to reach out to the minority.

As with intervention in Syria, my heart wasn’t entirely in it anymore. I could tell which way the argument was going to go, and which way events were going. Obama was the most powerful man in the world, but that didn’t mean he could control the forces at play in the Middle East. There was no Nelson Mandela who could lead a country to absolution for its sins and ours. Extremist forces were exploiting the Arab Spring. Reactionary forces—with deep reservoirs of political support in the United States—were intent on clinging to power. Bashar al-Assad was going to fight to the death, backed by his Russian and Iranian sponsors.


pages: 251 words: 76,225

The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, clean water, commoditize, desegregation, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Kickstarter, means of production, microaggression, Nelson Mandela, Skype, the long tail, women in the workforce

But you can be less of an enemy, a more welcoming villain, a force for good and change who fades quietly ahead of the onslaught of new, more powerful voices you helped over the wall. You can learn how to get out of the way, instead of impeding them. Terrorist or Revolutionary? Deciding Who Gets to Write History Before he was the first democratically elected president of South Africa and a symbol for peaceful resistance, Nelson Mandela was a terrorist. This is not rhetoric, or a purposefully inflammatory statement. It’s just fact. The government of South Africa and the U.S. government, among others, categorized the African National Congress, the party to which Mandela belonged, as a terrorist organization, and Mandela and his colleagues were terrorists.

If I shut the fuck up, then all the people you quote, all the people who write the postnarrative, the big pieces that folks look back on to create the history and narrative of an event, even a successful one, will be made by the powerful, influential people who believe their hurt feelings at being called out as problematic somehow outweigh the concerns of an entire community of folks with no media pull and no platform whose voices have been marginalized their whole lives and who are now being reduced to a crazy, screaming, angry mob acting up out of nowhere instead of a passionate community of folks reacting to an event they see as existing on a problematic continuum. We have a strange habit of falling back on “civility,” as if every social movement was entirely civil. Like unions didn’t bust up on scabs. Like Nelson Mandela didn’t blow shit up.5 Like MLK would tell us all to shut the fuck up,6 and women never chained themselves to the fences in city squares, stormed political buildings, or committed acts of arson and violence in an effort to achieve suffrage. Surprise! My specialization is in the history of revolutionary movements, and let me tell you, folks—being nice and holding hands didn’t get shit done.

Cora Buhlert, “The media spin machine at full power or This is totally not what happened,” corabuhlert.com, http://corabuhlert.com/2014/03/07/the-media-spin-machine-at-full-power-or-this-is-totally-not-what-happened/. 4. Michael Hogan, “It really is time people stopped hating Jonathan Ross,” The Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/10679808/It-really-is-time-people-stopped-hating-Jonathan-Ross.html. 5. Douglas O. Linder, “The Nelson Mandela (Rivonia) Trial: An Account,” University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) School of Law, http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mandela/mandelaaccount.html. 6. Matt Berman, “The Forgotten, Radical Martin Luther King Jr.” National Journal, http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/the-forgotten-radical-martin-luther-king-jr-20140120.


pages: 276 words: 78,061

Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags by Tim Marshall

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, colonial rule, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, It's morning again in America, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, white picket fence

One of those decisions was made by Fred. He is a quiet, unassuming man, not prone to flights of fancy or hyperbole, which is perhaps why, when the challenge came, he rose to it. His moment began when the phone rang at his home in Pretoria on a Saturday night in February 1994. President de Klerk was on his way out, Nelson Mandela was already out of prison and about to rise to the highest office in the land, and the new South Africa needed a new flag. The existing one had been based on the Dutch flag and was so identified with both colonialism and the apartheid government that it had to go. The phone call came after 7,000 designs had been rejected and the ideas of graphic design studios had failed to come up with the answer.

Acutely aware of the sensitivities of the decision, he felt it was not one he could take on his own, and so showed them to a hastily convened Cabinet meeting, which chose the version we now know. This was then sent to the chief ANC negotiator, Cyril Ramaphosa. He, understanding that the decision on what would be the symbolic embodiment of the new nation needed to have the blessing of the physical embodiment of the new era, in turn faxed it to Nelson Mandela. At this point one of those fascinating details of history enters the story. This was before emails were in widespread use and faxes were in black and white. Fred chuckled as he retold what happened next, although at the time he was oblivious to it. ‘Mr Mandela was up in the north-east when the fax came through.

There were about 100,000 flagpoles in the country, all of which would require the new flag to be flown on the day of the changeover, but the country could only produce 5,000 a week, which would leave three-quarters of the flagpoles embarrassingly naked. Dutch factories stepped in and saved the day, but not before using up Europe’s stock of flag-making materials. And the result? ‘There was initially a muted reaction from the public’, says the designer, but in the weeks between polling day and Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as President, the design and the colours began to seep into the collective consciousness: ‘Within a matter of two or three weeks attitudes changed, and in many cases people began to have a fond attachment to it. Now people have bought into it – after all, colours are a psychological component of life, part of the essence of life.’


pages: 318 words: 73,713

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O'Neil

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, data science, delayed gratification, desegregation, don't be evil, Edward Jenner, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, microbiome, microdosing, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pre–internet, profit motive, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Streisand effect, TikTok, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, working poor

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT white cops defend a marauding colleague: Jamil Zaki, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World (New York: Crown, 2019), 134. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Forgiveness”: K. Thelwell, “9 inspiring Nelson Mandela quotes on forgiveness,” The Borgen Project, November 5, 2019, https://borgenproject.org/​nelson-mandela-quotes-on-forgiveness/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT missteps shouldn’t plunge us into everlasting shame: In Hiding from Humanity, Martha C. Nussbaum masterfully argues against the explicit use of shame and disgust in our penal code on legal, moral, and ethical grounds.

And usually, when a person errs, nobody feels it more deeply than they do. So treat them the way you’d want others to treat you when you screw up, and respect their dignity as human beings. Forgiveness is in many ways the flip side of shame. While shame rips open wounds, forgiveness has the power to heal them. “Forgiveness,” Nelson Mandela wrote, “liberates the soul. It removes fear…. That’s why it’s such a powerful weapon.” But like empathy, it’s hard and inconsistent. As I write this, I’m thinking about a prisoner named Oscar Jones. I’d gotten to know him, because I helped to analyze the recidivism algorithms that unfairly perpetuated his decades-long confinement in federal prison.


pages: 117 words: 36,809

Help by Simon Amstell

Nelson Mandela, Russell Brand, Stephen Hawking

At the end of last year, I was promoting my stand-up special numb on the Radio 1 breakfast show. It happened to be the morning of Nelson Mandela’s death, which of course was very sad and shocking news. Even though he was ninety-five and human. I was asked not to make any jokes about it, which confused and upset me because I’m not an insensitive lunatic, I’m a brilliant, vulnerable clown. On the way to the studio, I walked past the ‘urban’ music station, 1 Xtra, where I saw black people in a booth (this is not their jingle). Then I arrived at the Radio 1 studio, which was exclusively white people in a booth. Nelson Mandela had just died. Black people in one booth, white people in a separate, nicer booth.


pages: 137 words: 36,231

Information: A Very Short Introduction by Luciano Floridi

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, carbon footprint, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, digital divide, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Laplace demon, machine translation, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Pareto efficiency, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, RFID, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Vilfredo Pareto

Guelzo LINGUISTICS Peter Matthews LITERARYTHEORY Jonathan Culler LOCKE John Dunn LOGIC Graham Priest MACHIAVELLI Quentin Skinner THE MARQUIS DE SADE John Phillips MARX Peter Singer MATHEMATICS Timothy Gowers THE MEANING OF LIFE TerryEagleton MEDICAL ETHICS Tony Hope MEDIEVAL BRITAIN John Gillingham and Ralph A. Griffiths MEMORY Jonathan K. Foster MODERN ART David Cottington MODERN CHINA RanaMitter MODERN IRELAND Senia Paseta MODERN JAPAN Christopher Goto-Jones MOLECULES Philip Ball MORMONISM Richard Lyman Bushman MUSIC Nicholas Cook MYTH Robert A. Segal NATIONALISM Steven Crosby NELSON MANDELA Elleke Boehmer NEOLI BERALISM Manfred Steger and Ravi Roy THE NEW TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE Kyle Keefer NEWTON RobertIliffe NIETZSCHE Michael Tanner NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Christopher Harvie and H. C. G. Matthew THE NORMAN CONQUEST George Garnett NORTHERN IRELAND Marc Mulholland NOTHING Frank Close NUCLEAR WEAPONS Joseph M.

Antisemitism 173. Game Theory 174. HIV/AIDS 175. Documentary Film 176. Modern China 177. The Quakers 178. German Literature 179. Nuclear Weapons 180. Law 181. The Old Testament 182. Galaxies 183. Mormonism 184. Religion in America 185. Geography 186. The Meaning of Life 187. Sexuality 188. Nelson Mandela 189. Science and Religion 190. Relativity 191. History of Medicine 192. Citizenship 193. The History of Life 194. Memory 195. Autism 196. Statistics 197. Scotland 198. Catholicism 199. The United Nations 200. Free Speech 201. The Apocryphal Gospels 202. Modern Japan 203. Lincoln 204.


pages: 161 words: 37,042

Viruses: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Crawford, Dorothy H.

clean water, coronavirus, CRISPR, discovery of penicillin, Edward Jenner, Francisco Pizarro, hygiene hypothesis, Louis Pasteur, megacity, Nelson Mandela, stem cell

James MODERN ART • David Cottington MODERN C Portals of virus entry into the human body–0SHINA • Rana Mitter MODERN IRELAND • Senia Paseta MODERN JAPAN • Christopher Goto-Jones MODERNISM • Christopher Butler MOLECULES • Philip Ball MORMONISM • Richard Lyman Bushman MUSIC • Nicholas Cook MYTH • Robert A. Segal NATIONALISM • Steven Grosby NELSON MANDELA • Elleke Boehmer NEOLIBERALISM • Manfred Steger and Ravi Roy THE NEW TESTAMENT • Luke Timothy Johnson THE NEW TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE • Kyle Keefer NEWTON • Robert Iliffe NIETZSCHE • Michael Tanner NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN • Christopher Harvie and H. C. G. Matthew THE NORMAN CONQUEST • George Garnett NORTHERN IRELAND • Marc Mulholland NOTHING • Frank Close NUCLEAR WEAPONS • Joseph M.

Antisemitism 173. Game Theory 174. HIV/AIDS 175. Documentary Film 176. Modern China 177. The Quakers 178. German Literature 179. Nuclear Weapons 180. Law 181. The Old Testament 182. Galaxies 183. Mormonism 184. Religion in America 185. Geography 186. The Meaning of Life 187. Sexuality 188. Nelson Mandela 189. Science and Religion 190. Relativity 191. The History of Medicine 192. Citizenship 193. The History of Life 194. Memory 195. Autism 196. Statistics 197. Scotland


Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil by Nicholas Shaxson

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business climate, clean water, colonial rule, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, income per capita, inflation targeting, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil-for-food scandal, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Tragedy of the Commons, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

It mentioned “Scratcher” (alleged to be Mark Thatcher, the son of the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher), a J. H. Archer— allegedly the former British Conservative Party politician Jeffrey Archer64— among others. Archer denies involvement,65 but Thatcher, no friend of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (his mother once called Nelson Mandela a “terrorist”), was arrested at his luxury home in Cape Town. The letter said: Our situation is not good and it is very URGENT. [The lawyers] get no reply from Smelly [alleged to be Ely Calil—who strongly denies any involvement in the plot], and Scratcher asked them to ring back after the Grand Prix race was over!

When I asked him an admittedly illinformed question, he turned on Guilherme. “How can you bring people like this to me?” he repeated twice, very loudly. Guilherme quailed. I switched to a more personal note. Who did Fradique admire most, I asked. “Myself!” he answered, straight away. “I am joking, of course!” he guffawed, and settled for Nelson Mandela. The interview settled down. Fradique said that he had never intended to be president. “When I leave office I will return to my business, and I can live in freedom.” I put to him what his enemies said: he wants to be king of oil; he is autocratic, undisciplined, and does not listen. Fradique cut me off angrily before I could finish.

He married in 1990 and took another wife in 1996 (later admitting that he had a “tendency of having four wives,” adding that he was more in love with the struggle than with anything else, including his wives). Asari has claimed: “Today in most of our villages you’ll find out that most of our ladies have gone into prostitution. Things that were unheard of before like homosexuality are being practiced. The Ijaw man is slowly being killed by the Nigerian state.” Among his heroes he cites not only Nelson Mandela but also Osama bin Laden; he has put up at least one poster of the Saudi militant, and even named one of his children Osama.10 Mandela and Bin Laden “fought against the arrogance of men who were playing God,” Asari said. “Apartheid was, ‘God gave the white man authority to rule the black man because the black man is not human’; for America it’s, ‘our civilization is superior . . . so we must impose our way of life, our civilization, on all people, whether they like it or not.’


pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

When Harvard Business School classmates and I visited one of South Africa’s richest people in Cape Town as part of a study trip, I also started to see how the compounding unearned advantages of whiteness also accrue to those of European descent in other nations. Known for its natural beauty, Cape Town boasts some of the world’s finest scenery, restaurants, and wineries. It is the largest city in a country that toppled apartheid in 1994 and elected Nelson Mandela as its first Black president of a new multiethnic government. Yet despite its progress, South Africa remains among the world’s most unequal countries. Millionaires and billionaires live on large estates while a quarter of the population lives on less than $3.20 a day.20 Almost all the millionaires are white, and almost everyone in poverty is Black.

And investing in our citizens would fuel innovation and shared prosperity: if such investments yielded millions of additional knowledge workers and even a few more innovations—like three-light traffic signals, refrigerated trucks, automatic elevator doors, electret microphones, carbon light bulb filaments, IBM PC monitors, and Gigahertz chips, all invented by Black Americans—how much would this country gain? Most of the rich white men I know act as if poverty is a necessary, insurmountable evil. On countless occasions, they’ve told me it is impossible to end poverty. However, this is a myth. “Like slavery and apartheid,” Nelson Mandela once said, “poverty is not natural. It is manmade and it can be overcome and eradicated by the action of human beings.”43 We rich white men have the power and resources to abolish poverty if we take it on directly. And if we don’t take that initiative, I hope the rest of America will demand that those in power take action.

CHAPTER 17 TRANSFORMING THE POWER STRUCTURE I promise you, you’ll see the most diverse cabinet, representative of all folks—Asian Americans, African Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ—across the board. —JOE BIDEN, FORTY-SIXTH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES MYTH: Equity can be achieved by diversifying the current power structure. A new society cannot be created by reproducing the repugnant past, however refined or enticingly repackaged. —NELSON MANDELA, SOUTH AFRICAN ANTIAPARTHEID REVOLUTIONARY AND FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT OF SOUTH AFRICA REALITY: Diversifying the current power structure is necessary but not sufficient. On a Sunday evening in September 2018, Pooja and I arrived at the Dorothy and Charles Mosesian Center for the Arts.


pages: 482 words: 122,497

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, disinformation, edge city, financial deregulation, full employment, George Gilder, guest worker program, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, P = NP, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the scientific method, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty

In this respect, the IFF was merely a large-scale replay of the political entrepreneurship we saw at the USAF, with Jack and the gang yet again hiring themselves out to a wealthy client to perform a hit on a troublesome left-wing group.12 High points in this campaign included hearings by the House Republican Study Committee in 1987 to blame “the plight of the children of South Africa” on the commie-terrorist ANC; reports playing up the ANC’s commie-derived taste for atrocities against kids; newspaper ads designed to throw cold water on Nelson Mandela during his triumphant visit to America in 1990; and an endless war on Ted Kennedy, a leading proponent of the 1986 sanctions.13 All of this specifically South African stuff was mixed in with a large quantity of standard-issue winger-talk. The IFF manifesto was a 1987 statement bearing the ultimate conservative seal of approval: a photo of Jack Abramoff proudly shaking hands with Ronald Reagan.

A handful of genuine thinkers did actually publish pieces in International Freedom Review, the group’s respectable-looking American magazine, but for the most part it was a showplace for pontifications by Congress’s rightmost members, gripes about betrayal from embittered South Africans, and gussied-up undergraduate term papers. It was also a showplace for the right’s unrelenting suspicion toward the world. Nothing was as it seemed; everything was an act of cold-war trickery or deception. International Freedom Review featured articles with titles like “Getting Beyond the [Nelson] Mandela Smokescreen” and “Afghanistan: Has Reagan Sold Out the Mujahideen?” In issue number one, a redbaiting book coauthored by Dinesh D’Souza is lauded as a well-observed description of how the sly Soviets are “manipulating public opinion” in the United States. In issue number two, the IFF lavishes its highest praise on Requiem in the Tropics—a feverish tract the foundation also happened to be selling via mail order—describing it as “the book they don’t want you to read.”

What would come after the white-minority regime was anyone’s guess, and a mania for “scenario planning” swept over the South African business community as its leaders tried to set the stage for a favorable outcome.27 The government privatized and downsized itself, even dismantling its collection of atomic bombs, working frantically to close off the possibility that some future South African government might nationalize basic industries (as Nelson Mandela confirmed in 1990 that the ANC still planned to do) or take some other costly step toward social democracy.28 The ideal scenario espoused by the IFF addressed just these fears: a country where everyone could vote but where those votes had no bearing on private property. Foundation publications constantly offered advice for the framers of a future South African constitution, recommending, for example, that it include “clauses establishing and protecting free enterprise.”29 White supremacy was not going to survive for long, but with a covering barrage of free-market propaganda, the country’s ruling class might yet come through the revolution unscathed.


pages: 487 words: 139,297

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason Stearns

Berlin Wall, business climate, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, technology bubble, transfer pricing, unemployed young men, working-age population, éminence grise

Kabila refused to meet in Gabon or the Republic of Congo, fearing a French-backed assassination plot in its former colonies. Mobutu could not travel to South Africa because of his health. Finally, both parties agreed on a meeting on the South African navy ship Outenika, anchored just off the coast. South African president Nelson Mandela would mediate. Since Mobutu was unable to walk the thirty-one steps onto the boat, the hosts had to cobble together a plank strong enough for Mobutu’s limousine to be driven on board. For once, Mobutu was outshone in superstition. Laurent Kabila refused to look into his eyes during the meeting and instead stared at the ceiling; according to the prevailing rumor, he was afraid that the Old Leopard still had enough magical power left to curse him with his stare and prevent him from reaching his prize, now so close.

There was little culture of democratic debate, and the one-party elections under Mobutu had hinged on cults of personality, ethnic politics, and the corruption of key opinion makers. An immediate opening to multiparty democracy and elections in this context could have led to a rebound by the Mobutists. Even Nelson Mandela, the dean of African democracy, deemed it “suicidal” for Kabila to allow free party activities before he had a firm grip on the government.6 A group of visiting U.S. congresspeople accepted Kabila’s measures, saying that the country needed stability first, even if it meant suppressing political protests in the short term.7 Kabila himself addressed these matters with typical flair during his inauguration speech: “You see, that’s very nice all that.

In addition, another Angolan rebel movement, the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC), appeared to be making inroads in Cabinda, a tiny Angolan enclave just north of the Kitona airbase, where around 60 percent of Angola’s oil is drilled, providing it with about half of all national revenues. According to French government officials, FLEC had been in touch with the Rwandan government before the Kitona airlift.21 The diplomatic tug-of-war continued for several days, with South African president Nelson Mandela attempting to mediate between the two sides to prevent a continent-wide war breaking out. His attempt earned him the scorn of Mugabe, who told him to shut up if he didn’t want to help defend the Congo. Kabila’s office was equally blunt, suggesting that “age had taken its toll” on the venerable African leader.22 At Malik Kijege’s makeshift headquarters at the Tshatshi military camp, he began receiving distress calls from Tutsis hiding in Kinshasa.


pages: 282 words: 89,266

Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016 by Stewart Lee

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, call centre, centre right, David Attenborough, Etonian, gentrification, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Livingstone, I presume, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, pre–internet, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Fry, trickle-down economics, wage slave, young professional

Of course, like those of Sepp Blatter, Eurovision’s tentacles are long and covered in suckers, and it is very useful for the organisation to have a public face that brings BAFTA-winning credibility to its tawdry TV competition. Just as Sepp Blatter paraded a grieving Nelson Mandela at the 2010 World Cup final in order to ennoble his vile carnival of ball control, so the presence of BAFTA-winning Graham Norton, TV’s Nelson Mandela of celebrity chat, at Eurovision lends the disgusting singing event a legitimacy it no longer deserves. Eurovision is nothing more than music’s FIFA. But what can be done with the bent football body now? Obviously this discredited organisation can’t be allowed to run a football franchise, but is it right to squander FIFA’s vast infrastructure?

I checked the dates. Thatcher writes “open the back door for negotiations with the IRA” on documents dated 31 March 1982, 2 May 1982, 9 February 1985, 3 March 1985, 19 July 1987, 24 May 1988, and every 10 May, or the Friday nearest to it, throughout. On the first six dates, respectively, terrorist Nelson Mandela was moved out of sight to Pollsmoor prison; the Argentinian warship the General Belgrano was torpedoed outside the Falklands exclusion zone with the loss of 323 lives; Russ Abbott’s haunting pop single “Atmosphere” peaked at number 7 in the UK chart; the miners’ strike ended; Nick Faldo claimed victory in the Open; and the anti-gay Section 28 legislation was passed.


pages: 340 words: 90,674

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

“The problem,” he told the class in May 2009, according to Maysem, “is that our government looks to the worst-case scenarios. They’re building a policy towards minorities based on fear and suspicion. But what about the best-case scenarios? What about the countries where minorities have been integrated and have become a part of these societies?” He told stories about Nelson Mandela and Abraham Lincoln to make his point. “He treated his students like he was a parent,” Jewher told me. “We always had students coming to our house. Dining with us. Cooking with us. My father even gave part of his salary to his students as money for the Eid holidays.” (Eid is the Islamic holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, when parents and elders are expected to give a little cash to younger people.)

Xi was also proud of his military knowledge, having served as the assistant to the defense minister in the 1980s. Military might, he believed, was an expression of national power.16 “He has experienced much, and gone through many a difficult period,” said the Singaporean prime minister after meeting Xi in 2007. “I would put him in Nelson Mandela’s class of people. A person with enormous emotional stability who does not allow his personal misfortunes or sufferings to affect his judgment.”17 Xi had a powerful sense of history, and used it to frame his view of China’s future. “The five thousand years of Chinese civilization are an intellectual strength,” Xi said.

We don’t want to work together to fight back. “And how about America? How about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln? Or Martin Luther King? How do you think they achieved what they achieved? They united so many Americans under a vision of what it means to be free and equal. And Charles de Gaulle? Nelson Mandela? Gandhi?” Now I could see how Maysem viewed her Uyghur world. It had no grand story, nothing to strive for—it was a fallen world. “We’re broken because we have no leader, no hero. They’re all in prison.” “And who is the leader that you want?” I asked. Both women, Maysem and her friend, snapped back almost in unison: “Ilham Tohti.”


pages: 162 words: 51,445

The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. S Dream by Gary Younge

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, immigration reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight

The speeches we believe to be most decisive can come only from those speeches we have heard about. Those given by a poor woman in Swahili, Kurdish, or Quechua are far less likely to make it through the filter of race, sex, class, and language than those given by wealthy white men in English, French, or Spanish. One wonders whether Nelson Mandela’s most famous oration, before his conviction by apartheid South Africa’s Supreme Court on April 20, 1964 (“[Nonracial democracy] is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die”), would have been as fondly or well remembered had it been delivered in his native tongue of Xhosa or the nation’s most popular first language, Zulu, instead of English, its fourth most widely spoken.

So that its conscience would collectively see as a nation the contradiction between the way it treated 12 percent of its population who are dark-skinned and the precepts and principles enshrined in our Declaration of Independence. And that recovery program enabled America to embark on the greatest political transformation in history.” So white America came to embrace King in the same way that most white South Africans came to accept Nelson Mandela—grudgingly and gratefully, retrospectively, selectively, without grace but with considerable guile. By the time they realized that their dislike of him was spent and futile, he had created a world in which admiring him was in their own self-interest. Because, in short, they had no choice. The only question remaining was what version of King should be honored.


pages: 181 words: 50,196

The Rich and the Rest of Us by Tavis Smiley

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, ending welfare as we know it, F. W. de Klerk, fixed income, full employment, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, job automation, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traffic fines, trickle-down economics, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor

King had in mind when he suggested that justice is what love looks like in public. This is what John Coltrane had in mind when he composed “A Love Supreme.” This is what Toni Morrison had in mind when she wrote Beloved. This is what Dorothy Day had in mind when she embodied a dark and dangerous love. This is what Nelson Mandela had in mind when he opted for justice over revenge. This is what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel had in mind when he spoke of the compassion of the Hebrew prophets. This is what Mahmoud Mohamed Taha had in mind when he preached of the mercy of Allah. This is what Mahatma Gandhi had in mind when he lived the loving soul force he talked about.

Keller traveled internationally and testified before Congress to raise awareness and advocate for the blind and handicapped. It took the victory of one oppressed man to inspire the multitude and dismantle the oppressive apartheid system in South Africa. After 27 years in prison on charges of treason, Nelson Mandela emerged, resolve unbroken, as a symbol of resistance that inspired Black South Africans and the world. In 1990, South African president F. W. de Klerk ordered the release of Mandela. Still fiercely active at the age of 72, Mandela led negotiations with the minority government that resulted in the end of apartheid and the beginning of a multiracial government.


pages: 197 words: 49,296

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac

3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gail Bradbrook, General Motors Futurama, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mustafa Suleyman, Nelson Mandela, new economy, ocean acidification, plant based meat, post-truth, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, the scientific method, trade route, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Get offline and get to know your neighbors, people in the grocery line, or fellow commuters. Challenge your own assumptions, and be mindful of misinformation and disinformation. Share your hopes and fears in person, listen to others, and be honest and respectful. * * * — In 1990, after spending twenty-seven years in prison, Nelson Mandela was informed by President F. W. De Klerk that he would be freed in less than twenty-four hours. The following day Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison and into history. He had to pass through a courtyard, beyond which he would be a free man. As he later recounted, he knew that if he did not forgive his captors before he reached the outer wall, he never would.

., and the 1960s civil rights movement to the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia—to name just a few—are all inspirational insofar as they mobilized vast numbers of people to champion their causes. An open, inclusive narrative and a sense of working collectively to change history for the better took them further than they ever imagined possible. As Nelson Mandela said, “It always seems impossible until it is done.” Now is the time for us to participate—in our schools, businesses, communities, towns, and countries—to ensure that the battle to survive the climate crisis becomes the biggest political movement in history. It is not about changing governments or political leaders.


pages: 322 words: 99,066

The End of Secrecy: The Rise and Fall of WikiLeaks by The "Guardian", David Leigh, Luke Harding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, air gap, banking crisis, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, Downton Abbey, drone strike, end-to-end encryption, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, friendly fire, global village, Hacker Ethic, impulse control, Jacob Appelbaum, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, machine readable, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, operational security, post-work, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Levy, sugar pill, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Rather, Davies predicted, the US would launch a dirty information war, and accuse him of helping terrorists and endangering innocent lives. WikiLeaks’ response had to be that the world was entitled to know the truth about the murky US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We are going to put you on the moral high ground – so high that you’ll need an oxygen mask. You’ll be up there with Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa,” Davies told Assange. “They won’t be able to arrest you. Nor can they shut down your website.” Assange was receptive. This wasn’t the first time WikiLeaks had worked with traditional news media, and Assange had decided it might be a good idea on this occasion to do so again.

This forbidding ensemble of grey Victorian buildings might have come from the pages of Charles Dickens. It proved to be an excellent setting for another reel in what would surely become Assange’s biopic. His life story already had the trajectory of a thriller. But now it had an unexpected change of pace, with a sequence to come on its protagonist’s suffering and martyrdom. Nelson Mandela, Oscar Wilde, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Assange’s hero), all had spent time in prison. They had used their confinement to meditate and reflect on the transitory nature of human existence and – in Solzhenitsyn’s case – on the brutalities of Soviet power. Now it was Assange’s turn to be incarcerated, as some saw it, in a dank British gulag.

At 5.48pm Assange emerged on to the steps of the high court into the flash-flare of TV cameras and photographers – clutching his bail papers, his right arm raised in triumph. There were whoops and cheers from his supporters. He had been in prison a mere nine days. But the atmosphere was as if he was had made the long walk to freedom, just like Nelson Mandela. Assange addressed the crowd: It’s great to smell [the] fresh air of London again … First, some thank-yous. To all the people around the world who had faith in me, who have supported my team while I have been away. To my lawyers, who have put up a brave and ultimately successful fight, to our sureties and people who have provided money in the face of great difficulty and aversion.


pages: 335 words: 96,002

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World by Craig Kielburger, Holly Branson, Marc Kielburger, Sir Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, blood diamond, Boeing 747, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, Colonization of Mars, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, energy transition, family office, food desert, future of work, global village, impact investing, inventory management, James Dyson, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, market design, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, pre–internet, retail therapy, Salesforce, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Virgin Galactic, working poor, Y Combinator

It drew in 48 million viewers per week.1 O, The Oprah Magazine, has the highest women's magazine circulation in North America with 2.4 million copies sold per year.2 Oprah invested $40 million to create the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls. The school in South Africa for disadvantaged girls was lauded by Nelson Mandela. Oprah's Book Club leads to 55 million books sold after promotion on the show. Fortune magazine named her the world's most charitable celebrity. People want to be Oprah because she fosters her passions while giving back—and she gets paid to do so. The Oprah Winfrey Show was devoted to health and fitness, relationships, and literacy because Oprah commiserates with our family issues and wants to be part of our book club.

Thomas went above and beyond to exemplify those values to his team during a ME to WE trip to northern India, the farthest leg on the company's long journey with us to boost team values and satisfaction. Watch highlights from a ME to WE trip to India to see what the group experienced: Click for video KPMG, one of the “Big Four” professional services networks in the world, performs scrupulous audits for major corporations, organizations, and governments (the firm certified the election of Nelson Mandela in South Africa in 1994).1 It measures complex data and scrutinizes the tiniest of details in financial deals. So, several years ago when they asked us to a meeting to discuss a partnership, we arrived equipped with piles of metrics and third-party studies to show the impact of our domestic and international programming.

Capturing and living your plan: We spent a whole lot of time as a family coming up with experiences and ways of working together, identifying a wise circle of advisors, rituals, and other ideas that will support us every day in living our plan—and having the impact we dream about in this world. The Elders: The Elders are an independent group of global leaders working together for peace and human rights. The Elders represent an independent voice, not bound by the interests of humanity, and the universal human rights we all share. Meet the Elders: Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) Founder, Martti Ahtisaari, Kofi Annan (Chair), Ban Ki-moon, Ela Bhatt (Elder Emeritus), Lakhdar Brahimi, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Fernando H Cardosa (Elder Emeritus), Jimmy Carter (Elder Emeritus), Hina Jilani, Ricardo Lagos, Graca Machel, Mary Robinson, Desmond Tutu, and Ernesto Zedillo.


pages: 341 words: 98,954

Owning the Sun by Alexander Zaitchik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Trump, energy transition, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Potemkin village, profit motive, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, The Chicago School, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Whole Earth Catalog

In South Africa, the Mandela government passed a Medicines Act in December 1997 that gave the health ministry powers to produce, purchase, and import low-cost drugs. The industry backlash came fast. In February 1998, more than three dozen multinational drug companies and the South African Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association filed a suit against Nelson Mandela and the government of South Africa, alleging violations of the country’s constitution and its looming obligations under TRIPS.44 The same Western leaders who continued to praise Mandela in public began chastising him in private meetings. In the summer of 1998, Al Gore put U.S. drug patents high on the agenda of that year’s U.S.

Trade Representative, meanwhile, put the country on notice for retaliatory measures under Section 301. In his 2012 documentary about the generic AIDS drugs fight, Fire in the Blood, Dylan Mohan Gray observes that it took the U.S. government forty years to threaten apartheid South Africa with sanctions, but less than four to do so against the government of Nelson Mandela. Though South Africa was not a major market for multinational drug companies—it barely registered—in the drug industry’s version of Cold War “domino theory,” the appearance of cheap drugs anywhere was a threat to monopoly-priced drugs everywhere. Allowing the poorest nations to “free ride” on U.S. science (as the biggest companies themselves did) and build parallel drug economies would eventually cause problems closer to home, where the industry spent billions keeping the lid on public discontent over drug prices.

The talks ended in stalemate with no schedule to resume. In March 2001, the South African government called the drug companies’ bluff by allowing the case to go to court. An attempt to scare and intimidate South African officials had ended with the companies under the harsh lights of a growing international scandal, suing Nelson Mandela to maintain rules that were killing thousands of people every day. The lawsuit wasn’t the only driver of global attention to the issue. Weeks before the industry’s lawyers delivered their opening argument to the Pretoria High Court, The New York Times published a bombshell by Donald McNeil Jr. titled “Indian Company Offers to Supply AIDS Drugs at Low Cost in Africa.”


Rethinking Islamism: The Ideology of the New Terror by Meghnad Desai

Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, global village, illegal immigration, income per capita, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, Yom Kippur War

฀The฀Black฀Hands฀group฀to฀which฀Gavrilo฀Princip฀belonged฀ was฀ such฀ an฀ outfit,฀ committed฀ to฀ Slav฀ independence฀ from฀ the฀ Habsburgs.฀Terrorism฀was฀their฀weapon,฀but฀as฀it฀was฀deployed฀in฀ a฀nationalist฀cause฀after฀independence฀the฀terrorists฀are฀celebrated฀ as฀martyrs.฀The฀terrorist/martyr฀if฀he฀dies฀or฀the฀terrorist/leader฀ if฀ he฀ survives฀ until฀ independence฀ is฀ equally฀ a฀ familiar฀ figure฀ in฀ modern฀history.฀Nelson฀Mandela฀is฀the฀most฀famous฀example฀of฀this฀ type,฀who฀was฀denounced฀as฀a฀terrorist฀by฀the฀apartheid฀regime,฀ and฀indeed฀by฀British฀prime฀minister฀Margaret฀Thatcher,฀but฀lived฀ on฀to฀become฀a฀statesman฀of฀world฀stature. The฀ empires฀ of฀ Europe฀ disappeared฀ in฀ two฀ waves.฀ First,฀ after฀ the฀end฀of฀the฀First฀World฀War,฀the฀land-based฀empires฀of฀Austria– Hungary฀ and฀ the฀ Ottomans฀ broke฀ up,฀ though฀ (as฀ we฀ saw฀ above)฀ their฀ after-effects฀ are฀ still฀ with฀ us.฀ The฀ Romanov฀ Empire฀ of฀ the฀ tsars฀was฀taken฀over฀by฀the฀Bolsheviks,฀and฀indeed฀expanded฀after฀ ฀ ฀  the฀Second฀World฀War฀through฀their฀formal฀and฀informal฀control฀ over฀eastern฀Europe.

.฀ Even฀ though฀ it฀ has฀ now฀ lasted฀ for฀ more฀ than฀ a฀ dozen฀ years฀(since฀the฀first฀attempt,฀in฀February฀,฀to฀bomb฀the฀World฀ Trade฀ Center฀ in฀ New฀ York),฀ many฀ people฀ still฀ deny฀ its฀ novelty.฀ They฀argue฀that฀one฀man’s฀terrorist฀is฀another’s฀liberation฀fighter.฀ However,฀ liberation฀ struggles฀ are฀ for฀ a฀ nationalist฀ cause,฀ often฀ against฀an฀imperial฀power,฀and฀the฀aim฀has฀been฀confined฀to฀winning฀independence฀for฀the฀nation.฀Nevertheless,฀we฀were฀told฀that฀ Nelson฀Mandela฀was฀a฀terrorist฀by฀no฀less฀a฀person฀than฀Margaret฀ Thatcher.฀Bin฀Laden,฀though,฀is฀not฀Mandela.฀Mandela’s฀struggle฀ was฀ anti-racist฀ and฀ was฀ for฀ equality฀ for฀ his฀ people฀ in฀ their฀ own฀ home฀against฀their฀white฀fellow฀countrymen.฀ People฀point฀out,฀quite฀rightly,฀that฀in฀the฀war฀on฀terror฀America฀has฀committed฀gross฀violations฀of฀human฀rights.


pages: 487 words: 147,891

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, colonial rule, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, forensic accounting, friendly fire, glass ceiling, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile

May 1, 1994, was a joyous day for most South Africans. The country’s first free elections three days earlier had given the African National Congress a thumping majority, and Nelson Mandela, the most admired politician in the world, had just become president-elect of his country. “I received my passport on April 18, my birthday,” Lucy recalled, “and a week later I went to vote. I told myself I was a lucky person and that this vote was the chance of a lifetime.” “I wanted to see pictures of Nelson Mandela celebrating our victory, but then the customs man came back—with big, big shiny dogs! Big black shiny dogs.” Lucy’s voice deepens and her hand gestures expand as she draws an imaginary pair of shiny sniffer dogs.

Its dissolution followed no obvious pattern, occurring instead as a series of seemingly disparate events: the spectacular rise of the Japanese car industry; Communist Hungary’s clandestine approach to the International Monetary Fund to explore a possible application for membership; the stagnation of India’s economy; President F. W. de Clerk’s first discreet contacts with the imprisoned Nelson Mandela; the advent of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in China; Margaret Thatcher’s decisive confrontation with Britain’s trades union movement. Individually, these and other events seemed to reflect the everyday ups and downs of politics; at most they were adjustments to the world order. In fact, powerful currents below the surface had provoked a number of economic crises and opportunities, especially outside the great citadels of power in Western Europe and the United States, that were to have profound consequences for the emergence of what we now call globalization.

This created great confusion—you can’t imagine…you had Swedes and Dutch coming over here and telling them about how policemen had to respect human rights! South African cops! Ha, ha, ha!” Gastrow bursts out laughing at the thought of a shock troop of Scandinavians in woolly sweaters teaching battle-scarred Boer hard nuts how to relate to someone else’s pain. In the first half of the 1990s, Nelson Mandela and the ANC’s liberal allies knew that the apartheid police represented a real threat to a peaceful transition. As Gastrow argues, some disgruntled whites were encouraging the incipient civil war among Zulus between ANC supporters and those of the more conservative Inkhata Freedom Party. They were doing so as if, were this conflict among the Zulus to escalate, it could fatally undermine the move to black majority rule.


The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz

affirmative action, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, different worldview, disinformation, facts on the ground, Jeffrey Epstein, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Yom Kippur War

Second, any Arab leader who has even the slightest possibility of defeating Israel will be praised and rewarded for trying, and condemned, perhaps even overthrown, for not trying. This is why it is so important for the preservation of peace that Israel remains qualitatively stronger militarily than all the combined Arab armies that surround it. If that military superiority were ever to be lost, it is virtually certain that Israel would again be attacked. That is why Nelson Mandela was wrong in suggesting any analogy between Israel’s defensive nuclear program and Iraq’s efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction for aggressive use. c15.qxd 6/25/03 8:24 AM Page 103 THE CASE FOR ISRAEL 103 This is what Mandela said: “But what we know is that Israel has weapons of mass destruction.

It has one of the most diverse populations in the world, including black Africans from Ethiopia; brown Africans and Asians from North Africa, Yemen, Egypt, Iraq, and Morocco; Jews from Central Asia, Russia, and the Caucasus; and families from Romania, Latin America, and the former Yugoslavia. Nelson Mandela was simply wrong when he described Israel as a “white” nation as contrasted with Iraq, which he called a “black” nation. cconcl.qxd 6/25/03 228 8:39 AM Page 228 THE CASE FOR ISRAEL As far as Israel being a tool of the United States, that is simply false. It is an ally. Both countries are democracies fighting against terrorism.

Laqueur and Rubin, p. 143. 2. “The Spirit of October,” Al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt), October 8–14, 1998. 3. Morris, p. 390. 4. Ibid., p. 413. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. Quoted in Morris, p. 406. Morris, p. 419. Ibid., p. 223. Quoted in Laqueur and Rubin, p. 148. Ibid., p. 143. Morris, p. 387. Tom Masland, “Nelson Mandela: The U.S.A. Is a Threat to World Peace,” Newsweek, September 10, 2002. 12. Morris, p. 632. CHAPTER 16 Has Israel Made Serious Efforts at Peace? 1. “Israel Sharpens Its Axe,” CounterPunch, July 13, 2001, www.counterpunch.org /saidaxe.html, (last visited April 5, 2003). 2. Lecture, Harvard University, November 25, 2002. 3.


pages: 335 words: 104,850

Conscious Capitalism, With a New Preface by the Authors: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business by John Mackey, Rajendra Sisodia, Bill George

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, do well by doing good, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, income per capita, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Elkington, lone genius, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, shareholder value, six sigma, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Everyone can and should aspire to integrity in life—to unify his or her values and virtues and express them within the context of the larger community, including where a person works. People who fail to achieve integrity can be accurately described using terms such as hypocrites, opportunists, yes-men (or yes-women), and ethical cowards.11 Famous historical leaders with high integrity include Socrates, Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Margaret Thatcher, and Liu Xiaobo. These exceptional leaders greatly inspire us to seek to attain higher levels of integrity, especially in their expression of moral courage. Capacity for Love and Care Conscious leaders have a great capacity for love and care. They recognize how important it is to drive fear out of their organizations.

Those qualities and virtues are usually already within us, but are not yet fully developed. It is very healthy to look up to admirable people. They could be friends, parents, siblings, or teachers. They could be people from history, such as Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., or Gandhi. We can admire and try to emulate living people whom we’ve never met, such as Nelson Mandela or Muhammad Yunus. If we follow a particular religious faith, our inspiration might come from Moses, Jesus, St. Francis, Mohammed, Patanjali, Krishna, or Buddha. We can even look to fictional characters who vividly express admirable virtues, such as Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Albus Dumbledore in J.

Our institutions magnify or depress our capacity to care.”7 Most corporate cultures don’t value love and caring enough, because their leaders have not fully integrated these virtues into their own lives. We need role models who are fully integrated human beings, loving as well as strong, and who show that there need not be any contradiction between the two. Leaders like Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Mother Teresa are considered strong as well as truly loving and compassionate. Few prominent business leaders can be described in the same way (Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines comes to mind). Business leaders should aspire to enter into the pantheon of strong and effective leaders who are also caring, loving, and compassionate.


pages: 338 words: 104,815

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Indeed, such memory tricks don’t require a totalitarian regime or even a clever artist—we can play them on ourselves. THE “MANDELA EFFECT” The cliché says that those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it, but what happens when different people remember entirely different histories? In 2009, a woman named Fiona Broome realized she had a memory of Nelson Mandela dying sometime in the 1980s in a South African prison, where he was serving a life sentence for conspiring to overthrow the country’s White government. In reality, he was released from prison in 1990, negotiated the end of apartheid, served as president of his country from 1994 to 1999, and died in 2013 at the age of ninety-five.

Likewise, some people recall a movie about a genie, called Shazam, starring the comedian Sinbad. Sinbad appeared in a genie-like outfit in another movie in the 1990s, basketball star Shaquille O’Neal starred as a genie in a movie named Kazaam around the same time, and an unrelated television show named Shazam ran in the 1970s. Nelson Mandela quite plausibly could have died in prison—his compatriot Stephen Biko died in police custody in 1977, an event memorialized in a popular song by Peter Gabriel—and there were riots in South Africa and demonstrations worldwide against apartheid throughout the 1980s. If you weren’t paying much attention to South Africa in the 1990s, you could easily combine these facts into a belief that the most famous Black South African leader must have died in prison, which you learned about from television news, the most common way people consumed news in the 1980s.

It’s not surprising that people’s memories can morph and that people are overconfident in them—these facts have been known for decades. What is surprising is that people can become so deeply committed to the infallibility of their personal recollections that they will adopt outlandish belief systems—forked timelines, alternate realities, and worldwide conspiracies to alter every news story about Nelson Mandela and delete every Jiffy peanut-butter reference from the Internet—to justify their memories. Like mistaken memories of Lustfaust, the stakes here may appear low—it doesn’t really matter whether Sinbad was in a genie movie or which vowel was in the title of a children’s book. But it matters a lot that people reject well-supported scientific explanations of reality in favor of pseudoscience and conspiracy thinking.


pages: 415 words: 103,231

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence by Robert Bryce

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, congestion pricing, decarbonisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, financial independence, flex fuel, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's over 9,000, Jevons paradox, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, low interest rates, Michael Shellenberger, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, price stability, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stewart Brand, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

Available: http:// search.nobelprize.org/search/nobel/?q=sadat&i=en&x=0&y=0. 39. Kati Marton’s A Death in Jerusalem provides a clear-eyed account of Bernadotte’s murder as well as a history of the Stern Gang and Irgun, both of which used terror in order to secure a Zionist state in Palestine. 40. Ibid., 1. 41. Nelson Mandela, from Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. London; Little, Brown Book Grooup, 1995: 166. 42. For more, see Robb’s blog, Global Guerillas. For his discussion on financing terrorism, see: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/ 04/global_guerrill.html. 43. Chris Abbott, Paul Rogers, and John Sloboda, “Global Responses to Global Threats: Sustainable Security for the 21st Century,” Oxford Research Group, briefing paper, June 2006, 4. 44.

Shamir ordered the murder of a Swedish diplomat, Count Folke Bernadotte, even though Bernadotte had gone to Jerusalem as a United Nations– appointed peacemaker.39 On September 17, 1948, Bernadotte was gunned down by Shamir’s lieutenants as he was being driven through Jerusalem.40 Similar facts surround the case of another Nobel laureate, the former president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela. In the early 1960s, Mandela led the armed faction of the African National Congress, through which he coordinated a sabotage campaign against military targets and government installations in South Africa. During his nearly three decades in captivity, Mandela refused to renounce violence— even when offered freedom if he did so.


pages: 481 words: 121,300

Why geography matters: three challenges facing America : climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism by Harm J. De Blij

agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial exploitation, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, John Snow's cholera map, Khyber Pass, manufacturing employment, megacity, megaproject, Mercator projection, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

Kenya, where Daniel arap Moi had succeeded Jomo Kenyatta, headed this depressing roster. In Southern Africa, the long-imprisoned Nelson Mandela made possible that almost unimaginable, peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy, setting one glorious and final example of African leadership and statecraft in the liberation era. But in South Africa's neighbor, Zimbabwe, the revolutionary hero Robert Mugabe turned into another of Africa's destructive tyrants—in the process ruining one of the continent's most promising economies. When Nelson Mandela was democratically succeeded in South Africa by Thabo Mbeki, the new South African president found it difficult to express toward Zimbabwe the moral standards he inherited from the founder.

Harm de Blij WHY GEOGRAPHY MATTERS WHY GEOGRAPHY MATTERS Ten years ago it seemed that the world could not possibly change any faster than it had over the previous decade. The Soviet Union had disintegrated into 15 newly independent countries, China's Pacific Rim was transforming the economic geography of East Asia, South Africa was embarked on a new course under the guidance of Nelson Mandela (a new course that relied on the complete reconstruction of its administrative map), NAFTA linked Canada, the United States, and Mexico in an economic union that would change the commercial map of North America, the European Community was renamed the European Union and added three members to its roster to create a 15-nation entity, and Yugoslavia was collapsing amid uncontrolled carnage.


pages: 413 words: 119,379

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth by Tom Burgis

Airbus A320, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Livingstone, I presume, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, purchasing power parity, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

His relationship with De Beers soon soured, and he took a job at Rio Tinto, working on a copper mine close to the Kruger National Park, where the racial division was even more apparent. ‘I was working on the mine, in production, and I was really exposed to how things are,’ Moloi remembers. By 1990 mass protests and international sanctions had brought the apartheid regime to the verge of collapse. F. W. de Klerk released Nelson Mandela and lifted the ban on the African National Congress. The party set up working groups to prepare itself for government, and Moloi joined the one on science and technology. By 1993 the leading lights of the ANC’s economics team had identified the usefulness of a man who knew the mining business from the inside.

He sought relentlessly to expand northward the interwoven projects of British colonial rule and his own corporate interests by way of treaties, force of arms and duplicity. His most hegemonic venture, the British South Africa Company, had a royal charter affording it powers akin to those of a government. The region’s black inhabitants, from the Xhosa of the eastern Cape – Nelson Mandela’s people – to Robert Mugabe’s Shona ancestors in Rhodesia, were gradually subjugated and marginalized. Rhodes died in 1902, humbled by his support of the disastrous Jameson Raid into Boer territory. W. T. Stead, the great crusading newspaperman of Victorian Britain, called Cecil Rhodes ‘the first of the new Dynasty of Money Kings which has evolved in these later days as the real rulers of the modern world’.33 That description echoes down the century that followed and past the turn of the millennium.

In the first months of 2014 alone it shuttled between Hong Kong, Singapore, Mauritius, Madagascar, the Maldives, Angola, Zimbabwe, Indonesia (where China Sonangol has a slice of a natural gas field) and Beijing.48 Like Rhodes before him, Pa’s African horizons are forever widening. In December 2013 Ernest Bai Koroma, the president of Sierra Leone, a nation scarred by its diamond-funded war but where peace has started to take hold, stopped off in Angola on his way home from Nelson Mandela’s memorial service in South Africa. Over dinner and red wine at Luanda One, the Queensway Group’s golden skyscraper, Koroma held what a statement from his office described as ‘fruitful discussions with Chinese Business Tycoon and Vice Chairman of China International Fund Limited, Mr Sam, on key infrastructural developments to be implemented in Sierra Leone’.49 A photograph shows Koroma engrossed in conversation with Pa, who is dressed in his usual dark suit and spectacles, a mobile phone on the table in front of him, gesturing as through ticking off items on a checklist.


pages: 272 words: 76,089

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, classic study, clean water, cosmic abundance, dark matter, demographic transition, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, germ theory of disease, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, planetary scale, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, zero-sum game

Shattering a four-year-long worldwide voluntary moratorium, China resumes nuclear weapons testing; should we? How much should we give to charity? Serbian soldiers systematically rape Bosnian women; should Bosnian soldiers systematically rape Serbian women? After centuries of oppression, the Nationalist Party leader F. W de Klerk makes overtures to the African National Congress; should Nelson Mandela and the ANC have reciprocated? A coworker makes you look bad in front of the boss; should you try to get even? Should we cheat on our income tax returns? If we can get away with it? If an oil company supports a symphony orchestra or sponsors a refined TV drama, ought we to ignore its pollution of the environment?

The Rules of the Game • 221 Nonviolent civil disobedience has worked notable political1 change in this century—in prying India loose from British rule and stimulating the end of classic colonialism worldwide, and in providing some civil rights for African-Americans—although the threat of violence by others, however disavowed by Gandhi and King, may have also helped. The African National Congress (ANC) grew up in the Gandhian tradition. But by the 1950s it was clear that nonviolent noncooperation was making no progress whatever with the ruling white Nationalist Party. So in 1961 Nelson Mandela and his colleagues formed the military wing of the ANC, the Umkhonto we Sizive, the Spear of the Nation, on the quite un-Gandhian grounds that the only thing whites understand is force. Even Gandhi had trouble reconciling the rule of nonviolence with the necessities of defense against those with less lofty rules of conduct: "I have not the qualifications for teaching my philosophy of life.


pages: 240 words: 73,209

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment by Guy Spier

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, book value, Checklist Manifesto, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, NetJets, pattern recognition, pre–internet, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, two and twenty, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

Or, A Good Hard Look at Wall Street by Fred Schwed Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich by Jason Zweig Literature 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez Hamlet by William Shakespeare Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert Pirsig Miscellaneous Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with the Truth by Mahatma Gandhi City Police by Jonathan Rubinstein Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela by Nelson Mandela Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson Reagan: A Life in Letters by Ronald Reagan The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell The New British Constitution by Vernon Bogdanor The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers Vor 1914: Erinnerungen an Frankfurt geschrieben in Israel by Selmar Spier Walden: or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau Why America Is Not a New Rome by Vaclav Smil Philosophy and Theology A Theory of Justice by John Rawls Anarchy, the State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick Destination Torah: Reflections on the Weekly Torah Readings by Isaac Sassoon Halakhic Man by Joseph Soloveitchik Letters from a Stoic by Lucius Annaeus Seneca Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl Meditations by Marcus Aurelius Pirke Avot: A Modern Commentary on Jewish Ethics by Leonard Kravits and Kerry Olitzky Plato, not Prozac!


pages: 317 words: 79,633

Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees by Thor Hanson

airport security, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, if you build it, they will come, Nelson Mandela, new economy, out of africa, wikimedia commons

After a day or two, antsiness sets in, and it’s not unusual to spot groups of people piling into rental cars and skipping out to the nearest national park. Sometimes, however, the best things to see lie right outside the windows of the conference room. When South Africa hosted the gathering a few years back, it took place at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth. Aside from the main cluster of buildings, most of the school’s 2,100-acre (830-hectare) campus remains in undisturbed fynbos, a dry, shrubby habitat named after the Afrikaans phrase for “fine bush.” On the second afternoon, after I’d given my paper and answered a few questions, I was gazing out the window as the next session got underway.

.), 3 Monodontomerus wasp, 1 Muir, John, 1(quote), 2 Multiple Stress Disorder, 1 mutations, 1 mutualism, 1 nature walks, 1 navigation by bees, 1 Neanderthals, 1 nectar history of beekeeping, 1 honey stomach, 1 mutualism versus exploitation in pollination, 1 pollinator manipulations in orchids, 1 wetting pollen while gathering, 1, 2 Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, South Africa, 1 neonicotinoids, 1, 2 nest boxes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 nest-building materials and techniques, 1 alkali bees, 1 biodiversity in a nesting habitat, 1 creating nesting sites, 1 digger bees, 1, 2, 3(fig.) diversity and opportunism of bees, 1 in Apidae family, 1 influencing social behavior, 1 masons, leafcutters, and wool-carders, 1 nesting in aggregations, 1, 2(fig.)


pages: 264 words: 74,313

Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places by Paul Collier

business cycle, carbon tax, dark matter, deskilling, failed state, information security, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, price stability, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, zero-sum game

A few political leaders of low-income societies have succeeded in countering the problems posed by ethnic diversity by superimposing a constructed national identity. Two outstanding instances were Sukarno, who was president of Indonesia from 1945 until 1967, and Julius Nyerere, who was president of Tanzania from 1964 until 1985. More recently Nelson Mandela set South Africa on the same path. Both Sukarno and Nyerere got their economic policies seriously wrong, falling victim to the fashionable nostrums of their times, but on the key issue of building the nation they were political giants. Sukarno had the more difficult task, a vast territory of more than six thousand inhabited islands.

Combined, these approaches would enhance the supply of the public goods, providing the security and the checks and balances that their citizens need. From time to time people capable of such leadership gain political power, but not very often. It is not by chance that the visionary leaders Julius Nyerere, Sukarno, and Nelson Mandela were all founding presidents. Once political power can readily be won by the self-serving, the self-serving will step forward to try their luck and the honorable will step back. Bad currency drives out good. In this book I have spared you the fancy terminology of economics, but since you have reached the end you On Changing Reality 231 can take delight in one technical term: in economic language the quality of political leadership is endogenous.


pages: 293 words: 74,709

Bomb Scare by Joseph Cirincione

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

Ireland was perhaps the first to demonstrate the important role smaller nations can play in great power politics by introducing the first resolution at the United Nations in 1958 calling for a treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. South Africa is a more recent example. In 1993, on the eve of the transition to majority rule, the apartheid government disclosed its secret nuclear program and announced that all its weapons had been dismantled. Nelson Mandela, the first president of the new majority government, could have reversed this decision. But he decided that South African security was better served in a continent where there were no nuclear weapons than in one where there was a nuclear arms competition. South African representatives made their new government’s first major foray into international affairs at the 1995 Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference.

Within a few years, they were convinced to give them up and join the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as non–nuclear weapon states. • The apartheid government in South Africa, on the eve of transition to majority rule in 1993, announced that it had destroyed its six secret nuclear weapons. Nelson Mandela could have reversed that decision, but he concluded that South Africa’s security would be better served in a region where no state had nuclear weapons than in one with a nuclear arms race. • Similarly, civilian governments in Brazil and Argentina in the 1980s stopped the nuclear weapon research that military juntas had started.


pages: 510 words: 141,188

Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Madoff, Frances Oldham Kelsey, global pandemic, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

The three drugs in question—stavudine, lamivudine, and nevirapine—were made by three different multinational drug companies. The combined price for a single patient reached $12,000 a year. Not only was the treatment regimen onerous, but few could afford it. Hamied immediately set out to make the drugs in the cocktail. In 1997, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, South Africa altered its law to make it easier to sidestep pharmaceutical patents and import low-cost medicine. No country needed the AIDS cocktail more badly than South Africa, which had emerged as an epicenter of the epidemic. But South Africa, along with over 130 nations, was bound by an international trade agreement called TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), which required that all members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) ensure basic protection for intellectual property.

Even among the industry’s lowest moments—the illegal marketing of drugs for off-label uses; the payoffs to doctors who acted as promotional mouthpieces; the concealment of negative safety data for high-profile drugs—its stance in South Africa seemed uniquely horrible. As the Wall Street Journal summed it up: “Can the pharmaceuticals industry inflict any more damage upon its ailing public image? Well, how about suing Nelson Mandela?” It was an outrage that William Haddad would never forget. “Big Pharma, those cock-sucking bastards,” he yelled to a journalist years later. “Thirty-four million people had AIDS and every single one of them would die without the medicine. Would die and were dying. And they charged $15,000 dollars a year, and only four thousand people [in Africa] could afford the medicine.”

biggest industry was making wooden coffins: Neil Darbyshire, “Land Where Only Coffin Makers Thrive,” Telegraph, June 24, 2002. 90 million Africans by 2025: Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), AIDS in Africa: Three Scenarios to 2025, January 2005, http://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media_asset/jc1058-aidsinafrica_en_1.pdf (accessed December 8, 2018). In 1991, Dr. Rama Rao: Peter Church, Added Value: 30 of India’s Top Business Leaders Share Their Inspirational Life Stories (New Delhi: Roli Books Pvt., 2010), 92. In 1997, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela: Helene Cooper, Rachel Zimmerman, and Laurie McGinley, “AIDS Epidemic Puts Drug Firms in a Vise: Treatment vs. Profits,” Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2001, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB983487988418159849 (accessed May 25, 2018); see also Deshpande, Sucher, and Winig, “Cipla 2011,” 5. On September 28, 2000, he took to the podium: Y.


pages: 900 words: 241,741

Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Peter Petre

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, California gold rush, call centre, clean tech, clean water, Donald Trump, financial independence, Golden Gate Park, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, index card, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, Y2K

Courtesy of Universal Licensing, LLC I loved working with Danny Hernandez, on my left, the ex-Marine who masterminded the Hollenbeck Youth Center in East LA. It provides kids in a poor, gang-infested neighborhood with a place to go and gives problem kids a second chance. Schwarzenegger Archive I get goose bumps when Nelson Mandela talks about inclusion, tolerance, and forgiveness. In 2001 we met at Robben Island, where he spent twenty-seven years in prison, to light the Flame of Hope for the Special Olympics African Hope Games. Christian Jauschowetz My first political campaign was crusading in 2002 to pass a ballot initiative to set up after-school programs at every elementary and middle school in California.

He opened the way for me to do bodybuilding exhibitions in the townships and said, “Every time you do something for whites, I’d like to see you do something for blacks.” He’d also taken the lead in getting South Africa to bid for the Mr. Olympia competition, and I’d been part of the delegation from the International Federation of Body Building that worked with him. Now apartheid was long gone, and Nelson Mandela was the nation’s distinguished former president. Since leaving office, Mandela had committed himself to raising the profile of the Special Olympics across the entire continent, where millions of people with intellectual disabilities were stigmatized, ignored, or worse. Sarge and Eunice had planned to come with us, but Eunice, who’d just turned eighty, broke her leg in a car crash a day before we left.

The United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon and I had been working on an ambitious response to global warming. Two years earlier, in 2007, he’d been so impressed by California’s climate change initiative that he’d invited me to speak at the opening session of the United Nations. When I stepped to the podium that fall, I was almost overwhelmed to realize that I was standing where John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, and Mikhail Gorbachev had all addressed the UN before me. The occasion gave California a world stage—and an opportunity to contribute to a crucial international conversation. Now, two years later, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was meant to be the most important meeting on global warming since the completion of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.


pages: 158 words: 16,993

Citation Needed: The Best of Wikipedia's Worst Writing by Conor Lastowka, Josh Fruhlinger

airport security, citation needed, en.wikipedia.org, jimmy wales, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Stephen Hawking

Never overestimate the intelligence of someone who is reading the Wikipedia article for Hamburger Helper. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburger_Helper Serial comma The Times once published an unintentionally humorous description of a Peter Ustinov documentary, noting that “highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector”. This is ambiguous as it stands, and would still be ambiguous if a serial comma were added, as Mandela could then be mistaken for a demigod. So yes, we admit it is completely worthless as an example and has no business being on the Serial Comma page.


pages: 296 words: 78,112

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Black Lives Matter, business climate, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate raider, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data science, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, hype cycle, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jim Simons, junk bonds, liberation theology, low skilled workers, machine translation, Michael Milken, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, obamacare, open immigration, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, urban planning, vertical integration

They will lie, lie, lie.” Democrats were giddy, believing that they were finally witnessing the self-destruction of a candidate who seemed impervious to so much. Paul Begala, an adviser to the Clinton-aligned Super PAC Priorities USA, watched Trump’s rally and pronounced him finished. “To quote the late, great Nelson Mandela, it’s like drinking poison and thinking it’s going to hurt your enemy,” Begala said. “He’s a billionaire tycoon in a total meltdown, and he’s going to try to take as many people down with him. It’s not a political strategy, but it will be an unlovely twenty-six days until we dispatch him to the ash heap of history

postshare=811476078962605&tid=ss_tw. NBC News/SurveyMonkey: Christine Wang, “Positive Opinions of Trump Grow After Second Debate, NBC/Surveymonkey Poll Says,” CNBC.com, October 12, 2016, www.cnbc.com/2016/10/11/positive-opinions-of-trump-grow-after-second-debate-nbcsuveymonkey-poll-says.html. “To quote the late, great Nelson Mandela”: Philip Rucker and Sean Sullivan, “Trump Says Groping Allegations Are Part of a Global Conspiracy to Help Clinton,” Washington Post, October 13, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-says-groping-allegations-are-part-of-a-global-conspiracy-to-help-clinton/2016/10/13/e377d7e4-915a-11e6-a6a3-d50061aa9fae_story.html.


pages: 287 words: 81,014

The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism by Olivia Fox Cabane

airport security, Boeing 747, cognitive dissonance, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, hedonic treadmill, Jeff Hawkins, Lao Tzu, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, social intelligence, Steve Jobs

Researchers who started experimenting with these kinds of visualizations with highly self-critical people reported “significant reductions in depression, anxiety, self-criticism, shame, and inferiority” while noting a “significant increase in feelings of warmth and reassurance for the self.”11 If the Metta visualization didn’t work for you, try putting up, throughout your home or office, photographs of people for whom you feel affection. These pictures could be of friends or family members, or even public figures who you feel could have affection for you, such as the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, or whichever figures resonate with your personal beliefs or bring warmth to your heart (pets and stuffed animals included). To nurture my internal warmth I set up a “Metta circle” of photographs in the area where I practice every morning. I also carry a small book of favorite wisdoms with me when I want to ensure that I’ll be in the right charismatic mental state.

What standard would you like them to live up to or exceed? Express this expectation as if you have full confidence that they can live up to it. Better yet, act like you assume they already are meeting these standards. Third, articulate a vision. A charismatic vision is what will give your charisma staying power when the crisis is over. Think of Nelson Mandela, whose vision of unity and modernism for South Africa was so powerful that even after the crisis of apartheid had passed and his service as president was over, he continued to be seen as a transnational leader for all of southern Africa and an influential voice in international politics. On the other hand, President George H.


pages: 276 words: 81,153

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter

affirmative action, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, classic study, cognitive load, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, post-truth, power law, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, traveling salesman, Turing test

He explained Pikachu’s tail, the question of whether the Monopoly guy had a monocle or not, what Darth Vader really said to Luke Skywalker and other examples of false memories. This was all fine. What surprised me was the original story about Mandela. According to the YouTuber, lots of people believe that Nelson Mandela died in jail in the 1980s. He and many others like him, including my own children, it seemed, considered Nelson Mandela dying in jail to be the original example of false memories. But it isn’t. There is no convincing evidence that a large number of people believed that Mandela died in jail. A little research of my own showed that the entire idea could be attributed to one single blog post, written by ‘paranormal consultant’ Fiona Broome in 2010.


pages: 227 words: 81,467

How to Be Champion: My Autobiography by Sarah Millican

Albert Einstein, call centre, Downton Abbey, index card, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson

We paid, we queued and, as happens with us, if something’s shit we make it fun. Not that Madame Tussauds is shit. As far as rooms full of lifelike waxworks of famous people go, it’s the best there is. That’s just not our cup of tea. As we walked through briskly, an old Indian man came up to us and asked why there were two Nelson Mandelas. He was a great man but it seemed odd. Then we pointed out to him that the Nelson Mandela standing between Brad Pitt and John Travolta was actually Morgan Freeman. Gary wanted to have his photo taken with Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Albert Einstein, so we nailed those two, but in the world-leader room he decided he wanted a quick picture with Hitler.


pages: 511 words: 148,310

Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide by Joshua S. Goldstein

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, blood diamond, business cycle, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Doomsday Clock, failed state, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of writing, invisible hand, land reform, long peace, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, selection bias, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Tobin tax, unemployed young men, Winter of Discontent, work culture , Y2K

By the way, France got its money’s worth from this maneuver, as Miyet was succeeded by another Frenchman in 2000 and yet another in 2008. Annan became a famous and popular figure, even in the United States, where the UN had many opponents and few champions. Journalist James Traub describes him as “perhaps the most popular figure ever to occupy the office.” Annan and Nelson Mandela, two gray-haired African men, were described as the “only two people with great moral stature in the world today.” Annan and his tall Swedish wife, Nane, were a glamorous presence in New York social circles. To top it off, Annan won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001. Before leaving to accept his prize in Norway, Annan even appeared on Sesame Street to resolve a conflict among Muppets.

Similarly, in 1998 Angola and Zimbabwe sent troops to the Congo under the banner of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and saved the Kabila government there. In its efforts in the Congo, Zimbabwe “consistently sought to sideline South Africa,” a fellow member of SADC, because the South African president, Nelson Mandela, opposed military action in the Congo. AFRICAN ISSUES African regional organizations have particular weaknesses in peacekeeping. In Africa, six different regional organizations have undertaken peacekeeping since 1979. The Organization of African Unity, predecessor of the AU, ran eleven operations, mostly small-scale.

UNICEF’s influential report The State of the World’s Children 1996 included a version in its section on “Children in War,” citing the Ahlström book. Also in 1996 the UN released a major report, “The Impact of Armed Conflict on Children,” authored by a high-profile figure of great moral stature, Graça Machel. (She was former education minister and first lady of Mozambique, and the future spouse of Nelson Mandela.) Machel had been commissioned by the UN secretary-general to lead the two-year process culminating in the report, which was requested by the UN General Assembly in 1993 and presented to the General Assembly in 1996. In the report, Machel writes, “In recent decades, the proportion of war victims who are civilians has leaped dramatically from 5 per cent to over 90 per cent.”


pages: 482 words: 161,169

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry by Peter Warren Singer

Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, Global Witness, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market friction, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, risk/return, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, vertical integration

It was discovered in 1990 to be the front for a covert assassination and espionage unit, used to eliminate enemies of the apartheid regime abroad.3 While in the CCB, Barlow, who is recognizable by his one green and one blue eye, was assigned to Western Europe. There, he was in charge of spreading disinformation against Nelson Mandela's African National Congre^ (ANC), for example, releasing propaganda in England that the ANC was working with IRA terrorists. He was also responsible for setting up front corporations to evade sanctions and sell South African weapons abroad. During this time, Barlow is suspected to have made many of his corporate world contacts that would later prove useful for EO.

Although regular unemployment is ahvays a concern to governments, unemployed former soldiers possess skills that, if thev become disaffected, can make them uniquely dangerous and disruptive. South Africa is a prime example of this factor. Given the checkered history of the soldiers who had served in the elite units of the apartheid-era South African military, the new African National Congress (ANC) government in South .Africa led by Nelson Mandela had a particular incentive to see that these soldiers stayed out of domestic trouble, especially during the first multiracial elections in 1994- This may in part explain the lack of sanction when EO first fought in the Angolan civil war. In public, the Mandela government was decidedly against the firm's activities, as EO w7as acting in contravention of the "new7" South Africa's attempt to become a responsible regional power.r>1 How7ever, in private, it quietly tolerated and even facilitated earlv EO recruitment of these forces.

The problem is that by limiting themselves to state regimes, PMFs would be agents of the status quo, aiding only those regimes with the money to retain power, while potentially suppressing more legitimate resistance movements or preventing the chances for a conflict to reach a negotiated solution. For example, the Nelson Mandela-led African National Congress and even the Founding Fathers of the United States were groups once classified as rebels or terrorists before they overturned unpop- MORALITY AND THE PRIVATIZED Mil ITARY FIRM 22X ular regimes and became internationally recognized, democratic governments. On the other hand, even when a government is formally recognized by the international community, it still may not be seen as legitimate by a large proportion of its society.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

And odds are, you can’t either. We all need fuel. Without the assistance, advice, and inspiration of others, the gears of our mind grind to a halt, and we’re stuck with nowhere to go. I have been blessed to find mentors and idols at every step of my life, and I’ve been lucky to meet many of them. From Joe Weider to Nelson Mandela, from Mikhail Gorbachev to Muhammad Ali, from Andy Warhol to George H.W. Bush, I have never been shy about seeking wisdom from others to pour fuel on my fire. You have probably listened to Tim’s podcasts. (I particularly recommend the one with the charming bodybuilder with the Austrian accent.)

I have my mind inside the pectoral muscles when I do my bench press. I’m really inside, and it’s like I gain a form of meditation, because you have no chance of thinking or concentrating on anything else at that time.” ✸ Who do you think of when you hear the word “successful”? He mentioned several people, including Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Nelson Mandela, and Muhammad Ali, but his final addition stuck out: “Cincinnatus. He was an emperor in the Roman Empire. Cincinnati, the city, by the way, is named after him because he was a big idol of George Washington’s. He is a great example of success because he was asked to reluctantly step into power and become the emperor and to help, because Rome was about to get annihilated by all the wars and battles.

* * * Tony Robbins Tony Robbins (TW/FB/IG: @tonyrobbins, tonyrobbins.com) is the world’s most famous performance coach. He’s advised everyone from Bill Clinton and Serena Williams to Leonardo DiCaprio and Oprah (who calls him “superhuman”). Tony Robbins has consulted or advised international leaders including Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand, Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, and three U.S. presidents. Robbins has also developed and produced five award-winning television infomercials that have continuously aired—on average—every 30 minutes, 24 hours a day, somewhere in North America, since 1989.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

In the realm of consumer behavior, brands, organizations, and leaders can gain or lose power because they align or fail to align with contemporary moral values. Appealing to moral principles to mobilize people for change is also a universal source of power. If you think back to social change icons like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Mother Teresa or, more recently, Malala Yousafzai, their ideals are what enabled them to influence others. This is also how, in 2019, sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future mobilized an estimated 4 million people in 163 countries to march, protest, and join strikes for climate action.68 But while moral appeals are powerful, they are not always virtuous.

Micah, Kalle, and so many others who occupied their cities had hoped that this would be the protest that led to the rise of a radically new social and economic system. Yet, the capitalist system did not change much, if at all, in the following months. What went wrong? Some may jump to the conclusion that the movement came short because it lacked an exceptionally charismatic leader, like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., or Nelson Mandela. But a single iconic change maker, no matter how remarkable, rarely changes the course of organizations or society on their own, because an isolated individual’s call to action is far too easy to disregard. These iconic figures used their power to inspire and influence thousands, sometimes millions of individuals to step out of their routine and join a movement to bring about the changes they envisioned.


How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

2021 United States Capitol attack, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Big Tech, Brexit referendum, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, colonial rule, commoditize, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, future of journalism, iterative process, James Bridle, Kevin Roose, lockdown, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, performance metric, QAnon, recommendation engine, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Twitter Arab Spring, work culture

Not because she has committed any crime—but because the leaders in her country do not want to hear criticism. So she has a choice: toe the government line and be safe, or risk everything to do her job. She has not hesitated to choose the latter. And I know she will never give up. Throughout history some of the most important voices in society have been persecuted. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King, Jr., were all prosecuted because they criticized the government of the day. At his criminal sedition trial in India, Gandhi told the judge that he did not want mercy for standing up to a government that was trampling on human rights: “I am here . . . to invite and cheerfully submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me” because “non-co-operation with evil is as much a duty as is co-operation with good.”

She looked down. “There is no curtailment of the right to freedom of speech and the press. . . . What society expects is a responsible free press. It is in acting responsibly that freedom is given its meaning. The exercise of a freedom should and must be used with due regard to the freedom of others. As Nelson Mandela said, ‘For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.’” Mandela must have been rolling in his grave. I was being convicted for a story I hadn’t written, edited, or supervised, for a crime that hadn’t even existed when the story had been published.


pages: 91 words: 26,009

Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bretton Woods, corporate governance, feminist movement, Frank Gehry, ghettoisation, Howard Zinn, informal economy, land bank, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, RAND corporation, reserve currency, special economic zone, spectrum auction, stem cell, The Chicago School, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

The report warned of the growing influence of the Soviet Union on the African National Congress (ANC) and said that US strategic and corporate interests (that is, access to South Africa’s minerals) would be best served if there were genuine sharing of political power by all races. The foundations began to support the ANC. The ANC soon turned on the more radical organizations like Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness movement and more or less eliminated it. When Nelson Mandela took over as South Africa’s first Black president, he was canonized as a living saint, not just because he is a freedom fighter who spent twenty-seven years in prison but also because he deferred completely to the Washington Consensus. Socialism disappeared from the ANC’s agenda. South Africa’s great “peaceful transition,” so praised and lauded, meant no land reforms, no demands for reparation, no nationalization of South Africa’s mines.


pages: 88 words: 26,706

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right by Michael Brooks

4chan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Bernie Sanders, capitalist realism, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Flynn Effect, gun show loophole, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trolley problem, universal basic income, upwardly mobile

Similarly, when it comes to political strategy, we should draw inspiration from the history of transnational organizing, in which people from various cultures worked together to overcome some of the twentieth century’s worst oppressions. Take the history of South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC), the party of Nelson Mandela. Founded in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress, the ANC helped smash apartheid and, in fact, still governs the country today. The party’s history exemplifies some of the absolute best of the international socialist tradition—and, tragically, also shows how neoliberalism, appealing to narrowly-conceived identity politics, and authoritarianism can undermine revolutionary momentum.


pages: 809 words: 237,921

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

These involved the transfer of equity from a white company to a black person or black-run company. As early as 1993 the financial services company Sanlam sold 10 percent of its stake in Metropolitan Life to a black-owned consortium led by Nthato Motlana, a former secretary of the ANC’s Youth League and onetime doctor to the ANC’s leader and future president Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. After 1994 the number of such BEE deals began to grow rapidly, reaching 281 by 1998. By this time some estimates suggest that as much as 10 percent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) was owned by black businesses. The problem was that the black people who wanted to buy shares often could not afford to.

This was a signal that the re-empowered black majority under the ANC’s leadership would not seek revenge against whites. But relationships and guarantees are not enough unless there is trust between the partners in the coalition, and here symbolic gestures of compromise matter greatly. This is where Nelson Mandela’s inspiring leadership played a critical role. One episode epitomizing Mandela’s efforts took place on June 24, 1995, on the day of the first Rugby World Cup final in South Africa. The country’s national team, the Springboks, was allowed to compete for the first time, after the end of the international boycott against the apartheid regime, and was facing the odds-on favorite, the New Zealand All Blacks.

The country’s national team, the Springboks, was allowed to compete for the first time, after the end of the international boycott against the apartheid regime, and was facing the odds-on favorite, the New Zealand All Blacks. The Springbok rugby team was closely identified with apartheid, and its jersey was an Afrikaner symbol, much hated by the black population. How would the president of the new, post-apartheid South Africa perform his duties as head of state on this day? Brilliantly, as it turned out. Nelson Mandela added to his year-long efforts to remove the bitterness and distrust between the black majority and the white minority by turning up wearing the Springbok jersey with the number 6 of the captain, François Pienaar. The 63,000-strong audience, about 62,000 of them white, and mostly Afrikaners, were stunned.


pages: 315 words: 99,065

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson

barriers to entry, Boeing 747, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, clean water, collective bargaining, Costa Concordia, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, flag carrier, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, index card, inflight wifi, Lao Tzu, legacy carrier, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, work culture , zero-sum game

But, all joking aside, listening and taking notes are clearly habits that have served Stelios well . . . oops, correction, make that Sir Stelios; he was knighted by the Queen in 2006 for ‘services to entrepreneurship’ – and note-taking. I can’t promise knighthoods for everyone, but if you’re still not convinced let me suggest you try a self-imposed crash course in listening more and talking less and I promise you will be amazed at the immediate benefits you’ll observe. SAY LESS – CONTRIBUTE MORE While the late Nelson Mandela was a man of innumerable talents, one that always impressed me the most about him was his unfailing willingness to listen to what others had to say. Even during his long years in prison he took time to listen to what his jailers had to say about life, so much so that he made them the first people he publicly forgave when he was released.

Few other people could have galvanised the formation of the Elders in the way that Madiba did and yet few people were better qualified to appreciate the critical role the ability to listen plays in diplomacy, business and life in general. Another remarkable human being and listener par excellence is Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who as a close friend of Nelson Mandela’s was a founding member of the Elders and chaired the group from 2007 until 2013. Seldom in history has a nation put more faith in the healing power of listening than post-apartheid South Africa did with its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). President Mandela named Desmond Tutu to chair the historic commission’s work, the primary focus of which was on those who had suffered human rights abuses as a result of apartheid between 1960 and 1994.


pages: 391 words: 102,301

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

Thatcher was not exaggerating hugely when she wrote in her memoirs, “The West’s system of liberty, which Ronald Reagan and I personified in the eastern bloc, was increasingly in the ascendant; the Soviet system was showing its cracks.”21 While Thatcher and Reagan’s support of democracy in Eastern Europe fits a narrative in which the advances of economic and political freedom throughout the 1980s were essentially inseparable, elsewhere things were more complicated. The exigencies of the cold war and Thatcher’s admiration for capitalism and aversion to socialism meant that she enjoyed cordial relations with some right-wing dictators and excoriated some genuine freedom fighters. Thatcher notoriously referred to Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress as a “terrorist” organization—and there are warm references in her memoirs to dictators such as Suharto of Indonesia and General Augusto Pinochet in Chile. But while Thatcher may have exaggerated the extent to which she and Ronald Reagan always represented “freedom,” there is no doubt about the potency and importance of their transatlantic partnership and their promotion of free markets.

But by the time apartheid was brought down in the mid-1990s and South Africa achieved its freedom, the Soviet Union no longer existed. The collapse of the Soviet Union freed white South Africa of its fear of the “red menace” and made it easier to contemplate the end of apartheid. The government of the new South Africa did contain members of the Communist Party. But the ministers in Nelson Mandela’s first government donned suits and ties, pursued orthodox economic policies, and embraced globalization. The idea of “roundtable negotiations” that helped to bring a peaceful end to communism in Central Europe also served as a model for the negotiations that brought a peaceful end to apartheid and a transition to democracy in South Africa.


Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

Able Archer 83, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, one-state solution, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, uranium enrichment, wage slave, WikiLeaks, working-age population

Similarly, in Iran we honor the courageous dissidents and condemn those who defend the clerical establishment. And so on elsewhere generally. In this way, the honorable term “dissident” is used selectively. It does not, of course, apply, with its favorable connotations, to value-oriented intellectuals at home or to those who combat U.S.-supported tyranny abroad. Take the interesting case of Nelson Mandela, who was only removed from the official State Department terrorist list in 2008, allowing him to travel to the United States without special authorization. Twenty years earlier, he was the criminal leader of one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups,” according to a Pentagon report.12 That is why President Reagan had to support the apartheid regime, increasing trade with South Africa in violation of congressional sanctions and supporting South Africa’s depredations in neighboring countries, which led, according to a UN study, to 1.5 million deaths.13 That was only one episode in the war on terrorism that Reagan declared to combat “the plague of the modern age,” or, as Secretary of State George Shultz had it, “a return to barbarism in the modern age.”14 We may add hundreds of thousands of corpses in Central America and tens of thousands more in the Middle East, among other achievements.

-backed terrorist operations in Angola, Cuban forces drove South African aggressors out of the country, compelled them to leave illegally occupied Namibia, and opened the way for the Angolan election in which, after his defeat, Savimbi “dismissed entirely the views of nearly 800 foreign elections observers here that the balloting … was generally free and fair,” as the New York Times reported, and continued the terrorist war with U.S. support.4 Cuban achievements in the liberation of Africa and the ending of apartheid were hailed by Nelson Mandela when he was finally released from prison. Among his first acts was to declare that “during all my years in prison, Cuba was an inspiration and Fidel Castro a tower of strength … [Cuban victories] destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor [and] inspired the fighting masses of South Africa … a turning point for the liberation of our continent—and of my people—from the scourge of apartheid.… What other country can point to a record of greater selflessness than Cuba has displayed in its relations to Africa?”


pages: 337 words: 103,273

The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World by Paul Gilding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, BRICs, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, data science, decarbonisation, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fear of failure, geopolitical risk, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Ocado, ocean acidification, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, systems thinking, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, University of East Anglia, warehouse automation

Each held different levels of personal spiritual alignment with this position of hope, but they were all united in their strategic pragmatism. Hope works. Martin Luther King’s famous speech was not “I have a nightmare based on the evidence of racism all around me every day and the inability of people to change,” it was “I have a dream.” Nelson Mandela faced a country that was on the verge of collapse and chaos, with devastating violence between blacks and a ruthless white government that had been fighting change with military force for decades with the support of the white population. Despite having been imprisoned for decades, he drew on the best of humanity in himself and called on all the people of South Africa to aspire to a united country.

If we want a world that works, we’re going to have to raise our voices. McKibben is right. This is a time we need to be clear, loud, and focused in our message. What big oil and coal companies are doing is just plain wrong, and it must be stopped, urgently. The right strategy model for this is Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid. He was a leader who never once backed way from the rightness of his cause or compromised his goal, but still approached those who opposed him with humanity. This was all the more remarkable remembering that his enemies kept him in jail for twenty-seven years and murdered his friends and colleagues.


pages: 351 words: 96,780

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, launch on warning, liberation theology, long peace, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment

It is illuminating to see how they reacted, say, to Tony Blair’s repetition of the official reasons for the bombing of Serbia in 1999: failure to bomb “would have dealt a devastating blow to the credibility of NATO” and “the world would have been less safe as a result of that.” The objects of NATO’s solicitude did not seem overly impressed by the need to safeguard the credibility of those who had been crushing them for centuries. Nelson Mandela, for example, condemned Blair for “encouraging international chaos, together with America, by ignoring other nations and playing ‘policeman of the world’” in their attacks on Iraq in 1998 and Serbia the next year. In the world’s largest democracy—which, after independence, began to recover from the grim effects of centuries of British rule—the Clinton-Blair efforts to shore up NATO’s credibility and make the world safe were also not appreciated, but official and press condemnations in India remained unheard.

A UNICEF study estimated a death toll of 850,000 infants and young children in these two countries—150,000 in 1988 alone, reversing gains of the early post-independence years primarily through the weapon of “mass terrorism.” That is putting aside South Africa’s practices within its own borders, where it was defending civilization against the onslaughts of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, one of the “more notorious terrorist groups,” according to a 1988 Pentagon report. Meanwhile the Reaganites evaded sanctions, increased trade, and provided valuable diplomatic support for South Africa.3 One of the endeavors of the current incumbents has become well known: the success of the CIA and its associates during the 1980s in recruiting radical Islamists and organizing them into a military and terrorist force.


pages: 537 words: 99,778

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement by Amy Lang, Daniel Lang/levitsky

activist lawyer, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bonus culture, British Empire, capitalist realism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, different worldview, facts on the ground, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, housing justice, Kibera, late capitalism, lolcat, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, plutocrats, Port of Oakland, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Slavoj Žižek, social contagion, structural adjustment programs, the medium is the message, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor

When I visit prisoners at the supermaximum security prison in Youngstown, more than one officer has called out, ‘Remember me, Staughton? I used to be your client.’ When they could not find other work in our depressed city, which has the highest rate of poverty in the United States, many former steelworkers and truck drivers took prison jobs. Nelson Mandela befriended a guard at Robben Island whose particular assignment was to watch over him. The officer, James Gregory, has written a book about it sub-titled Nelson Mandela: My Prisoner, My Friend. Mr Gregory had a seat near the front at Mr Mandela’s inauguration. The same logic applies to soldiers in a volunteer army. Thus one Occupier has written, ‘A thoughtful soldier, a soldier with a conscience, is the 1%’s worst nightmare.’2 In the end, I think, consensus decision-making and nonviolence both have to do with building a community of trust.


pages: 359 words: 96,019

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, gamification, gentrification, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, Oculus Rift, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, QR code, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, too big to fail, value engineering, Y Combinator, young professional

It had only been two short years since Snapchat took advantage of front-facing cameras on iPhones to explode from an unknown startup to one of the fastest-growing tech companies on the planet. As Snapchat grew, the selfie tipped over into the mainstream. President Barack Obama made worldwide headlines when he joined Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt and British prime minister David Cameron in a smiling selfie during a memorial celebration for Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg, South Africa. And the trend would only continue. At the start of 2014, Academy Awards host Ellen DeGeneres walked down the aisle of the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood with her phone out, taking a selfie with Liza Minelli and talking about it like a teenage Snapchatter. She stopped by Meryl Streep and said she wanted to pay homage to Streep’s record eighteen Oscar nominations by breaking the record for most retweeted picture ever.

Evan hates the expansive, all-company open-floor plans that many tech giants favor, preferring places where small groups can be in the same room. Each team works in the same room, but only with their team, not the entire division or company. Evan has arranged for artists who inspire him to decorate Snapchat’s offices. Inside, the exposed brick walls are covered in illustrated portraits of Tina Fey, George Clooney, Andy Warhol, Nelson Mandela, Daft Punk, and other celebrities. Every one of the stars is portrayed through a phone screen taking a selfie. In August 2013, a friend of Evan’s had been meeting with Paramount Television president Amy Powell and snapped a portrait of Steve Jobs in her office to him. Evan loved it and tracked down the artist, ThankYouX, aka Ryan Wilson.


pages: 846 words: 250,145

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, imperial preference, Internet Archive, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, out of africa, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South China Sea, special economic zone, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, union organizing, urban planning, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

In spite of its domestic failures, however, Ben Bella’s Algeria became a centerpiece for Third World revolutionaries from Africa and the Middle East. Two of the main groups fighting against Portugal, which still held on to its African colonies, were headquartered there—the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). Nelson Mandela, the leader of the South African National Congress (ANC), spent time in Algiers, where he received military training, as did revolutionaries from Congo, Rhodesia, and Palestine. Malcolm X and other African-American militants visited, and several of the leaders of the Black Panther movement later took refuge there.

But unlike more radical Third World countries, Nehru continued to believe that cooperation with Europeans was possible, and that violent conflict should be avoided. Radicals such as Nasser were disappointed with India’s position in favor of negotiations during the Suez Crisis or its lack of military support for African liberation movements. Nasser, Ben Bella, and Nelson Mandela deplored India’s emphasis on mediation and arbitration, and its continued willingness to remain within the British Commonwealth. Within India itself, however, Nehru was moving further to the Left in his attempts to further his country’s rapid development. Since the 1930s, the Congress leadership had been fascinated with Soviet planning models and the success these plans seemed to have in modernizing a backward country.

On other matters, internal and external, the Cold War became increasingly important in southern Africa in the 1980s. Botha viewed his own regime as essentially anti-Communist. His argument for clinging to the fiction of “independent” homelands for blacks within South Africa was that majority rule would mean a victory for Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC), which was in alliance with the South African Communist Party. South Africa also continued to occupy the neighboring country of Namibia (also known as South West Africa), in spite of countless UN resolutions demanding its withdrawal. Meanwhile, Botha stepped up the policy of trying to destabilize the next-door countries of Angola and Mozambique, on the pretext that they were allied with the Soviet Union and gave refuge to ANC exiles.


pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

When Angola finally won its independence and Neto became president, the US feared that Neto, a developmentalist, would nationalise the oil reserves, so they threw substantial support behind his opponent, the brutal rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, fuelling a civil war that would last until 2002 and leave Angola in ruins. And then there was South Africa. Both the United States and Britain actively supported the apartheid regime all the way through the 1980s, for they feared that if Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress ever came to power they would nationalise the country’s enormous deposits of gold, diamonds and platinum, which American and British companies controlled. But no Western power intervened in postcolonial Africa as much as France. After Francophone Africa won formal independence in 1960, France worried it would lose control over the region’s resources to the nationalist movements.

Economic and political freedom has been attacked, ironically, in the name of economic and political freedom. Structural adjustment is a powerful manifestation of this paradox, but it has also been perpetrated in other, more insidious ways. Six Free Trade and the Rise of the Virtual Senate Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts. Nelson Mandela At the same time that structural adjustment was being imposed across the global South, cracking open markets and clearing the way for Western exports and multinational companies, there was already something else afoot – yet another tactic with which the South would have to contend. A new organisation was being designed that would govern the emerging world of global commerce.


pages: 374 words: 110,238

Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain's Most Notorious Media Baron by John Preston

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, computer age, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, G4S, global village, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, Jeffrey Epstein, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, the market place

(Maxwell family archives, first published in Joe Haines, Maxwell, Orion, 1988.) Maxwell with Barry in post-war Berlin. (Maxwell family archives, first published in Joe Haines, Maxwell, Orion, 1988.) here Clash of the titans: a rare photograph of Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch in the same room. (Mirrorpix.) here A genius for hobnobbing: Maxwell with Margaret Thatcher and Nelson Mandela. (Mirrorpix.) here ‘That odious man’: Maxwell with Princess Diana. (Mirrorpix.) here When the going was good: Maxwell with Andrea Martin and Peter Jay. (Mirrorpix.) here Up above the clouds: Maxwell stretched out on his private jet. (Mirrorpix.) Headington Hill Hall: ‘the best council house in the country’.

Maxwell and Betty shortly after their marriage. Maxwell with Barry in post-war Berlin. Clash of the titans: a rare photograph of Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch in the same room, together with the Japanese businessman Yosaji Kobayashi. A genius for hobnobbing: Maxwell with Mrs Thatcher and Nelson Mandela. ‘That odious man’: Maxwell with Princess Diana. When the going was good: Maxwell with Andrea Martin and Peter Jay. Up above the clouds: Maxwell stretched out on his private jet. Headington Hill Hall: ‘the best council house in the country’. The Mirror pulls out all the stops to report Maxwell’s death.


pages: 708 words: 176,708

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire by Wikileaks

affirmative action, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, energy transition, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, F. W. de Klerk, facts on the ground, failed state, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, high net worth, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Northern Rock, nuclear ambiguity, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game, éminence grise

By the early 1990s, internal unrest and international sanctions brought the apartheid regime to the brink of collapse. In response, the de Klerk regime was forced to release political prisoners and legalize opposition movements such as the African National Congress. The release in February 1990 of ANC leader Nelson Mandela epitomized this momentum toward majority rule. The growing unrest and clamor for change are reflected in a March 1990 cable, for instance, that transcribes a speech delivered in Durban by the US ambassador, which vividly reflects the contentious relations between the African nationalists led by Mandela and the Bush administration.

The growing unrest and clamor for change are reflected in a March 1990 cable, for instance, that transcribes a speech delivered in Durban by the US ambassador, which vividly reflects the contentious relations between the African nationalists led by Mandela and the Bush administration. The ambassador emphasized that the US continued to oppose apartheid but vowed that the US would reject any settlement that was not acceptable to all parties [90CAPETOWN623_a]. The ambassador noted that President Bush had invited both F. W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela to the White House. He took time to praise de Klerk for releasing political prisoners, and called on US allies in Europe to support the South African prime minister. The speech underscores the Bush administration’s tilt toward the white-minority regime. The ambassador clearly signaled the Bush administration’s ambivalence about the US sanctions mandated by the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 and 1988.

The ambassador clearly signaled the Bush administration’s ambivalence about the US sanctions mandated by the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 and 1988. His boss, George Bush, had opposed both pieces of legislation as vice president in the Reagan administration. The Clinton administration established a closer relationship with South Africa. This is reflected in the diplomats’ unusual interest in Thabo Mbeki, the presumed successor to Nelson Mandela. In March 1995, for example, in a confidential intelligence assessment, the INR posited that Thabo Mbeki would probably succeed Mandela as ANC leader and thus as the next South African president [1995STATE51417_a]. The report describes Mbeki as a “moderate” but warns that “growing rifts within the ANC will increasingly test Mbeki’s leadership.”


9-11 by Noam Chomsky

Berlin Wall, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

The toll of Reagan’s war on terror included hundreds of thousands of corpses in Central America, over a million in Angola and Mozambique where Reagan was strongly supporting the apartheid South African regime in its defense against “one of the more notorious terrorist groups” in the world (1988, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress), tens of thousands in the Middle East, and much else. All dispatched to the memory hole along with other matters of little consequence. 19. I know of no comprehensive study, but it seems quite clear that reactions were considerably different in the West and the Global South, where events of little consequence tend to be remembered.


Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World by Michael Edwards

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Bernie Madoff, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, different worldview, high net worth, invisible hand, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Shuttleworth, market bubble, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, subprime mortgage crisis, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs

The Omidyar Network is investing heavily in civil society development in West Africa through a new African foundation called TrustAfrica. Richard Branson and others are supporting interventions in conflict situations by the Elders, a group of eminent statesmen and stateswomen whose numbers include Nelson Mandela, Mary Robinson, and Jimmy Carter. And some of the important commons-based experiments cited above are funded by software companies such as Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, presumably not entirely without self-interest, given that they rely on the infrastructure of computers and the Internet. the good, the bad, and the ugly 31 the bad Less good, and merging into bad, is corporate social responsibility, or at least those parts of CSR that are closer to windowdressing than substantive reform — for example, Coca-Cola, releasing its first review of corporate responsibility at the same time as contaminating water supplies in India; Intel, which exited the One Laptop per Child project because of “philosophical differences” that turned out to be a more basic desire to protect its market for higher-priced hardware and more profits for itself; Walmart, now selling environmentally friendly light bulbs and the like but still engaged in “wage theft” (depressing living wages by withholding benefits and opposing unionization), as author Kim Bobo puts it; and a whole raft of oil companies, mining companies, supermarkets, and others whose performance in CSR doesn’t match their public statements.28 As in these examples, too much CSR is a case of one step forward, two steps back, giving with one hand and taking with the other.


pages: 122 words: 38,022

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, capitalist realism, citizen journalism, crony capitalism, death of newspapers, DIY culture, Donald Trump, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, mass immigration, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, Overton Window, post-industrial society, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

Third, this laughter is ambivalent; it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. The transgressive style is not without precedent on the formally political conservative right, either. The Federation of Conservative Students in the UK famously shocked with a poster saying ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ and criticized Thatcher for her soft touch, perhaps an early version of the ‘cuckervative’ jibe. They also had libertarian and authoritarian wings of thought, but certainly constituted a break from the decorum of the Burkeans, adopting some of the harder edge of the Thatcher era, even flirting with far-right ideas.


pages: 124 words: 39,011

Beyond Outrage: Expanded Edition: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It by Robert B. Reich

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, benefit corporation, business cycle, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, electricity market, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, job automation, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

In 1966, Huerta negotiated a contract between the farmworkers and the Schenley Wine Company; it was the first time farmworkers effectively negotiated a contract to improve their pay and working conditions. Or think of other great leaders who had no formal authority but changed the world—Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela. Leaders get people to actively work on what needs to be done. To do this, leaders need to help people overcome the four “work-avoidance mechanisms” that most of the rest of us carry around in our heads. Those mechanisms are denial that a problem exists, the desire to escape responsibility even when we recognize the problem, the tendency to scapegoat others for causing it, and—worst of all—cynicism about the possibility of ever remedying the problem.


pages: 127 words: 36,853

Autism: A Very Short Introduction by Uta Frith

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, epigenetics, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, phenotype, theory of mind

Deary INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION Khalid Koser INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Paul Wilkinson ISLAM Malise Ruthven JOURNALISM Ian Hargreaves JUDAISM Norman Solomon JUNG Anthony Stevens KABBALAH Joseph Dan KAFKA Ritchie Robertson KANT Roger Scruton KIERKEGAARD Patrick Gardiner THE KORAN Michael Cook LAW Raymond Wacks LINGUISTICS Peter Matthews LITERARY THEORY Jonathan Culler LOCKE John Dunn LOGIC Graham Priest MACHIAVELLI Quentin Skinner THE MARQUIS DE SADE John Phillips MARX Peter Singer MATHEMATICS Timothy Gowers THE MEANING OF LIFE Terry Eagleton MEDICAL ETHICS Tony Hope MEDIEVAL BRITAIN John Gillingham and Ralph A. Griffiths MEMORY Jonathan Foster MODERN ART David Cottington MODERN CHINA Rana Mitter MODERN IRELAND Senia Pašeta MOLECULES Philip Ball MORMONISM Richard Lyman Bushman MUSIC Nicholas Cook MYTH Robert A. Segal NATIONALISM Steven Grosby NELSON MANDELA Elleke Boehmer THE NEW TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE Kyle Keefer NEWTON Robert Iliffe NIETZSCHE Michael Tanner NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Christopher Harvie and H. C. G. Matthew NORTHERN IRELAND Marc Mulholland NUCLEAR WEAPONS Joseph M. Siracusa THE OLD TESTAMENT Michael D. Coogan PARTICLE PHYSICS Frank Close PAUL E.


Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, colonial rule, corporate personhood, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, invisible hand, liberation theology, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuremberg principles, one-state solution, open borders, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

Through the 1980s, U.S. trade with South Africa increased despite the 1985 congressional sanctions (which Reagan evaded), and Reagan continued to back South African depredations in neighboring countries that led to an estimated 1.5 million deaths. As late as 1988 the administration condemned Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress as one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups.”40 The Apartheid regime remained strong, some thought invulnerable. But then U.S. policy shifted, and within a few years, the regime had collapsed. There are clear lessons here both for Israelis and for those outside who are committed to bringing some measure of peace and justice to the region.

That war on terror has also been expunged from historical consciousness, because the outcome cannot readily be incorporated into the canon: hundreds of thousands slaughtered in the ruined countries of Central America and many more elsewhere, among them an estimated 1.5 million in the terrorist wars sponsored in neighboring countries by Reagan’s favored ally, Apartheid South Africa, which had to defend itself from Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, one of the more world’s “more notorious terrorist groups,” so Washington determined in 1988. In fairness, it should be added that twenty years later Congress voted to remove the ANC from the list of terrorist organizations, so that Mandela is now at last able to enter the United States without obtaining a waiver from the government.14 The reigning doctrine is sometimes called “American exceptional-ism.”


pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

With the unemployment rate at over 25 per cent, the lack of jobs, particularly for the black population, is a recurrent concern. Some of these economic woes are legacies of apartheid, which was a system of racial segregation in place between 1948 and the early 1990s. It was ended after the release from prison in 1990 of Nelson Mandela, who was later elected president. Mandela had worked for decades to end the unfair system that designated the majority of the South African population second-class citizens. Even though official discrimination against blacks has ended, they remain less well off economically more than two decades later.

It’s an example of Douglass North’s path dependence and why institutions are slow to change, even with the will to do so. And how it takes time for a disadvantaged group to advance even after the formal barriers have been removed since they start from a weaker economic position. It’s one of the challenges holding back the country’s growth potential decades after Nelson Mandela led the nation into a new era. This jars with the perception that South Africa is an attractive destination for investors. This is why the country has been described as having a First World financial market within a Third World economic system. Further reform of its economic and political institutions is needed to close that gap, as South Africa has been a beacon for the sub-Saharan region but also epitomizes the development challenges the region still faces.


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

With the unemployment rate at over 25 per cent, the lack of jobs, particularly for the black population, is a recurrent concern. Some of these economic woes are legacies of apartheid, which was a system of racial segregation in place between 1948 and the early 1990s. It was ended after the release from prison in 1990 of Nelson Mandela, who was later elected president. Mandela had worked for decades to end the unfair system that designated the majority of the South African population second-class citizens. Even though official discrimination against blacks has ended, they remain less well off economically more than two decades later.

It’s an example of Douglass North’s path dependence and why institutions are slow to change, even with the will to do so. And how it takes time for a disadvantaged group to advance even after the formal barriers have been removed since they start from a weaker economic position. It’s one of the challenges holding back the country’s growth potential decades after Nelson Mandela led the nation into a new era. This jars with the perception that South Africa is an attractive destination for investors. This is why the country has been described as having a First World financial market within a Third World economic system. Further reform of its economic and political institutions is needed to close that gap, as South Africa has been a beacon for the sub-Saharan region but also epitomizes the development challenges the region still faces.


pages: 411 words: 114,717

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

Given both countries’ histories of racial strife, many observers figured it was only a matter of time before South Africa, too, succumbed to violent demands that whites yield a share of the wealth to the millions of blacks who were still mired in poverty, without jobs or land of their own. That March I decided to go see for myself if these dark predictions had merit. Arriving on a Sunday morning in Cape Town, my first stop was Robben Island, the infamous former penal colony where Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the black liberation movement were held for decades. Its squalid jail cells were the very symbol of apartheid-era oppression, but I found to my astonishment that many of the retired white prison guards were still living on the island with several former black prisoners, who were serving as guides to visitors like me.

In South Africa the limits to racial integration outside the office environment are clear in fine restaurants, where it is hard to find blacks among the diners. For many years it struck me as remarkable that most black South Africans were so determined to reconcile—the grace and statesmanship for which Nelson Mandela became internationally famous appeared to spring from a steadfast national character. Now, after many years without real progress, that statesmanship is starting to look like stagnation. During the years of the economic boom from 2003 to 2007, South African growth did accelerate but only from 3 percent to 5 percent, much slower than the emerging-market average, and it has since fallen back to 3 percent.


pages: 342 words: 114,118

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, British Empire, centre right, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, late capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, Washington Consensus, young professional, zero-sum game

I believed that what they wanted was simple: They wanted freedom, and that meant that America—in my young boy’s mind—was winning. The winds of change. This was freedom’s high-water mark. In a dizzying few years, the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe collapsed, followed by the Soviet Union. Nelson Mandela strode out of a South African prison. Right-wing dictatorships tumbled from South America to Southeast Asia, no longer a useful extension of American anticommunism. The organizing principle of American politics disappeared as well: the Cold War, which had driven everything from our ascent to the moon, to the structure of our government, to the pop culture that shaped my worldview through osmosis.

Eastern European countries like Hungary democratized. Soviet republics like Ukraine declared independence. America distanced itself from autocratic right-wing allies who had formed a bulwark against Communism around the world. Democracy bloomed in Latin America and in parts of Africa and Southeast Asia. Nelson Mandela walked out of prison. The Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. China opened up its economy, but not its political system. “The Communist Party,” Bao Pu said, “they see the outcome of the Cold War. And so now they unanimously conclude that if we don’t actually strengthen Party control, we’re finished—just like the Soviet Communists


The Next Great Migration by Sonia Shah

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, climate change refugee, colonial rule, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, GPS: selective availability, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Ken Thompson, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, open borders, out of africa, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl

We watched on television, the night the news came out, as thousands of ecstatic young people stormed the wall en masse for an impromptu, all-night dance party atop it. A few months later there was dancing in the streets again when the president of South Africa released the revolutionary leader Nelson Mandela from a twenty-seven-year imprisonment, ushering in the end of the harsh system of racial segregation known as apartheid. New graduates like me felt a deep sense of relief. The world seemed immeasurably safer without two superpowers loudly threatening nuclear holocaust. But soon a new global bogeyman2 emerged, one even more chaotic and disruptive than nuclear missiles.

a robotics professor plotted fifteen years Adele Peters, “Watch the Movements of Every Refugee on Earth Since the Year 2000,” Fast Company, May 31, 2017. Over the last few years “Global Animal Movements Based on Movebank Data (Map),” Movebank, YouTube, August 16, 2017, https://youtu.be/nUKh0fr1Od8. 2: PANIC In late 1989 Soviet-aligned officials “Revellers Rush on Hated Gates,” Guardian, November 10, 1989; “February 11, 1990: Freedom for Nelson Mandela,” On This Day 1950–2005, BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/11/newsid_2539000/2539947.stm. But soon a new global bogeyman Robert D. Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” Atlantic, February 1994. The idea of migrants as a national security threat McLeman, Climate and Human Migration due to sea-level rise McLeman, Climate and Human Migration, 212.


pages: 743 words: 201,651

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

A provision of the Chilean constitution was actually amended in response to a judgement of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which ruled that Chile should not have banned a film called ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’.129 Some of these traditions and values may have come originally in the wake of European colonialism, but even where they did, they have taken root in local soil and been changed in the process. South Africa combines a Dutch and English legal heritage with strong native traditions, memorably evoked in Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom. A comparable blending can be observed in English-, French-, Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries around the world, from Australia to Chile and Kenya to Venezuela. India has an ancient, original heritage of religious and political thought relating to freedom of expression, yet its contemporary free speech debates often revolve around the proper interpretation of a penal code originally drafted by the nineteenth-century English historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay.130 All are also influenced by the international legal and human rights framework developed since 1945.

Jeremy Waldron argues that the law should protect people’s dignity but that it should not protect them from offence. He suggests that dignity concerns the ‘objective or social aspects of a person’s standing in society’, but offence ‘subjective aspects of feeling, including hurt, shock and anger’. ‘Offence’, he says, ‘is inherently a subjective reaction’.63 But, what if I choose, like Nelson Mandela and many dignified African Americans in the last century, to maintain that those who are truly demeaned are not the targets of racist abuse but their abusers? Are we to say ‘no, objectively, Comrade Mandela, your dignity has been demeaned, even if you maintain it has not. Who are you to say whether you have kept your dignity?’

The ignorance of literature and history behind this writing is indeed laughable; more regrettably, the author forgot precisely the most important political ideal which Yu the Great has left the Chinese people: “Those who regulate rivers lead the flood; those who regulate people dredge [channels] and let them talk”’.109 (The ignorance is ‘laughable’ because Yu the Great is a legendary figure, as well known to the Chinese reader as King Arthur is to the British, and is thought to have lived some 4,000 years ago, not 2,000.) In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela recalls the almost Athenian practice of his African home village: Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard: chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and labourer.


A United Ireland: Why Unification Is Inevitable and How It Will Come About by Kevin Meagher

Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, kremlinology, land reform, Nelson Mandela, period drama, Right to Buy, trade route, transaction costs

Indeed, without such support, the balance may well have tipped towards the militarists who were content to make ‘the long war’ against the British state even longer. Like many on the left, Corbyn saw Ireland as a classic struggle for national selfdetermination against colonial rule. But he was by no means alone. Nelson Mandela may be the safest of safe options for any politician responding to the question ‘who do you most admire in politics?’ but he was also a strong supporter of Irish Republicanism. It was an association that weathered his transformation into international statesman. Indeed, Gerry Adams was part of the honour guard for Mandela’s funeral.


pages: 145 words: 41,453

You Are What You Read by Jodie Jackson

Brexit referendum, delayed gratification, Filter Bubble, framing effect, Future Shock, Hans Rosling, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, race to the bottom, Rutger Bregman, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, yellow journalism

The news industry’s resistance to change will only be overcome by seeing worthwhile results. Industries that have gone through their own consumer-driven evolution all have one thing in common: they rely on a conscious consumer. And a critical requirement for us to become conscious about our consumption is education. It was Nelson Mandela who said, ‘Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.’ Once we are educated about the helpful and harmful effects of the news, we are equipped to shift from being consumers to being conscious consumers. Wilbur Schramm, a sociologist researching the relationship between news and national development, said, ‘Change will not take place unless those who are expected to change know and accept the reasons, the methods, and the rewards for changing.’2 Those of us who learn the ‘why’ of anything will always find the ‘how’.


pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

Recently popular virtues such as grit and resilience are similar recombinations of heart, mind, and will. Cross-cultural analyses show that these and other virtues are valued throughout the world, even if their relative emphasis varies.20 When you ask people who they believe to be civilization’s wisest people, they nominate people like Socrates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, Daw Aung Sang Suu Kyi, and so on.21 Notably, the lists typically exclude the likes of Mozart and Steve Jobs, even if the latter might have been wise in limited domains. Intelligence, talent, and brilliance aren’t the same as heart, mind, and will, although some IQ might be needed for good discernment.

Patrinos and his colleague George Psacharopoulos noted, “it is established beyond any reasonable doubt that there are tangible and measurable returns to investment in education.” Based on data from a range of countries, they estimated the economic rate of return to nationwide education programs to be roughly 10 percent.36 But Nelson Mandela once said that “education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world,” and he was certainly not just talking about economic change.37 In fact, education’s benefits go well beyond economic productivity. Here, for example, is Patrinos’s own catalog of the benefits of girls’ education: A year of schooling for girls reduces infant mortality by 5 to 10 percent.


pages: 391 words: 123,597

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

“What message does Brittany need to hear?” Alexander asked me, and clicked over to another slide. We need to create “adverts just for Brittany,” he said, looked at me again, and smiled. “Just for the things she cares about and not for anything else.” At the end of his presentation, he pulled up an image of Nelson Mandela. Mandela was in my pantheon of superheroes. I had worked with one of his best friends in South Africa, someone who had been imprisoned with him on Robben Island. I had even helped run a Women’s Day event in South Africa for Mandela’s longtime partner, Winnie, but I’d never gotten the chance to shake the hand of the man himself.

BDI began to look at the ways in which human behavior could be understood, and then influenced, through communication. Out of this research, BDI produced significant findings useful for stopping violence, and it began to consult in the defense industry. When the Oakes brothers ran a defense campaign to stop election violence in South Africa in 1994, they helped to bring about the peaceful election of Nelson Mandela. As Alexander had shown me when I first visited the SCL offices, Mandela himself had endorsed SCL. The company’s first golden age began after September 11, 2001, when SCL became an essential partner with governments, including the United Kingdom, in the fight against terrorism. It was an integral part of helping to fight Al-Qaeda messaging.


pages: 378 words: 121,495

The Abandonment of the West by Michael Kimmage

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, classic study, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

In the words of the journalist Charles Krauthammer, who blurbed The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which had gained a clause and lost a question mark from the article, Fukuyama’s theses were “bold, lucid, scandalously brilliant. Until now, the triumph of the West was merely a fact. Fukuyama has given it a deep and highly original meaning.”32 An intervening event between the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe and the appearance of Fukuyama’s book was the release of the anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela from a South African prison in February 1990. The pernicious legacy of European imperialism had fallen on Mandela’s shoulders, and throughout the Cold War the United States had stood with the practitioners of apartheid. The CIA may even have assisted the South African government in Mandela’s arrest in August 1962.

Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 322, 320, 321, 380, 256. 31. Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 312, 79, 382. 32. See Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest, no. 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18; and Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 33. On the CIA and Nelson Mandela, see Borstelmann, Cold War and the Color Line, 156. 34. Fukuyama, End of History, 323, 48. 35. Fukuyama, End of History, xiii, 7, 48. 36. Fukuyama, End of History, 18. 37. Fukuyama, End of History, 45. CHAPTER SIX: THE POST–COLUMBIAN REPUBLIC, 1992–2016 1. McNeill, Pursuit of Truth, 133, 136. 2.


pages: 1,072 words: 297,437

Africa: A Biography of the Continent by John Reader

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, clean water, colonial rule, discovery of the americas, illegal immigration, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, surplus humans, the market place, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The South African election brought Nelson Mandela to power – a man whose strengths had been preserved intact by twenty-seven years of incarceration. By imprisoning him indefinitely, the apartheid regime had sought to remove Mandela's influence from the mainstream of political development, but in fact they had intensified it. Nelson Mandela emerged from prison perfectly equipped for his role in the new South Africa – unbowed by the oppression and indignities of the white regime, untainted by the failures and corruption of independent black Africa, steeled by years of study and reflection. Nelson Mandela and the shift in political power that he represents affirm the value of integrity and ideals in an era when economic pragmatism is the dominant theme of world affairs.

Free elections had taken place on 26 April 1994. For the first time ever, the black majority of the country's 22.7 million electorate had voted. As had been expected, the African National Congress (ANC) secured a convincing majority in a multiracial parliament with a power-sharing government. Nelson Mandela, the man gaoled for treason in 1964 and released only in 1990, became president. The events which occurred simultaneously in Rwanda and South Africa in April 1994 were at opposite extremes of human social behaviour; they demonstrate the depths and the heights to which humanity may fall or rise as it contends with the fundamentals of human existence.


The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe

Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, complexity theory, Copley Medal, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Thomas Malthus

In 1979 a Sunday New York Times review of Chomsky’s Language and Responsibility (Paul Robinson’s “The Chomsky Problem”) began: “Judged in terms of the power, range, novelty and influence of his thought, Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive today.”114 In 1986, in the Thomson Reuters Arts & Humanities Citation Index, which tracks how often authors are mentioned in other authors’ work, Chomsky came in eighth…in very fast company…the first seven were Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato, and Freud.115 The Prospect–Foreign Policy world thinkers poll for 2005 found Chomsky to be the number one intellectual in the world, with twice the polling numbers of the runner-up (Umberto Eco).116 In the New Statesman’s 2006 “Heroes of Our Time” listings—the heroes being mainly fighters for justice and civil rights who had been imprisoned for the Cause, such as Nelson Mandela, the Nobel Peace Prize winner (1993) who had served twenty-seven years of a life sentence for plotting the violent overthrow of the South African government, and another Nobel winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, who was under house arrest in Myanmar at the time—Chomsky came in seventh.117 His arrests were of the token variety that seldom caused the miscreant to miss dinner out.


pages: 165 words: 47,405

Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

British Empire, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, failed state, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, launch on warning, liberation theology, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Westphalian system

There was strong opposition to apartheid at the time, and Congress had passed legislation banning aid for South Africa. The Reaganites had to find ways to get around congressional legislation in order to in fact increase their trade with South Africa. So they said that South Africa was defending itself against one of the “more notorious terrorist groups” in the world, namely Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress.8 This was a period of massacres, devastation, and destruction, all of which is effaced. One of the things that happened during Reagan’s administration was the invasion of Grenada. You were in Boulder, Colorado, that day, October 25, 1983, and you began your talk by saying, “The latest U.S. intervention as of this morning is Grenada.”


pages: 193 words: 46,052

Modern China: A Very Short Introduction by Rana Mitter

banking crisis, British Empire, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, invention of gunpowder, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, urban planning

Schwartz MODERN IRELAND Senia Pašeta MODERN JAPAN Christopher Goto-Jones MODERN LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE Roberto González Echevarría MODERN WAR Richard English MODERNISM Christopher Butler MOLECULES Philip Ball THE MONGOLS Morris Rossabi MOONS David A. Rothery MORMONISM Richard Lyman Bushman MOUNTAINS Martin F. Price MUHAMMAD Jonathan A. C. Brown MULTICULTURALISM Ali Rattansi MUSIC Nicholas Cook MYTH Robert A. Segal THE NAPOLEONIC WARS Mike Rapport NATIONALISM Steven Grosby NELSON MANDELA Elleke Boehmer NEOLIBERALISM Manfred Steger and Ravi Roy NETWORKS Guido Caldarelli and Michele Catanzaro THE NEW TESTAMENT Luke Timothy Johnson THE NEW TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE Kyle Keefer NEWTON Robert Iliffe NIETZSCHE Michael Tanner NINETEENTH‑CENTURY BRITAIN Christopher Harvie and H.


pages: 165 words: 46,133

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials Into Triumph by Ryan Holiday

British Empire, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, fear of failure, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, reality distortion field, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs

Which is to say, we are never completely powerless. Even in prison, deprived of nearly everything, some freedoms remain. Your mind remains your own (if you’re lucky, you have books) and you have time—lots of time. Carter did not have much power, but he understood that that was not the same thing as being powerless. Many great figures, from Nelson Mandela to Malcolm X, have come to understand this fundamental distinction. It’s how they turned prison into the workshop where they transformed themselves and the schoolhouse where they began to transform others. If an unjust prison sentence can be not only salvaged but transformative and beneficial, then for our purposes, nothing we’ll experience is likely without potential benefit.


pages: 452 words: 135,790

Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder From the World of Plants by Jane Goodall

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, Easter island, European colonialism, founder crops, Google Earth, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, language of flowers, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, precautionary principle, transatlantic slave trade

Enlightened inner-city schools realize this and make an effort to give the children at least some experience with planting things, watching flowers bloom, growing something they can eat—even if it is only in pots in the schoolroom. But that is a lot better than nothing. Perhaps the best endorsement of the effect of a garden on the well-being of the gardener comes from that most inspirational of people, Nelson Mandela. He survived twenty-seven years in Robben Island Prison in South Africa, and this is something he wrote in his autobiography: “A garden is one of the few things in prison that one could control. Being a custodian of this patch of earth offered a small taste of freedom.” Renewal on the Reservation Nowhere is the power of gardens and gardening more apparent than in Pine Ridge, an Oglala Lakota (Sioux) Native American reservation located in South Dakota.

James Jiler, Doing Time in the Garden: Life Lessons Through Prison Horticulture (Oakland, CA: New Village Press, 2006). Rachel Cernansky, “Prison Gardens a Growing Trend, Feeding Inmates on the Inside and Food Banks on the Outside,” TLC: How Stuff Works, accessed July 29, 2013, http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/prison-gardens-growing-trend1.htm. 12. “ ‘A garden is one of the few things’ ” Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (Abacus 40th Anniversary) (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008). 13. “ ‘Going out there and taking responsibility’ ” Louise Gray, “The Secret Life of the ‘Guerilla Gardener,’ ” Telegraph, April 15, 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/5154388/The-secret-life-of-the-guerilla-gardener.html. 14.


pages: 385 words: 133,839

The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink by Michael Blanding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, Internet Archive, laissez-faire capitalism, market design, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine

—joined the call, however, Coke compromised by moving its concentrate plant supplying the bottlers to black-ruled Swaziland, and establishing a $10 million fund to support African-Americans administered by Nobel Prize winner Archbishop Des­ mond Tutu. That mollified the SCLC, even as Coke—and the apartheid govern­ ment—continued to profit from its South African bottling franchises. For years after his release from prison, Nelson Mandela denied Coke’s offers of travel aid, and even required hotels to remove Coke products from his sight during his stay. The company assiduously courted the sainted leader, putting its highest-ranking African-American executive on the case. By 1993, Coke was contributing heavily to Mandela’s campaign to be elected president of a new South Africa, and he was flying around on one of Coke’s corporate jets.

Page 154 buyout by two handpicked bottling executives: Frundt, 163–167. Page 154 But Coke’s stalling had left eight workers dead: Gatehouse and Reyes, 12–13. Page 154 Per-caps in Latin America: Pendergrast, 367. Page 154 minutiae of foreign markets: Allen, 421–422. Page 154 “Our success”: Pendergrast, 389. Page 155 Nelson Mandela denied Coke’s offers: Lawrence Jolidon, “Divestment, Sanctions, Not Always Simple,” USA Today, June 19, 1990; Clarence Johnson, “ANC’s Oakland Headquarters,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 27, 1990. Page 155 contributing heavily . . . corporate jets: Deborah Scroggins, “Mandela in Atlanta: Regular Folk to Coke Elite Vie to Help His Cause,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 11, 2009; Lewis Grizzard, “Respect for Mandela Went down the Drain,” Atlanta JournalConstitution, July 18, 1993.


pages: 373 words: 132,377

Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation by Hannah Gadsby

autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, imposter syndrome, Mason jar, microdosing, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, rolodex, Saturday Night Live

It took me even longer to understand that the reason I’d taken to collecting ideas that had nothing to do with me, was because they had everything to do with me, and I must have known it, even if I didn’t understand it. 1994 1994 was the first year that Australia Day was celebrated by all states at the same time, which, to be clear, is nothing to celebrate, unless the uniform erasure of Indigenous culture is your thing. Speaking of America, the Beastie Boys gifted us with a new vocab word for the ubiquitous hairstyle in their 1994 song “Mullet Head.” Australian cinema gave us Muriel’s Wedding and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa. Which is not a film, just an unrelated fact tacked onto the end of a poorly constructed sentence I decided to keep in as an ode to my failing grades of the same year. In other news, I turned sixteen and there was nothing sweet about it. School continued to be an exhausting struggle.

I know those feelings. I would go through my own cocktail of that trifecta of woe seven years later when I came out to my own family. But unlike Lilly, I didn’t have someone like my mum to help me navigate the pain of it. STOP! CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE TIME! In May of 1994, the same month that Nelson Mandela was sworn in, Tasmanian gay men began turning themselves in to the police with details of their illegal sexual activity. They were drawing from a tactic pioneered by Sydney gay activists in the early 1980s as a protest against the raids on gay sex clubs—the idea was to highlight the hypocrisy of the anti-homosexual laws and try to embarrass both the federal and state governments into either enforcing or repealing the laws.


pages: 689 words: 134,457

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Years later, the senior partner David Fine, a white native South African, spoke with pride of his firm’s refusal to take clients there until free multiracial elections were held. When that finally happened in 1994, consultants at the firm clamored to be a part of South Africa’s rebirth. Yet working in South Africa was not as simple as helping Allstate sell more insurance or Philip Morris sell more cigarettes. Nelson Mandela’s political party, the African National Congress, decided that a strong central government should lead the way in transforming society, an approach that placed a heavy burden on a country with no democratic traditions and an untested legal system. It did not help that McKinsey built its reputation advising companies, not governments.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Fine, a white native South African: Fine’s biography, McKinsey & Company website. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT South Africa’s rebirth: Smith, Seaman, and Witzel, History of the Firm, 339. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Nelson Mandela’s political party: Saki Macozoma, “The ANC and the Transformation of South Africa,” Brown Journal of World Affairs (Winter 1994). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT pro bono in the city budget office: Martin Tolchin, “City Paid $75-Million in 1969 in Fees to Private Consultants,” New York Times, July 1, 1970.


pages: 186 words: 49,595

Revolution in the Age of Social Media: The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet by Linda Herrera

citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, decentralized internet, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Google Earth, informal economy, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, RAND corporation, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, WikiLeaks

These two men became symbols of mass movements, the detonators which touched the fiber of people and the hooks that motivated them to join, as the anti-FARC campaigner Oscar Morales wrote about in the AYM manual for cyberdissidents. Activists have long understood the power of symbols in galvanizing people to join a movement; think of what Rosa Parks meant to the civil rights movement, or Nelson Mandela to the anti-apartheid struggle. In the age of social media activism, the difference has been that an image and story can proliferate in the guise of a meme and travel across space at breakneck speed. In the breathtaking pace at which images and stories spread, there is little time for fact-checking, reflection, or bottom-up movement building.


Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, American ideology, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate personhood, David Brooks, discovery of DNA, double helix, drone strike, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, land reform, language acquisition, Martin Wolf, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, single-payer health, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tobin tax, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

So, for example, the wording of the judgment suggests that if you talk to somebody they call a terrorist and urge them to turn to nonviolence, you’re guilty of giving material assistance to terrorist groups. The potential scope of that is incredible. These are executive decisions—without review, without recourse. If you look at the record of who is designated a terrorist, it’s shocking. Maybe the most extreme case is Nelson Mandela, who just got off the terrorist list about four years ago.7 The Reagan administration, which supported the apartheid regime in South Africa right to the end, condemned the African National Congress as one of “the more notorious terrorist groups” in the world.8 So Mandela is a terrorist because they say so.


pages: 165 words: 50,798

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game

He said “place no head above your own.” Of course, to question the categories of custom, convention, rule, and order is to risk your neck. Galileo was found “gravely suspect of heresy” for confirming the Copernican re-classification of the universe, Joan of Arc was burned to death for “dressing as a man” and Nelson Mandela was categorized as a domestic terrorist by South Africa and the United States for defying the taxonomy – black, white, coloured, Indian – of apartheid. Mostly what we do isn’t quite so heavy. But it’s unwise to ask certain questions before understanding politics and culture. In all organizations, from libraries, nonprofits, and government agencies to Fortune 500s and Silicon Valley startups, visible categories are built on invisible fault lines.


pages: 149 words: 48,700

The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

Cape to Cairo, East Village, indoor plumbing, Nelson Mandela, out of africa

Semenya’s countrymen were appalled by the idea of a person who thought she was one thing suddenly being told that she was something else: The classification and reclassification of human beings has a haunted history in South Africa. When Semenya returned to Johannesburg, thousands of supporters waited to cheer her at O. R. Tambo International Airport. Nelson Mandela and President Jacob Zuma made a point of meeting her to offer their congratulations. People were outraged that a teenager had been examined and analyzed, like the Hottentot Venus before her, by European men who were fascinated by her exotic, anomalous appearance. The truth is, I was fascinated, too.


pages: 193 words: 48,066

The European Union by John Pinder, Simon Usherwood

Berlin Wall, BRICs, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, failed state, illegal immigration, labour market flexibility, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, non-tariff barriers, open borders, price stability, trade liberalization, zero-sum game

James MODERN ART • David Cottington MODERN CHINA • Rana Mitter MODERN IRELAND • Senia Paseta MODERN JAPAN • Christopher Goto-Jones MODERNISM • Christopher Butler MOLECULES • Philip Ball MORMONISM • Richard Lyman Bushman MUSIC • Nicholas Cook MYTH • Robert A. Segal NATIONALISM • Steven Grosby NELSON MANDELA • Elleke Boehmer NEOLIBERALISM • Manfred Steger and Ravi Roy THE NEW TESTAMENT • Luke Timothy Johnson THE NEW TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE • Kyle Keefer NEWTON • Robert Iliffe NIETZSCHE • Michael Tanner NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN • Christopher Harvie and H. C. G. Matthew THE NORMAN CONQUEST • George Garnett NORTHERN IRELAND • Marc Mulholland NOTHING • Frank Close NUCLEAR WEAPONS • Joseph M.


I You We Them by Dan Gretton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, Desert Island Discs, drone strike, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Honoré de Balzac, IBM and the Holocaust, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, pre–internet, restrictive zoning, Stanford prison experiment, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

It would be instructive to know exactly what was said at these meetings (particularly in regard to Saro-Wiwa’s case) – and also to know which other senior figures in Shell were present at those meetings with Abacha. Some presumably who may have gone on to ‘higher things’ in their careers – both in the oil industry and in the world of politics. Appeals did come, from the Pope and Nelson Mandela and some prominent Commonwealth leaders. Mandela made one of the most tragic mistakes of his life (as he later admitted), calling for ‘quiet diplomacy’ with Nigeria, the old African National Congress ally. But the efforts that did come, came too late, and were to no avail. On the morning of 10 November 1995, in Port Harcourt prison, Ken and eight of his colleagues were hanged.

This made me sense that there had been a co-ordinated internal company ‘line’ issued to all employees. Incidentally, it’s fascinating to look at the language both Anna and David used – making the oil company sound more like a provider of local social services rather than a profit-making business: Anna: I believe Shell was a force for good within that society, and Nelson Mandela said, after his release, that he was glad Shell stayed and that, erm, Shell had been instrumental in, erm, challenging the government on black housing, and providing black housing, which was technically illegal at the time, and they were able to get the law changed to allow Shell to provide black housing, and the standards by which Shell upheld during that period and respect for human rights and diversity, erm, I felt was a beacon in a very bleak period, where other companies were cutting and running.

The Federation of Conservative Students were in their deeply offensive, extreme-Thatcherite heyday, aided by the far-right Monday Club – and, at an NUS conference I attended at Warwick University, many of them (including, I recall, the current Speaker of the House of Commons – who was then secretary of the Monday Club’s ‘Immigration and Repatriation Committee’ – and several other future Tory MPs and ministers), proudly sported badges reading ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’. 3 The Bishopsgate Institute in London has recently acquired the Platform archive, which is publicly accessible. I recently spent a very nostalgic couple of hours going through some of the earliest files of material from the Cambridge and Addenbrooke’s campaign days, finding notes that J. and I had written, and publicity materials typed on my old Olympia typewriter.


pages: 171 words: 54,334

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, some of the same news outlets begin publishing selected US diplomatic cables from a corpus WikiLeaks says numbers over a quarter of a million and dates back to 1966. The first 260, published on 28 November, reveal instructions to US diplomats to gather information about UN officials which the Guardian describe as “blur[ring] the line between diplomacy and spying”, as well as historic cables about the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and a number of cables from around the Middle East that have to do with Iran, its nuclear programme, and the 2009 Iranian elections. The days that follow feature tittle-tattle with high entertainment value (Prince Andrew acting like a tit in his role as special trade representative; US diplomats across the world making snarky comments about national leaders) mixed in with the odd serious revelation about corruption and extra-judicial killing in Pakistan, or China’s weakening diplomatic stance over North Korea.


pages: 175 words: 54,497

The Naked Eye: How the Revolution of Laser Surgery Has Unshackled the Human Eye by Gerard Sutton, Michael Lawless

Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, microplastics / micro fibres, Nelson Mandela

It’s a fabulous book of short verses, beautifully written, that talks about why the world is how it is and how to live your life. Even though it might seem a bit obvious in parts, the fact that it was written two and half thousand years ago makes it quite remarkable. Which living person do you most admire? Nelson Mandela, the captain of the ship that was his life. As for someone who is personally known to me, our business partner, Dr Chris Rogers is someone for whom I have enormous respect and admiration. He has been one of the most important influences in my professional life. Together with Dr Peter Cohen, Chris and I brought the first excimer laser for short-sightedness to Australia in September 1991.


Masters of Mankind by Noam Chomsky

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, failed state, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land bank, land reform, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, nuremberg principles, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

They objected to a passage recognizing “the right to self-determination, freedom, and independence, as derived from the Charter of the United Nations, of people forcibly deprived of that right, . . . particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation.” The term “colonial and racist regimes” was understood to refer to South Africa, a US ally, resisting the attacks of Nelson Mandela’s ANC, one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups,” as Washington determined at the same time. And “foreign occupation” was understood to refer to Washington’s Israeli client. So, not surprisingly, the US and Israel voted against the resolution, which was thereby effectively vetoed—in fact, subjected to the usual double veto: inapplicable, and vetoed from reporting and history as well, though it was the strongest and most important UN resolution on terrorism.


pages: 184 words: 54,833

Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Etonian, hiring and firing, land reform, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes

Ever since the white-settler revolt in Southern Rhodesia in 1965, I had involved myself with the white and black advocates of majority rule and independence. I made several visits to the country, and interviewed many of the guerrilla leaders in exile, of whom the most impressive was Robert Mugabe. His ultimate election victory in 1980, transforming Rhodesia into Zimbabwe, was a foretaste of the later triumph of Nelson Mandela. But the abolition of racism and the end of colonial rule was succeeded by a dirty war in Matabeleland against the supporters of Mugabe’s rival Joshua Nkomo, and by the awarding of confiscated agricultural property to the party loyalists of the regime. Displaying signs of megalomania, especially after the tragic death of his wife, Mr Mugabe set up a ‘youth brigade’ that was named the 21st February Movement in honour of his own birthday.


pages: 180 words: 55,805

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

But you might miss that every leader, company, brand, and political institution uses a similar understanding to build power. In itself that is neither good nor bad. Throughout history, the greatest leaders, brands, companies, and institutions have used that influence and persuasion to make our world better. Inspirational leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, and Nelson Mandela come to mind in their efforts to make our world better and more just. And even if you do not agree with everything Elon Musk does or says, it is hard to argue that he has not mastered the ability to influence and, because of that influence, has accelerated numerous industries for the betterment of humanity.


pages: 180 words: 57,694

Loving Someone With Asperger's Syndrome: Understanding and Connecting With Your Partner by Cindy Ariel

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, index card, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, place-making, scientific management, theory of mind

Your personal strengths in understanding and communicating may leave you feeling that you put in much more effort than your partner. But your effort will pay off as you both learn to manage your relationship interaction and communication in each other’s world. 8 An Emotional Connection A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination. —Nelson Mandela So how do you develop an emotional connection with someone with Asperger’s syndrome? Your partner’s primary struggles often have to do with forming and maintaining the one thing you may want the most. Your emotional connection may be unclear and static, or even feel nonexistent. Differences in the way you and your partner experience emotions may cause many areas of difficulty and misunderstanding.


pages: 495 words: 154,046

The Rights of the People by David K. Shipler

affirmative action, airport security, computer age, disinformation, facts on the ground, fudge factor, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, mandatory minimum, Mikhail Gorbachev, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, RFID, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, working poor, zero-sum game

“Fear” was the word that one of his closest colleagues, Politburo member Aleksandr Yakovlev, used when I asked what he had been feeling at the time. I thought he might say pride or exhilaration, but no, he had feared the unknown consequences of their uncharted path. “I am surprised I am still alive,” Yakovlev declared. It got me wondering if Václav Havel felt fear as he brought Czechoslovakia out of communism, and if Nelson Mandela, beneath his inspirational assuredness, endured fear as he led South Africa from its bondage of apartheid. Perhaps if you’re not at least a little scared, if you do not go to the edge of your comfort zone and beyond, you are not doing anything worthwhile. In other circumstances, though, fear in high places can infect values, as it did following September 11.

The State Department has typically been slow to remove certain movements from the “terrorist” list after violence has subsided. The Nepali Maoists remained designated long after they had ceased fighting and had become the largest party in a freely elected government; being on the list hampered even American diplomats who needed to deal with Nepal’s Maoist prime minister. Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress was designated because of the violence to which it finally resorted in its struggle against apartheid in South Africa, notwithstanding Mandela’s inspirational leadership in healing racial wounds. Congress could fix the problem if it were so inclined. As the Court observed, to prove a violation under the existing statute, prosecutors must show only that the trainer or adviser knew that the organization appeared on the terrorist list, “without requiring the Government to prove that plaintiffs had a specific intent to further the unlawful ends of those organizations.”


pages: 196 words: 58,886

Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe

British Empire, disinformation, facts on the ground, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Jeremy Corbyn, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, Suez canal 1869, WikiLeaks

The final reason offered for the Zionist reclamation of the Holy Land, as determined by the Bible, was the need of Jews around the world to find a safe haven, especially after the Holocaust. However, even if this was true, it might have been possible to find a solution that was not restricted to the biblical map and that did not dispossess the Palestinians. This position was voiced by a quite a few well-known personalities, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. These commentators tried to suggest that the Palestinians should be asked to provide a safe haven for persecuted Jews alongside the native population, not in place of it. But the Zionist movement regarded such proposals as heresy. The difference between settling alongside the native people and simply displacing them was recognized by Mahatma Gandhi when he was asked by the Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, to lend his support to the Zionist project.


On Palestine by Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, Frank Barat

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, David Brooks, facts on the ground, failed state, ghettoisation, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, Stephen Hawking

And they do have support—external support—enough so that the Palestinian elite can live a fairly decent, often lavish, lifestyle, while the society around them collapses. FB: So would the crumbling and disappearance of the PA be a bad thing after all? NC: It depends on what would replace it. If, say, Marwan Barghouti were permitted to join the society the way, say, Nelson Mandela was finally, that could have a revitalizing effect in organizing a Palestinian society that might press for more substantial demands. But remember: they don’t have a lot of choices. In fact, go back to the beginning of the Oslo agreements, now twenty years old. There were negotiations under way, the Madrid negotiations, at which the Palestinian delegation was led by Haider Abdel-Shafi, a highly respected, left-nationalist figure in Palestine.


pages: 184 words: 58,557

The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee by Sarah Silverman

haute couture, index card, Nelson Mandela, Saturday Night Live, Skype

I know that all this crap is what I should expect when I choose to build a career on shock and profanity, but since I've got this book, I'm going to try to get the message out: I'm not interested in seeing pictures of anyone's bowel movements. The two exceptions would be (1) Clive Owen's, for obvious reasons; and (2) Nelson Mandela's, because his life has just been such an incredibly rich journey. This all relates to the larger point of this chapter: That I am not an animal. Of course I am literally an animal, but I mean "I am not an animal" the way the Elephant Man meant it (though he was pretty gross). I feel I have life pretty much figured out, and I would now like to share this gift with you.


pages: 215 words: 59,188

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down by Tom Standage

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, blood diamond, business logic, corporate governance, CRISPR, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, failed state, financial independence, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, Julian Assange, life extension, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mega-rich, megacity, Minecraft, mobile money, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, post-truth, price mechanism, private spaceflight, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, ransomware, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South China Sea, speech recognition, stem cell, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, zoonotic diseases

In America, the only rich country on the list, a spike in homicides propelled two more cities, Detroit and New Orleans, to join St Louis and Baltimore, which also figured on 2015’s list. Each has a rate that is around ten times the national average of 4.9 homicides per 100,000 people. South Africa is the only country outside the Americas in this ranking. Two new cities, Nelson Mandela Bay and Buffalo City, have been added to the list, mainly because data collection is improving in the country. The homicide rate in South Africa climbed by 5% last year, though other violent crime dropped. Why young Britons are committing fewer crimes Crime in Britain has been falling, as in many rich countries.


pages: 186 words: 57,798

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Kurlansky

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, working poor

Gandhi's campaign at the beginning of the twentieth century was nonviolent. The African National Congress, modeled on Gandhi's Indian National Congress, was also nonviolent and focused on fighting legal battles. After 1948, when an openly racist National Party won elections, a new generation of militants, led by Nelson Mandela, energized the old movement, while remaining committed to nonviolence. They went to jail for deliberately defying laws of segregation. But by 1953 some demonstrations turned into riots and the government passed laws approving such practices as whipping protesters. In 1960, to protest the requirement of black people to carry official passes, thousands showed up at once in police stations to be arrested for not having them.


Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood

carbon footprint, delayed gratification, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, financial independence, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, trickle-down economics, wage slave

One is through the courts of law, which are supposed to settle questions of the weighing and measuring and resolving of debtor/creditor issues in a fair and equitable way. Whether they always do so is of course open to a lot of questions, but in theory that is their function. The other antidote is more radical. It is told of Nelson Mandela that, after much persecution, and when he was finally freed from the prison where he’d been put by the apartheid government in South Africa, he said to himself that he had to forgive all those who had wronged him by the time he reached the prison gates or he would never be free of them. Why? Because he’d be bound to them by the chains of vengeance.


pages: 222 words: 60,207

Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup by Andrew Zimbalist

airline deregulation, business cycle, carbon footprint, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, longitudinal study, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, selection bias, Suez crisis 1956, urban planning, young professional

Serious corruption charges were made, and at least three persons were murdered in connection with the allegations. Many more received death threats. Mbombela is also rarely used, and both Mokaba and Mbombela may have to be demolished to avoid the crippling operating and maintenance costs. Green Point Stadium in Cape Town has yearly maintenance costs of $6.2 million. The Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium is still looking for an anchor tenant and will cost an estimated $8.7 million a year to run.35 FIFA has a 420-page stadium manual that explains that a new stadium “provides many benefits for the local community” and enhances community pride. In too many cases, this is fanciful nonsense, but either the executives at FIFA are willfully ignorant or they just don't want any facts getting in the way of their PR machine.


pages: 199 words: 64,616

The Double Comfort Safari Club by Alexander McCall Smith

Nelson Mandela

She knew the warning signs with middle-aged men--they were like a set of traffic lights that glowed brightly in the dark. Greater attention to personal grooming? Bad sign. Pulling-in of the stomach to conceal paunch? Bad sign. Purchase of a more powerful car in bright red? Very, very bad sign. Of course, the shirt could be interpreted in various ways. It was a loose-fitting, open-neck shirt of the sort worn by Nelson Mandela. Such shirts were not tucked into one's trousers, but hung about the waist, allowing for air to circulate. They suited older men very well, those on whose physique prosperity, and particularly a diet of good Botswana beef, might have taken its toll, and they were perfect, of course, for Mr. Mandela himself, who lent them that grace and dignity that came so naturally to him.


pages: 258 words: 63,367

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Frank Gehry, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, liberation theology, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, precariat, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, working poor

When President Reagan took office in 1981, he lent support to South Africa’s domestic crimes and its murderous depredations in neighboring countries. The policies were justified in the framework of the war on terror that Reagan had declared on coming into office. In 1988, his administration designated Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups” (Mandela himself was only removed from Washington’s “terrorist list” in 2008). South Africa was defiant, and even triumphant, with its internal enemies crushed, and enjoying solid support from the one state that mattered in the global system.


pages: 202 words: 62,773

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

David Sedaris, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan

No weeding of the white people allowed. Unless they’re Catholic. Or one of those Satan-worshipping Virginians. John Cotton is forty-six years old. He is the most respected, famous, and beloved Puritan minister in England. Getting him to bless the send-off of these relatively unimportant castaways would be like scoring Nelson Mandela to deliver the commencement address at the neighbor kid’s eighth-grade graduation. In fact, once the colonists arrive in Massachusetts they will name their settlement Boston, in honor of Cotton’s hometown. These people listening to this man are scared. There’s a boat in the harbor that just might sail them to their deaths.


pages: 202 words: 62,199

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

90 percent rule, Albert Einstein, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, impact investing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Peter Thiel, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Vilfredo Pareto

It answered the question: “How will we know when we have succeeded?” Living with Intent Essential intent applies to so much more than your job description or your company’s mission statement; a true essential intent is one that guides your greater sense of purpose, and helps you chart your life’s path. For example, Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in jail becoming an Essentialist. When he was thrown in jail in 1962 he had almost everything taken from him: his home, his reputation, his pride, and of course his freedom. He chose to use those twenty-seven years to focus on what was really essential and eliminate everything else—including his own resentment.


Inside British Intelligence by Gordon Thomas

active measures, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, country house hotel, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, job satisfaction, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, lateral thinking, license plate recognition, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, operational security, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

On the morning of April 11, 2002, Judge Willie Hartzenberg concluded that, having considered the evidence of 153 witnesses, thousands of pages of affidavits by those who had worked for him, and documents, Wouter Basson was not guilty on any of the charges he had faced. To this day, four metal trunks filled with classified information about Project Coast remain locked in a government vault in Pretoria. Only two keys exist that can open the vault. One of them remained in the possession of President Nelson Mandela until his retirement. He has steadfastly refused to discuss Project Coast. Who holds the keys remains unknown. 15 A New World: Adjust or Die On that March day in 1991 when he celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday with his wife, Lynda, and added another honorary degree to the growing number he had already acquired from colleges and universities, Judge William Webster knew his four-year tenure as CIA director was coming to an end.

It had developed the plans that led to the election of pro-British leaders like Kenya’s Tom Mboya, Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika, Nysaland’s Hastings Banda, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, and Joshua Nkomo of Rhodesia. They had all been given substantial funds to become “agents of influence.” On August 5, 1962, Nelson Mandela, by then a key member of the African National Congress, was arrested near the town of Howick in Natal. It was a time when the country was filled with foreign spies, mostly from MI6 and the CIA, but also a number of French and German intelligence officers. Some were “declared”—their presence announced to the apartheid regime, and so protected by diplomatic immunity; many more were “undeclared” and subject to prosecution if caught.


pages: 243 words: 66,908

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Meadows. Donella, Diana Wright

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, game design, Garrett Hardin, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Review

They may seem a bit dated to you, but in editing her work I chose to keep them because their teachings are as relevant now as they were then. The early 1990s were the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and great shifts in other socialist countries. The North American Free Trade Agreement was newly signed. Iraq’s army invaded Kuwait and then retreated, burning oil fields on the way out. Nelson Mandela was freed from prison, and South Africa’s apartheid laws were repealed. Labor leader Lech Walesa was elected president of Poland, and poet Václav Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia. The International Panel on Climate Change issued its first assessment report, concluding that “emissions from human activities are substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and that this will enhance the greenhouse effect and result in an additional warming of the Earth’s surface.”


pages: 257 words: 68,383

Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water by Peter H. Gleick

Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, clean water, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, John Snow's cholera map, Nelson Mandela, place-making, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley

CHAPTER 12 The Future of Water Making predictions is very difficult, especially about the future. —Casey Stengel, famous philosopher (and Major League Baseball legend) It is one thing to find fault with an existing system. It is another thing altogether, a more difficult task, to replace it with another approach that is better. —Nelson Mandela, speaking of water resource management1 THE WORLD’S rapidly growing dependence on expensive, commercial bottled water is a symptom of the fundamental failure to provide safe and affordable drinking water to everyone on the planet—which should be a basic human right. Those of us who live in the richer nations of the world are buying more and more bottled water because we increasingly fear or dislike our tap water, we distrust governments to regulate, monitor, and protect public water systems adequately, we can’t find public fountains anywhere anymore, we are convinced by advertisers and marketers that bottled water will make us healthier, thinner, or stronger, and we’re told that it is just another benign consumer “choice.”


pages: 238 words: 68,384

The Charming Quirks of Others: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel by Alexander McCall Smith

classic study, cuban missile crisis, Nelson Mandela, retail therapy

Goebbels and Mussolini—they could be there to illustrate the proposition at the beginning: Goebbels with his pinched, rat-like features; Mussolini with his thuggish bully’s face; both perfect illustrations of the proposition that character shines through. And from the other end of the spectrum? She wondered about that. Nelson Mandela, perhaps, would be a good candidate: his face was suffused with kindness, with a sort of joy that was unmistakable; or Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whose lined, careworn features were so transformed when she smiled. She could look severe sometimes, but that was the effect of suffering and the day-to-day toll of caring for those for whom nobody else would care.


pages: 236 words: 66,081

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, behavioural economics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, citizen journalism, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, experimental economics, experimental subject, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Kevin Kelly, lolcat, means of production, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, seminal paper, social contagion, social software, Steve Ballmer, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Grobanites for Africa, a wholly unowned subsidiary of Grobanites for Charity, is specifically dedicated to raising money for organizations fighting poverty and the effects of HIV/AIDS on that continent. This group started after Groban’s first international concert tour took him to South Africa, where he met Nelson Mandela and announced his support for charitable work on behalf of African children. A group of Grobanites, preparing the meet-and-greets for a tour stop in Atlanta, decided to adopt this cause and, true to form, organized themselves separately; they work closely with other Grobanites and with the Josh Groban Foundation, a pattern established by the original fund-raising efforts.


pages: 207 words: 64,598

To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction by Phillip Lopate

Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, desegregation, fear of failure, index card, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

Jung: Memories, Dreams and Reflections Kate Simon: Bronx Primitive Lewis Mumford: Sketches from Life Loren Eiseley: All the Strange Hours Thomas Merton: The Seven-Storey Mountain Colette: My Mother’s House Michel Leiris: Manhood, Rules of the Game Geoffrey Wolff: The Duke of Deception Hilary Masters: Last Stands Frank Conroy: Stop-Time Peter Handke: A Sorrow beyond Dreams John Updike: Self-Consciousness Anatole Broyard: Kafka Was the Rage, Intoxicated by My Illness V. S. Naipaul: “Prologue to an Autobiography,” The Enigma of Arrival Chester Himes: The Quality of Hurt Luis Buñuel: My Last Sigh Elia Kazan: A Life Sylvia Ashton-Warner: Teacher Nelson Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom Gregor von Rezzori: The Snows of Yesteryear Recent Memoirs Philip Roth: Patrimony Vivian Gornick: Fierce Attachments Richard Rodriguez: Hunger of Memory Lucy Grealy: Autobiography of a Face Joanne Beard: The Boys of My Youth Mary Karr: The Liar’s Club Frank McCourt: Angela’s Ashes, Teacher Man Dave Eggers: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius Doris Lessing: Under My Skin, Walking in the Shade Amos Oz: A Tale of Love and Darkness Art Spiegelman: Maus Marjane Satrapi: Persepolis 1 and 2 David Shields: Remote Emily Fox Gordon: Mockingbird Years Lorna Sage: Bad Blood Spalding Gray: Swimming to Cambodia Jill ker-Conway: The Road from Corain Elizabeth Kendall: American Daughter J.


pages: 252 words: 65,990

HWFG: Here We F**king Go by Chris McQueer

call centre, Donald Trump, Kickstarter, Nelson Mandela, sensible shoes, Social Justice Warrior

A lot of folk will say I’m just misremembering things from my childhood, a lot of folk will say I’m just being daft. But this is the hill I will die on. I read up online about other people saying things along the same lines as my snail nightmare and there’s a phenomenon called the Mandela effect. So-called because apparently lots of people say they remember Nelson Mandela dying in jail in the 80s and even remember watching his funeral on the telly. There’s people that swear Sex and the City used to be called Sex in the City. I know a couple of people who claim Scott’s Porage Oats used to be spelled on the box as Scott’s Porridge Oats. There’s theories that say the Mandela effect is down to time travellers from the future messing about with past or that people have somehow slipped from an alternate universe into our own.


pages: 234 words: 63,149

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer

airport security, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, clean water, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, Parag Khanna, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, trade route, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

* The phrase did not actually come from Obama. It was attributed to an unnamed administration official who was describing the president’s approach to Gadhafi’s Libya. As Ryan Lizza, the journalist who published the “leading from behind” comment in the New Yorker, has acknowledged, the concept was first championed years ago by Nelson Mandela. Ryan Lizza, “Leading from Behind,” New Yorker, April 27, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/04/leading-from-behind-obama-clinton.html. * In late 2011, Myanmar showed signs of trying to become a pivot state. Political concessions and a shift in rhetoric earned a visit from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.


pages: 262 words: 66,800

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, availability heuristic, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, continuation of politics by other means, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Island, Hans Rosling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, moveable type in China, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, open economy, place-making, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, special economic zone, Steven Pinker, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, very high income, working poor, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

Not a single African country saw a peaceful transfer of power at the ballots in the 1960s and 1970s, and there was only one in the 1980s. But then suddenly, in the 1990s, twelve countries held peaceful elections. Few people thought that it would be possible to abolish apartheid peacefully, but in 1994, Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa. Since 1990, more than thirty African governments and presidents have been voted out of office. In 1959 the political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset made the case that one important factor that contributes to democratization is increased wealth. He argued that development consolidates democracy, since it increases levels of education and literacy, reduces poverty and builds a middle class.


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Some of the better-known successes of the scenario planning process were Royal Dutch Shell’s ability to plan successfully for the expansions and contractions of global oil demands after the price shocks of the 1970s, the apartheid government of South Africa developing the capacity to imagine a peaceful turnover of power to Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, and somewhat less globally significant, the identification and development of a U.S. “gardening lifestyle” by the retailer Smith & Hawken.20 Crafting Bespoke Futures Peter Schwartz and Jay Ogilvy, cofounders of the Global Business Network (or GBN as it is better known), are two of the better-known scenario planners.


pages: 274 words: 66,721

Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World - and How Their Invention Could Make or Break the Planet by Jane Gleeson-White

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, British Empire, business cycle, carbon footprint, corporate governance, credit crunch, double entry bookkeeping, full employment, Gordon Gekko, income inequality, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Mahbub ul Haq, means of production, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Ponzi scheme, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, source of truth, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile

As such, practitioners of the rare mathematic arts can become the powerful priests of investing, thanks to their strange and obscure language, much the way the medieval church trafficked in Latin’. The antics of the share market and its mathematical wizards manipulate not only the wealth of individuals and corporations, they also dramatically shape the political life of nations. Naomi Klein gives a stark example of the impact of markets on politics. Following the election of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa, ‘Every time a top party official said something that hinted that the ominous Freedom Charter might still become policy, the market responded with a shock, sending the rand into free fall. The rules were simple and crude, the electronic equivalent of monosyllabic grunts: justice—expensive, sell; status quo—good, buy.’


pages: 247 words: 68,918

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The oil crisis of the mid-1970s and growing international criticism of apartheid forced the country toward deeper self-reliance and active state promotion of companies like Eskom (the state-owned power utility), Iscor (a steel producer), and Sasol (a developer of coal-to-fuel technology). With the end of apartheid in 1994, Nelson Mandela’s government took up the challenge of reversing decades of institutional racism and its impact on an undereducated, underemployed black majority. Knowing that South Africa’s new government needed to avoid large-scale capital flight, Mandela worked to persuade white businessmen and landowners to remain in the country and to create favorable terms to attract foreign investment.


Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity by Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods

autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, desegregation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, drone strike, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Law of Accelerating Returns, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, out of africa, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, smart cities, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, zero-sum game

Though the historical and social misconceptions are very clear in this population, the most important finding about SDO and RWA personality is that education has very little effect. “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion,” wrote Nelson Mandela. “People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” It is a beautiful saying, and it captures what people want to believe about intolerance—that it is a result of “closed-mindedness and ignorance”38 and that we can teach people to think differently.


pages: 209 words: 68,587

Stephen Hawking by Leonard Mlodinow

Albert Michelson, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, do what you love, Ernest Rutherford, Eyjafjallajökull, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Nelson Mandela, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

When you called, it was she who picked up, and brought him the call (or didn’t). When you wrote him, it was she who decided whether to relay the letter, and, if important, to read it to him. The only time I ever heard of someone getting the better of her was when Stephen, while in South Africa, went to see Nelson Mandela, whom he very much admired. Mandela was around ninety then. He wasn’t at all tech savvy, and for some reason he was freaked out by the way Stephen’s computer spoke for him. He wasn’t well, either. He was in frail health. “A little past it” was how Stephen described him, which was ironic because Stephen was having a bad day, too, and almost hadn’t made it to the appointment.


The Little Black Book of Decision Making by Michael Nicholas

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, call centre, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hindsight bias, impulse control, James Dyson, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, scientific management, selection bias, Stephen Hawking

It is so natural to blame circumstances or other people when we feel bad, and this idea, that it is we ourselves who shape our inner experience, not the external environment, can be perceived as radical at first. But, it is also transformational. The world had a chance to see this from the way that Nelson Mandela left his 27 years of captivity a completely different man to the one who had entered it. Rightly branded a terrorist when he was imprisoned, he used his captivity to prepare for leadership outside, including making huge shifts in his attitude to his captors. Despite being forced to do hard labour in a quarry, and being confined to a small cell with only a rough bed on the floor and a bucket for a toilet, Robben Island was the crucible for the transformation that enabled him to become widely viewed as one of the greatest leaders of the twentieth century.


pages: 242 words: 67,233

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

Another Davos acolyte, the MIT management theorist Otto Scharmer, runs an organization called The Presencing Institute, providing cover for elites: “The root cause of our current economic and civilizational crisis is not Wall Street,” he says, “not infinite growth [and] not Big Business or Big Government.”5 No, the root cause, according to Scharmer is “between our ears.” He was one of the courtiers at the 2014 WEF, chatting about how to be mindful like Nelson Mandela.6 Following the lead of Marturano, there has been a steady procession of mindfulness teachers, Buddhist monks, neuroscientists, and celebrities spreading the postmodern prosperity gospel. At the 2014 annual meeting, the actress Goldie Hawn promoted her MindUP™ program for children, leading a session on how mindfulness training and social-emotional learning can change the world.


ECOVILLAGE: 1001 ways to heal the planet by Ecovillage 1001 Ways to Heal the Planet-Triarchy Press Ltd (2015)

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, do what you love, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, intentional community, land tenure, low interest rates, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, systems thinking, young professional

What seems more trustworthy, instead, is searching the edge, coming down to the ground, meeting the people, welcoming tangible experience and the general messiness and complexity of life. My engagement with the ecovillage and intentional community movement has been inspired by all the above. When I turned 23, I went on a pilgrimage through my home country at a time when violence was at its peak. It was in 1991 and Nelson Mandela had just been released. The country was bristling with suppressed anger and frustrated hope. For a while, I had worked for various anti-apartheid organisations. Now, at last, I had the courage to walk an actual exploration of my country, to visit all those places that were taboo to a young white ‘Afrikanermeisie’: the black taxis, the townships, wilderness and night sky-solitude.


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Where states are relatively weak and capricious, both fears and opportunities encourage the rise of local would-be rulers who supply a rough justice while arrogating the power to ‘tax’ for themselves and, often, a larger cause.”48 Just as the uptick in civil warfare arose from the decivilizing anarchy of decolonization, the recent decline may reflect a recivilizing process in which competent governments have begun to protect and serve their citizens rather than preying on them.49 Many African nations have traded in their Bokassa-style psychopaths for responsible democrats and, in the case of Nelson Mandela, one of history’s greatest statesmen.50 The transition required an ideological change as well, not just in the affected countries but in the wider international community. The historian Gérard Prunier has noted that in 1960s Africa, independence from colonial rule became a messianic ideal. New nations made it a priority to adopt the trappings of sovereignty, such as airlines, palaces, and nationally branded institutions.

A damping of the desire for justice is particularly indispensable after civil conflicts, in which the institutions of justice like the police and prison system are not only fragile but may themselves have been among the main perpetrators of the harm. The prototype for reconciliation after a civil conflict is South Africa. Invoking the Xhosa concept of ubuntu or brotherhood, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu instituted a system of restorative rather than retributive justice to heal the country after decades of violent repression and rebellion under the apartheid regime. As with the tactics of the Rights Revolutions, Mandela and Tutu’s restorative justice both sampled from and contributed to the pool of ideas for nonviolent conflict resolution.

Fiske notes that utilitarian morality, with its goal of securing the greatest good for the greatest number, is a paradigm case of the Market Pricing model (itself a special case of the Rational-Legal mindset).199 Recall that it was the utilitarianism of Cesare Beccaria that led to a reengineering of criminal punishment away from a raw hunger for retribution and toward a calibrated policy of deterrence. Jeremy Bentham used utilitarian reasoning to undermine the rationalizations for punishing homosexuals and mistreating animals, and John Stuart Mill used it to make an early case for feminism. The national reconciliation movements of the 1990s, in which Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and other peacemakers abjured in-kind retributive justice for a cocktail of truth-telling, amnesty, and measured punishment of the most atrocious perpetrators, was another accomplishment of violence reduction via calculated proportionality. So is the policy of responding to international provocations with economic sanctions and tactics of containment rather than retaliatory strikes.


pages: 649 words: 181,179

Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa by Martin Meredith

back-to-the-land, banking crisis, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, Great Leap Forward, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, liberation theology, Nelson Mandela, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route

Chapter 46 - THE BLACK ORDINANCE Chapter 47 - THE SPHINX PROBLEM EPILOGUE CHAPTER NOTES SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX Copyright Page ALSO BY MARTIN MEREDITH The Past Is Another Country: Rhodesia—UDI to Zimbabwe The First Dance of Freedom: Black Africa in the Postwar Era In the Name of Apartheid: South Africa in the Postwar Era Nelson Mandela: A Biography Coming to Terms: South Africa’s Search for Truth Elephant Destiny: Biography of an Endangered Species in Africa Mugabe: Power, Plunder, and the Struggle for Zimbabwe The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence I speak of Africa, and golden joys . . .

In their quest for political rights, the black opposition tried public protests, petitions, passive resistance, boycotts and eventually sabotage, guerrilla warfare and urban insurrection. Their struggle lasted for much of the twentieth century. It was not until 1994, after years of internal strife, that South Africa’s first democratic elections were held and Nelson Mandela became president of a democratic government. CHAPTER NOTES The material for this book is based on memoirs and reminiscences; on biography and autobiography; on government reports and correspondence; and on the work of several generations of historians. These chapter notes include references to books I found to be of particular interest and value.


May We Be Forgiven by A. M. Homes

anti-communist, Burning Man, dumpster diving, friendly fire, if you build it, they will come, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Skype, South China Sea

“Son of a bitch who the hell does he think he is—Charlton Heston in the Ten Commandments. SOB…” I glance up and see Wanda in the hall chatting with Marcel, who pushes the chrome mail basket around delivering mail. Later, I ask Marcel what he knows about Wanda. “Not much,” he says. “Only that she’s the granddaughter of Nelson Mandela—or Desmond Tutu, or someone like that…” He trails off. “Born in South Africa, sent to England for school, came here, sold her memoir for three-quarters of a million dollars,” he adds as an afterthought. “Why is she working here?” “Going to law school in the fall,” he says. “And she gave away the advance, donated to charity.”

“Not a clue,” she says. “But aren’t you the granddaughter of—?” “The Nixons’ old cleaning lady in Washington?” she says, cutting me off. “Marcel tells everyone that my mother worked for Mrs. Nixon.” “That’s weird,” I say and go no further. “What’s Marcel’s story?” “Well, he’s either the illegitimate son of Nelson Mandela who was sent to Harvard to get a divinity degree and flunked out, or he’s a kid from New York City who does stand-up comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade.” “I wonder where the truth lies,” I say, knowing I’ve been had. “It’s an open question,” she says. As the days go by, everything becomes more urgent.


pages: 1,261 words: 294,715

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biofilm, blood diamond, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Brownian motion, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fudge factor, George Santayana, global pandemic, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, intentional community, John von Neumann, Loma Prieta earthquake, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, nocebo, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, publication bias, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social contagion, social distancing, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, trolley problem, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Even bigger surprise—stop the presses—Zimbardo criticized the study, arguing that its structure invalidated it as a chance to replicate the SPE; that guard/prisoner assignments could not have really been random; and that filming made this a TV spectacle rather than science; and asking, how can this be a model for anything when the prisoners take over the prison?73 Naturally, Reicher and Haslam disagreed with his disagreement, pointing out that prisoners have de facto taken over some prisons, such as the Maze in Northern Ireland, which the Brits filled with IRA political prisoners, and the Robben Island prison, in which Nelson Mandela spent his endless years. Zimbardo called Reicher and Haslam “scientifically irresponsible” and “fraudulent.” They pulled out all the stops by quoting Foucault: “Where there is [coercive] power there is resistance.” Let’s calm down. Amid the controversies over Milgram and the SPE, two deeply vital things are indisputable: When pressured to conform and obey, a far higher percentage of perfectly normal people than most would predict succumb and do awful things.

In 2010 Robinson was upended in a major scandal involving his politician wife, who had committed some major financial improprieties in the name of another type of impropriety—funneling money to her nineteen-year-old lover. And history was then made when McGuinness offered, and Robinson accepted, a commiserative handshake. A guy-code sacred-value moment.*31 Something similar happened in South Africa, much of it promulgated by Nelson Mandela, a genius at appreciating sacred values.32 Mandela, while at Robben Island, had taught himself the Afrikaans language and studied Afrikaans culture—not just to literally understand what his captors were saying among themselves at the prison but to understand the people and their mind-set. At one point just before the birth of a free South Africa, Mandela entered into secret negotiations with the Afrikaans leader General Constand Viljoen.

Hussein quote from CNN, Nov 6, 1995. 31. D. Thornton, “Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness Shake Hands for the First Time,” Irish Central, January 18, 2010, www.irishcentral.com/news/peter-robinson-and-martin-mcguinness-shake-hands-for-the-first-time-81957747-237681071.html. 32. J. Carlin, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (New York: Penguin Press, 2008); D. Cruywagen, Brothers in War and Peace: Constand and Abraham Viljoen and the Birth of the New South Africa (Cape Town, South Africa: Zebra Press, 2014). Chapter 16: Biology, the Criminal Justice System, and (Oh, Why Not?) Free Will 1.


pages: 237 words: 74,966

The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout

Albert Einstein, estate planning, long peace, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Milgram experiment, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, twin studies

It induces the exhausted doctor to pick up the phone for his frightened patient at three in the morning. It blows whistles against institutions when lives are endangered. It takes to the streets to protest a war. Conscience is what makes the human rights worker risk her very life. When it is combined with surpassing moral courage, it is Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi. In small and large ways, genuine conscience changes the world. Rooted in emotional connectedness, it teaches peace and opposes hatred and saves children. It keeps marriages together and cleans up rivers and feeds dogs and gives gentle replies. It makes individual lives better and increases human dignity overall.


pages: 251 words: 76,868

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Ken Saro-Wiwa, a noted Nigerian author, led peaceful mass protests with people chanting, “The flames of Shell are the flames of hell.” Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth joined the Ogoni cause, but governments said nothing as the Nigerian military began a brutal crackdown. Even Nelson Mandela didn’t intervene. After a 1993 coup that brought General Sani Abacha to power, Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni were sentenced to death and hanged. Shell had already pulled its personnel out of the Delta, but its reputation was damned. Today, Moody-Stuart has a new mantra: “If it is a problem for society, it is a problem for business.”


pages: 280 words: 75,820

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, do what you love, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, fundamental attribution error, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Being the best you can be is a major top-down focus for saints, workaholics, and others who continually strive to improve; some may decide to listen to Prozac to help ensure that they’re functioning at 110 percent of normal. Others figure that hey, nobody’s perfect, and easily suppress comparisons between themselves and Nelson Mandela or Hillary Clinton. As Rozin says, “How much do you attend to your desire to be a certain way? How much of a disparity between your real and ideal self is there? As a focus, it may or may not be important to you, but it’s an attentional issue.” The particular ways in which you direct your focus to cope with your mixed emotions about dirt, food, body image, and ego illustrate your ability to use attention to shape and improve your experience in general.


pages: 256 words: 75,139

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls by Tim Marshall

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, end world poverty, facts on the ground, gentrification, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, openstreetmap, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, the built environment, trade route, unpaid internship, urban planning

Now such communities are being built the length and breadth of Africa, with Zambia, South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria leading the way. South Africa pioneered the African gated trend. According to The Economist, as early as 2004 Johannesburg alone had 300 enclosed neighbourhoods and 20 security estates, while in 2015 Graça Machel, widow of Nelson Mandela, inaugurated the ‘parkland residence’ Steyn City in South Africa – a development four times the size of Monaco – which includes South Africa’s most expensive house. This is not limited to Africa, of course. In the USA, for example, the use of ‘fortified towns’ seems to have begun in California in the 1930s with gated enclaves such as the Rolling Hills Estate.


pages: 290 words: 72,046

5 Day Weekend: Freedom to Make Your Life and Work Rich With Purpose by Nik Halik, Garrett B. Gunderson

Airbnb, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, business process, clean water, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Ethereum, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, gamification, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Isaac Newton, Kaizen: continuous improvement, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, market fundamentalism, microcredit, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Skype, solopreneur, subscription business, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, traveling salesman, uber lyft

The ultimate quantification of success is not how much time you spend doing what you love. It’s how little time you spend doing what you hate. Most people work for their money. I’m going to show you how to get your money working for you. “There is no small passion to be found playing small — in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.” —NELSON MANDELA CHAPTER 2 NEW MINDSET, MORE FREEDOM Retirement. That great American Dream. Work at a job you don’t even like for forty years. Scrimp and save in retirement plans. Then become economically dead and after that, as this plan is sold to us, live the “good life.” The only problem with this plan is that it doesn’t work.


pages: 352 words: 80,030

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World by Peter Frankopan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, cashless society, clean water, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, global supply chain, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, land reform, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, purchasing power parity, ransomware, Rubik’s Cube, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, trade route, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

‘The heroic deeds of Boris Yeltsin and the Russian people’ had steered Russia onto a course of reform and democracy, said President Bill Clinton at a meeting with the Russian president in Vancouver in 1993. The prospect of a ‘newly productive and prosperous Russia’ was good for everyone, he noted.1 Hopeful times lay ahead too in South Africa, where fraught negotiations to end apartheid had advanced sufficiently for the Nobel committee to award the Peace Prize for 1993 to F. W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela for their ‘their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime, and for laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa’.2 The award of the prestigious prize was a moment of hope for South Africa, for Africa and for the world – even if it later emerged that many of Mandela’s closest confidants urged him not to accept the prize if it meant having to share it with a man they referred to as ‘his oppressor’.


pages: 366 words: 76,476

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) by Christian Rudder

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data science, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, Frank Gehry, Howard Zinn, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, p-value, power law, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, race to the bottom, retail therapy, Salesforce, selection bias, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, two and twenty

Conquerors, tycoons, martyrs, saviors, even scoundrels (especially scoundrels!)—their lives are how we’ve told our larger story, how we’ve marked our progression from the banks of a couple of silty rivers to wherever we are now. From Pharaoh Narmer in BCE 3100, the first living man whose name we still know, to Steve Jobs and Nelson Mandela—the heroic framework is how people order the world. Narmer was first on an ancient list of kings. The scribes have changed, but that list has continued on. I mean, the 1960s, power to the people and so on, is the perfect example: that’s the era of Lennon and McCartney, Dylan, Hendrix, not “Guy at Party.”


pages: 232

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

Houses are turned into virtual fortresses by surrounding them with high walls topped by glass shards, barbed wire, and heavy iron bars on all windows. 75 This "architecture of fear," as Tunde Agbola describes fortified lifestyles in Lagos, is commonplace in the Third World and some parts of the First, but it reaches a global extreme in large urban societies with the greatest socio-economic inequalities: South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, and the United States.76 In Johannesburg, even before the 73 Solomon Benjamin, "Governance, Economic Settings and Poverty in Bangalore," Environment and Urbanisation 12:1 (April 2000), p. 39. 74 Harald Leisch, "Gated Communities in Indonesia," Gties 19:5 (2002), pp. 341, 344-45. 75 Berner, Defending a Place, p. 163. 76 For a description of Lagos's fortress homes, see Agbola, Architecture of Fear, pp. 68-69. election of Nelson Mandela, big downtown businesses and affluent white residents fled the urban core for northern suburbs (Sandton, Rand burg, Rosebank, and so on) which were transformed into highsecurity analogues of American "edge cities." Within these sprawling suburban laagers with their ubiquitous gates, housing clusters, and barricaded public streets, anthropologist Andre Czegledy finds that security has become a culture of the absurd.


pages: 273 words: 21,102

Branding Your Business: Promoting Your Business, Attracting Customers and Standing Out in the Market Place by James Hammond

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, call centre, Donald Trump, intangible asset, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, market design, Nelson Mandela, Pepsi Challenge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steve Jobs, the market place

You can instead create a story based on your travels, adventures, situations you have experienced, humorous times, difficult times – anything that will evoke strong emotional ties with your audiences.  Your mentors. Who has provided the source of inspiration in your life? Family members, friends, teachers or coaches, or perhaps the people you most admire in the world, past and present? Great figures such as Mother Theresa, Gandhi or Nelson Mandela have given inspiration to countless men and women who saw in them qualities they admired, and desired to have themselves, whether it be succeeding against all odds, having a disciplined mind, living with honesty and integrity at the highest level or reaching a particular level of accomplishment.


pages: 248 words: 72,174

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau

Airbnb, big-box store, clean water, digital nomad, do what you love, fixed income, follow your passion, if you build it, they will come, index card, informal economy, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, late fees, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, price anchoring, Ralph Waldo Emerson, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, web application

Some people design an entire for-profit business around the social component, others shift to focus on it as they go along, and still others integrate a social project within a for-profit business. Apartheid came to an end in South Africa in 1994, ending nearly half a century of white-only rule in Africa’s most economically developed country. Nelson Mandela was elected the first black president the same year, and the country began a slow process of creating true equality for its “rainbow nation” of people. In addition to the negative association of apartheid, South Africa was known for many good things, one of which was its popular prize-winning wine.


A Schoolmaster's War by Jonathan Ree

anti-communist, Nelson Mandela, unemployed young men, V2 rocket

He had a rooted distaste for all kinds of boasting, personal or institutional, and he used to brush off enquiries about his war by saying – with the self-deprecating good humour that seems to have charmed everyone he met – that the whole thing had been like a glorious summer holiday. The closest he came to taking pride in his war was when Margaret Thatcher denounced Nelson Mandela as a terrorist, and he was able to say, ‘But I was a terrorist too, and I got a medal from George VI.’ Another reason for his reticence was disappointment at the condition of post-war France, where the spirit of solidarity and optimism which sustained him in the Resistance gave way to recrimination, obfuscation, and vindictive partisanship.


pages: 286 words: 79,305

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

Martin Luther King may have been able to meet with the president5 but most members of the population of the United States cannot. Being a billionaire, however, is helpful in this respect: Bill Gates, for example, has met President Barack Obama of the United States,6 President Xi Jinping of China7 and President Nelson Mandela of South Africa,8 among others. The most accessible of the four levers is access to elite education – the top schools and universities in each country, from which a high proportion of the future elite are drawn. The power of this lever is surprising. In the UK, for example, 35 per cent of members of Parliament were educated in private schools, against 7 per cent of the population as a whole.9 Even more strikingly, David Cameron, the former Prime Minister of the UK, and four of his most trusted aides all attended the same school, Eton College, and more than half of the Cabinet were privately educated and attended either Oxford or Cambridge University.10 As with meeting the president, it is not impossible to attend these schools without a privileged background – they all offer scholarships – but it does require exceptional ability.


pages: 225 words: 74,210

Wanderland by Jini Reddy

Airbnb, country house hotel, Day of the Dead, Google Earth, invisible hand, Nelson Mandela

I’d spent the Friday with an environmentalist friend who works for DEFRA but who on the side secretly bangs gongs, twirls mallets round crystal bowls, and shakes rain sticks. I’d spent an entertaining afternoon round hers and the next day had ended up at a gig by Johnny Clegg, a South African musician-activist. He knew he was dying and it was to be one of his last tours. There was dancing and swaying and fist pumps and tributes to Nelson Mandela and me feeling South African and teary, even though I’ve only been to my parents’ homeland three times. So by the time I board the train, I’m feeling a little flat. Do I really want to go to landlocked Derbyshire? Once more I have that strange feeling of contraction I sometimes feel when I head north.


pages: 257 words: 77,612

The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime by Bradley Hope

Airbnb, battle of ideas, bitcoin, blockchain, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital map, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, operational security, Potemkin village, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

All the stress and fear came pouring out. “I need you to come home,” she told him. 17 JAILHOUSE KIMCHI It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones. —NELSON MANDELA LOS ANGELES APRIL 2019 As the inmates shuffled to their tables for another grim dinner, Christopher Ahn spotted his quarry: coleslaw. In jail, Ahn realized that there were two culinary worlds. There were the universally despised meals served in the mess hall, where rotten ingredients are not uncommon.


The Trauma Chronicles by Westaby, Stephen

Albert Einstein, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, James Dyson, lockdown, Nelson Mandela, social distancing, Stephen Hawking

It was the same honours list attended by the architect of the Iraq war. The man who mistakenly spoke of weapons of mass destruction and triggered as many deaths as Covid did in Britain. As the old song says ‘that’s the way it is…’ Postscript It always seems impossible until it’s done. Nelson Mandela Whether they were the good old days or times to be forgotten, the era of the fearless swashbuckling surgeon has passed. What’s more, the contemporary profession openly celebrates that fact. So concerned were the Royal College of Surgeons about their macho image that the President, Neil Mortensen, a friend and colleague from Oxford, commissioned an enquiry about it.


pages: 255 words: 80,190

Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story by Rachel Clarke

clockwatching, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, imposter syndrome, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, post-truth, profit motive, sensible shoes, Snapchat, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

How do you answer the criticisms that I suppose might be made that if you’d cared more you would have gone outside the hospital and raised, as one might put it, merry hell? A. I would have then ended up becoming either a stroke or a heart attack, and being on the road. Q. You mean out of a job? A. Yes. Clear and simple. And I am brave – I mean, what I did takes a lot of guts to do. But I’m not Nelson Mandela … You’re always watching your back. At the end of the day, I’m a human being. I might make a mistake and that could be the end of my career, because it will be used against me. Because the kind of job we’re in, things will occasionally go wrong. It doesn’t matter how good you are, and then that will become the excuse for destroying your career.9 Francis identified frontline clinicians’ fear of speaking out as one of the most important factors that permitted the cruelties of Mid Staffs to flourish unchecked for so long.


pages: 1,429 words: 189,336

Mauritius, Réunion & Seychelles Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

call centre, carbon footprint, Google Earth, haute cuisine, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, place-making, restrictive zoning, spice trade, trade route, urban sprawl

oCafé InternationalINTERNATIONAL€€ (Flame Grill Cafe; MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %5765 8735; Royal Rd, Trou aux Biches; mains Rs 300-850; h3-10pm Tue-Fri, noon-10pm Sat & Sun) This popular South African–run spot serves up an excellent assortment of dishes from around the world. Burgers, curries, fresh fish and sandwiches are mainstays, but the highlights are the ribs and South African steaks that are so good we would (and, on at least one occasion, did) cross the island just to have them. It's all watched over by friendly Deon (a former bodyguard for Nelson Mandela), and there's a secondhand bookshop as well. o1974ITALIAN, SEAFOOD€€ ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %265 7400; Royal Rd, Trou aux Biches; mains Rs 350-600; h6.30-11pm Tue-Thu, noon-2.30pm & 6.30-11pm Fri & Sat, noon-5pm Sun) This fabulous place in warm terracotta hues is the work of Italians Antonio and Giulia.

The gardens were named after Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, the first prime minister of independent Mauritius, and were started by Mahé de Labourdonnais in 1735 as a vegetable plot for his Mon Plaisir Château (which now contains a small exhibition of photographs). Close to the chateau is the funerary platform where Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam was cremated (his ashes were scattered on the Ganges in India). Various international dignitaries have planted trees in the surrounding gardens, including Nelson Mandela, Indira Gandhi and a host of British royals. The landscape came into its own in 1768 under the auspices of French horticulturalist Pierre Poivre. Like Kew Gardens, the gardens played a significant role in the horticultural espionage of the day. Poivre imported seeds from around the world in a bid to end France's dependence on Asian spices.


pages: 306 words: 79,537

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place) by Tim Marshall

9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, Charlie Hebdo massacre, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Hans Island, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, market fragmentation, megacity, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transcontinental railway, Transnistria, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, zero-sum game

In 2012, he wrote an article for Germany’s best-selling daily newspaper, Bild, and was clearly still haunted by the possibility that, because of the financial crisis, the current generation of leaders would not nurture the postwar experiment in European trust: “For those who didn’t live through this themselves and who especially now in the crisis are asking what benefits Europe’s unity brings, the answer despite the unprecedented European period of peace lasting more than 65 years and despite the problems and difficulties we must still overcome is: peace.” 5 * * * AFRICA It always seems impossible until it is done. —Nelson Mandela Africa’s coastline? Great beaches—really, really lovely beaches—but terrible natural harbors. Rivers? Amazing rivers, but most of them are worthless for actually transporting anything, given that every few miles you go over a waterfall. These are just two in a long list of problems that helps explain why Africa isn’t technologically or politically as successful as Western Europe or North America.


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Springing into prominence in the US in the late 1960s, this term was briefly adopted, though later dropped, by Democrat Senator George McGovern during his unsuccessful presidential campaign. It remains an attractive name, suggesting a link between ‘democracy’ and ‘grants’. Freedom grant. This was the name proposed by the writer for a basic income grant (BIG) advocated in South Africa after Nelson Mandela became the country’s first post-apartheid president.11 Sadly, the International Monetary Fund and the then South African finance minister opposed the BIG, since when inequality and chronic insecurity have persisted and grown. Stabilization grant. This term, another proposed by the writer, refers to a form of basic income, or a component of it, that would vary with the economic cycle, rising in recessions to encourage spending and falling in better times.


pages: 322 words: 84,752

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

The stories of the Zapatistas and the Arab Spring are not about nationalist fervor inspiring political revolution. They are not about religious fundamentalism. These movements were not particularly Marxist, Maoist, or populist. They had leaders, but employed comparatively flat organizations of informal teams compared with the formal and hierarchical unions and political parties behind Václav Havel, Nelson Mandela, and Lech Wałęsa. Instead, digital photos circulated widely and kept grievances alive. Periods of political history are not easy to define. They begin and end slowly. Their features are not absolute, but are prominent and distinctive. That’s how these two social movements demark the interregnum.


pages: 316 words: 87,486

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Anyone inquiring how an obscenity like this came to pass—how it is that the home of the free outstripped what we used to call “captive nations” as well as countries philosophically dedicated to wholesale imprisonment like apartheid South Africa—anyone looking into these things soon realizes that this cannot be laid simply and neatly at the doorstep of the Republican Party and Those Awful Wingers. It is true that the Republican Richard Nixon started the war on drugs, and that the Republican Ronald Reagan escalated it. But the Democrat Bill Clinton—the buddy of Bono and Nelson Mandela, the man repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize—easily bested both of these Republicans as well as all other presidents in his zeal to incarcerate.8 Alexander writes as follows of Clinton’s 1994 crime law: Far from resisting the emergence of the new caste system, Clinton escalated the drug war beyond what conservatives had imagined possible a decade earlier.


pages: 432 words: 85,707

QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance (Qi: Book of General Ignorance) by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Boris Johnson, British Empire, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

Decades after it was written, the name and characters from his 1901 play Quality Street were used in the product’s advertising and packaging. Most Barrie scholars now think he got the idea for the name ‘Wendy’ from five-year-old Margaret Henley, who tried to call him ‘friendy’ but mispronounced it ‘fwendy’. Margaret was the daughter of the one-legged poet William Ernest Henley, who wrote Nelson Mandela’s favourite poem ‘Invictus’. The character of Long John Silver in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island was based on Henley – so Long John Silver was Wendy Darling’s father. Peter Pan was named after Pan, the Greek god who was abandoned by his mother as a child. The title of the first Peter Pan book (1902) was initially going to be The Boy Who Hated Mothers, and in the play Barrie intended Peter to be ‘a demon boy, the villain of the story’.


pages: 212 words: 80,393

Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain by Lisa McKenzie

British Empire, call centre, credit crunch, delayed gratification, falling living standards, financial exclusion, full employment, income inequality, low skilled workers, meritocracy, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, unpaid internship, urban renewal, working poor

Levitas, R. (2005) The inclusive society (2nd edn), London: Macmillan. Lister, R. (1996) Charles Murray and the underclass: The developing debate commentaries, London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit in association with The Sunday Times. Lister, R. (2004) Poverty, Cambridge: Polity. Littlejohn, R. (2014) ‘Duggan was a gangster not Nelson Mandela’, Mail Online, 10 January (http://dailym.ai/1tvagLR). MacDonald, R., Shildrick, T., Webster, C. and Simpson, D. (2005) ‘Growing up in poor neighbourhoods: the significance of class and place in the extended transitions of “socially excluded” young adults’, Sociology, vol 39, no 5, December, pp 873-91.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

Peter’s Basilica.32 No wonder the “selfie”—defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media site”—was the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year in 2013, its use increasing by 17,000% over the year.33 And no wonder that almost 50% of the photos taken on Instagram in the United Kingdom by 14–21-year-olds are selfies, many of whom use this medium to reify their existence.34 “All too often, selfies involve shooting yourself in the foot,” Gautam Malkani noted about Barack Obama and David Cameron’s selfie debacle at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service in December 2013. But the unfortunate truth is that we are all—from Barack Obama to James Franco to the other 150 million selfie addicts on Kevin Systrom’s social network—collectively shooting ourselves in more than just our feet with our battery of Hello this is me snaps. These “Advertisements for Myself” are actually embarrassing commercials both for ourselves and for our species.


pages: 306 words: 84,649

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, COVID-19, Danny Hillis, Doomsday Clock, European colonialism, Ford Model T, friendly fire, High speed trading, interchangeable parts, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, smart grid, Stewart Brand, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, éminence grise

The British invaded in 1795, in a move against the French, with whom they were then at war; gave it back in 1803; then re-invaded in 1806. By then vast numbers of indigenous African people had been killed, dispossessed or forced away. Today, Cape Town’s Table Bay is most famous for the Robben Island prison that held Nelson Mandela from 1964 for eighteen years of his twenty-seven-year imprisonment. When the British government seized control of the colony in 1806, Table Bay was one of the most strategically significant places on Earth, because the ships of every empire stopped there for supplies during their long voyages around Africa, trading the riches of imperial expansion.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

Now instead it is said that the country never introduced real socialism but some form of corrupt state capitalism that only appropriated the socialist brand, and it is intellectually dishonest to use that failure as evidence that socialism is not working, especially as real socialism right now is being developed elsewhere, in the hopeful country X, which you should look at instead. (At which point the foreign admirers move on to the next experiment and the process begins again from step 1.) To witness the damage a single person can inflict on a country, one can head to South Africa. Following the liberation from apartheid, Nelson Mandela, as president from 1994, created a climate of reconciliation while democratizing the country and liberalizing the economy. Under Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, inflation was tamed, government debt was halved and the growth rate reached 5 per cent. The outside world thought South Africa could be the next economic miracle.


pages: 265 words: 80,510

The Enablers: How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption - Endangering Our Democracy by Frank Vogl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, corporate governance, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Global Witness, Greensill Capital, income inequality, information security, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Londongrad, low interest rates, market clearing, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, profit maximization, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stock buybacks, too big to fail, WikiLeaks

The brilliance of that time was heightened even further when news came on the final day of the Davos meeting that South African president F. W. de Klerk had announced that the African National Congress would no longer be banned and that arrangements would be made to set the Congress’s leader, Nelson Mandela, free from the Robben Island prison, where he had spent twenty-seven years. The apartheid era, like the communist era in Eastern Europe, was ending. FAST-FORWARD THIRTY YEARS The euphoria that swept across Eastern and Central Europe in late 1989/early 1990 is a distant memory. The hopes of tens of millions of people liberated from communism have been dashed.


Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power by Rose Hackman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, cognitive load, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Graeber, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, game design, glass ceiling, immigration reform, invisible hand, job automation, lockdown, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, performance metric, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

“Since all the initial stories are by men, the breaking of silence by women completely reimagines how you think about this history.” Armah’s thinking around the overlooked centrality of emotions and the stories of women continued to take form when, in 1997, she headed to South Africa for work. There, she was set to cover the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, organized under Nelson Mandela’s government, which aimed to bring the country forward after the end of the half-century-long apartheid regime. The unprecedented national restorative justice effort set up to move the country forward peacefully gave space to white perpetrators of atrocities and encouraged them to acknowledge crimes in exchange for possible amnesty alongside the testimonies of their Black victims of abuse.


pages: 388 words: 211,074

Pauline Frommer's London: Spend Less, See More by Jason Cochran

Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, British Empire, congestion charging, context collapse, David Attenborough, Easter island, electricity market, Etonian, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Multics, Nelson Mandela, Skype, Stephen Fry, urban planning

But by 1905, its fortunes reversed when it was elevated to a cathedral, which now serves 2.5 million across southern London, and in 2000, it was given a lavish cleaning—so much of one that it’s hard to discern the true age and sordid past of the place. The cathedral’s entrance is to the left. Go in, go straight across the sanctuary, through the glass doors opposite, up a short flight of stairs, and turn right to the end of the glass-roofed corridor, which traces the line of an alley that was called @ Lancelot’s Link Nelson Mandela opened this building in 2001. Have a look at the display here, which preserves surprising discoveries made in this small area during a 1999 renovation. Look down into the well on the far right, and you’ll see the original paving stones from the Roman road that cut through this space in the 1st century.

Find more events at London’s city website (www.london.gov.uk/gla/events), at Visit London’s site (www.visitlondon.com), and in Time Out magazine (www.timeout.com/london). The regular events below are by no means the full list. There are always short-run, one-off events popping up unexpectedly throughout the year, such as the installation of a temporary lawn across Trafalgar Square to promote London parks, open-air rock concerts like the one honoring Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday, and wacky art installations like the “Telectroscope” that offered live, life-size views of Brooklyn in its lens in 2008. Time Out and the commercial weblog Londonist (www.londonist.com) are good places to find advance word. January or Early February London International Mime Festival Chinese New Year Festival (% 020/ (% 020/7637-5661; www.mimefest. 7851-6686; www.chinatownchinese. co.uk): Not just for silent clowns, but co.uk): In conjunction with the Chinese also for funky puppets and Blue Man–style New Year, the streets around Leicester Square come alive with dragon and lion dances, children’s parades, performances, screenings, and fireworks displays.


pages: 891 words: 220,950

Winds of Change by Peter Hennessy

anti-communist, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land tenure, liberal capitalism, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, oil shock, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment

Anthony Sampson, for example, wrote in his memoir, The Anatomist, that Macmillan ‘had a simplified view of Africa: it was, the Prime Minister said, like a lazy hippo which had suddenly been prodded’.29 But, as Sampson recognized, the ‘Wind of Change’ speech had had a tonic effect on some of Africa’s future leaders. Nelson Mandela, for example, thought the speech ‘terrific’ and, ‘[n]early forty years later Mandela, speaking in Westminster Hall, would recall Macmillan’s courage in confronting “a stubborn and race-blind white oligarchy”’. The 1960 speech, Sampson wrote, ‘had long repercussions in black Africa’.30 More immediately for Macmillan, Central Africa was the most explosive patch in 1961 – how to let the wind of change blow while preserving something multiracial in a new settlement.

We are the only people who, with all the hesitations and failures that there have been, are genuinely resolved on turning, to use Harold Macmillan’s phrase, an empire into a commonwealth and a commonwealth into a family.102 When Macleod expressed that aspiration he already knew full well that a large-scale ‘family’ row was underway about British policy towards apartheid South Africa, which had left the Commonwealth the previous March after Macmillan had striven mightily but failed to persuade the South African premier, Hendrik Verwoerd, to make ‘the smallest move towards an understanding of the views of his Commonwealth colleagues’.103 The South African question was to poison intra-Commonwealth relations for a generation until Nelson Mandela was freed from prison in 1990 and the apartheid regime began to dismantle itself. At home, the question of ‘colour’, as it was expressed in the early 1960s, began to rise up the barometer of political sensitivity when Commonwealth immigration continued to increase and anxieties, aroused during the Notting Hill and Nottingham riots of 1958, about the capacity and willingness of the host communities to absorb the newcomers in areas of particular concentration, showed no signs of abating.


pages: 723 words: 211,892

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Joan Didion, land reform, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, Ronald Reagan, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, yellow journalism, young professional

Another war between the MPLA and UNITA killed thousands between 1998 and 2002. War’s destructive power casts a long shadow. So does colonialism’s. Cuba’s victory over the South African army has meant that the Cuban role in Angola has been viewed in postapartheid South Africa in emphatically positive terms. Years later, Nelson Mandela—famed antiapartheid fighter turned president and Nobel Peace Prize winner—acknowledged Cuba’s critical role in Southern Africa. When he visited the island in 1991, he spoke at the annual July 26 rally commemorating Castro’s assault on the Moncada barracks. Referring to Cuba’s victory over South Africa in the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, Mandela explained, “The decisive defeat of the aggressive apartheid forces destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor… [and it] served as an inspiration to the struggling people of South Africa….

A cousin who served in Angola gave me a porcupine spine he had brought back from the war as a gift on my first visit back to Cuba in 1990. 25. Isaac Saney, “African Stalingrad: The Cuban Revolution, Internationalism, and the End of Apartheid,” Latin American Perspectives 33, no. 5 (2006): 81–117; Nelson Mandela speech in Havana on July 26, 1991, in http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/1991/19910726-1.html; Gleijeses, Visions, 338–40, 379. 26. Ben Rhodes, The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (New York: Random House, 2018), 261, 265; Interview with Ben Rhodes, December 18, 2020.


pages: 420 words: 98,309

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

Ayatollah Khomeini, classic study, climate anxiety, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, false memory syndrome, fear of failure, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, medical malpractice, medical residency, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, psychological pricing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, sugar pill, telemarketer, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

In South Africa, the end of apartheid could easily have left a legacy of self-justifying rage on the part of the whites who supported the status quo and the privileges it conferred on them, and of self-justified fury on the part of the blacks who had been its victims. It took the courage of a white man, Frederik de Klerk, and a black man, Nelson Mandela, to avert the bloodbath that has followed in the wake of most revolutions, and to create the conditions that made it possible for their country to move forward as a democracy. De Klerk, who had been elected president in 1989, knew that a violent revolution was all but inevitable. The fight against apartheid was escalating; sanctions imposed by other countries were having a significant impact on the nation's economy; supporters of the banned African National Congress were becoming increasingly violent, killing and torturing people whom they believed were collaborating with the white regime.


pages: 289 words: 87,137

What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear by Danielle Ofri

big-box store, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, medical residency, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, stem cell, sugar pill

The one skill area that did not improve, interestingly, was the same for both doctors and patients: time management skills. Maybe it’s time to admit we just need longer visits! Research continues to bear out that communication can be broken down into discrete skills that can be taught and retained,5 that one needn’t be born a Nelson Mandela or Winston Churchill to do a decent job communicating. Just as doctors can be taught how to suture, how to run a code, how to hear a heart murmur, and how to brake a gurney without severing their toes, they can also be taught how to communicate better. One area that is rightfully getting attention is teaching how to break bad news.


pages: 395 words: 94,764

I Never Knew That About London by Christopher Winn

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Clapham omnibus, Desert Island Discs, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869

Since the law courts moved to the Strand, Westminster Hall has been used for mainly ceremonial occasions. The first person to lie in state here was William Gladstone in 1898, then George VI in 1952, Queen Mary in 1953, Sir Winston Churchill in 1965 and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, in 2002. In 1996 Nelson Mandela addressed both Houses of Parliament in the Hall. * * * The Exchequer Westminster Hall was for many years the home of the ‘exchequer’, or treasury. The term exchequer derived from the chequered table, based on the abacus and resembling a chess board, on which counters representing different values were placed and used to calculate expenditure and receipts.


pages: 264 words: 90,379

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, complexity theory, David Brooks, East Village, fake news, haute couture, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, new economy, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, theory of mind, young professional

It is true, for instance, that you can take the Race IAT or the Career IAT as many times as you want and try as hard as you can to respond faster to the more problematic categories, and it won’t make a whit of difference. But, believe it or not, if, before you take the IAT, I were to ask you to look over a series of pictures or articles about people like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela or Colin Powell, your reaction time would change. Suddenly it won’t seem so hard to associate positive things with black people. “I had a student who used to take the IAT every day,” Banaji says. “It was the first thing he did, and his idea was just to let the data gather as he went. Then this one day, he got a positive association with blacks.


pages: 366 words: 87,916

Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It by Gabriel Wyner

card file, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, index card, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, language acquisition, machine translation, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Skype, spaced repetition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Yogi Berra

Principle 5: Rewrite the Past Timing Is Everything: The End of Forgetting Do This Now: Learn to Use a Spaced Repetition System 3: Sound Play Train Your Ears, Rewire Your Brain Train Your Mouth, Get the Girl Train Your Eyes, See the Patterns Do This Now: Learn Your Language’s Sound System 4: Word Play and the Symphony of a Word Where to Begin: We Don’t Talk Much About Apricots Games with Words The Gender of a Turnip Do This Now: Learn Your First 625 Words, Music and All 5: Sentence Play The Power of Input: Your Language Machine Simplify, Simplify: Turning Mountains into Molehills Story Time: Making Patterns Memorable On Arnold Schwarzenegger and Exploding Dogs: Mnemonics for Grammar The Power of Output: Your Custom Language Class Do This Now: Learn Your First Sentences 6: The Language Game Setting Goals: Your Custom Vocabulary Words About Words Reading for Pleasure and Profit Listening Comprehension for Couch Potatoes Speech and the Game of Taboo Do This Now: Explore Your Language 7: Epilogue: The Benefits and Pleasures of Learning a Language The Toolbox The Gallery: A Guide to the Flash Cards That Will Teach You Your Language The Art of Flash Cards The First Gallery: Do-It-Yourself Pronunciation Trainers The Second Gallery: Your First Words The Third Gallery: Using and Learning Your First Sentences The Fourth Gallery: One Last Set of Vocabulary Cards A Glossary of Terms and Tools Appendices Appendix 1: Specific Language Resources Appendix 2: Language Difficulty Estimates Appendix 3: Spaced Repetition System Resources Appendix 4: The International Phonetic Alphabet Decoder Appendix 5: Your First 625 Words Appendix 6: How to Use This Book with Your Classroom Language Course One Last Note (About Technology) Notes Acknowledgments Index CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Stab, Stab, Stab If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. —Nelson Mandela Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages. —Dave Barry Language learning is a sport. I say this as someone who is in no way qualified to speak about sports; I joined the fencing team in high school in order to get out of gym class.


Pirates and Emperors, Old and New by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, drone strike, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, union organizing, urban planning

Their terrorist acts inside Russia were serious enough to have brought a Russia–Pakistan war ominously close (John Cooley, Global Dialogue 2.4, Autumn 2000). 85. Barry Munslow and Phil O’Keefe, Third World Quarterly, January 1984. During the Reagan years, South African depredations in the neighboring countries left 1.5 million killed and caused over $60 billion in damage, while Washington continued to support South Africa and condemned Nelson Mandela’s ANC as one of the “more notorious terrorist groups” in the world. Joseba Zulaika and William Douglass, Terror and Taboo (Routledge, 1996), 12. 1980–88 record, Merle Bowen, Fletcher Forum, Winter 1991. On expansion of U.S. trade with South Africa after Congress authorized sanctions in 1985 (overriding Reagan’s veto), see Gay McDougall, Richard Knight, in Robert Edgar, ed., Sanctioning Apartheid (Africa World Press, 1990). 86.


pages: 323 words: 89,795

Food and Fuel: Solutions for the Future by Andrew Heintzman, Evan Solomon, Eric Schlosser

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, big-box store, California energy crisis, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, deindustrialization, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, full employment, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, hydrogen economy, Kickstarter, land reform, megaproject, microcredit, Negawatt, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social contagion, statistical model, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

In 1959, the year I was born, people of colour in much of the United States were forbidden to use the same public toilets as white people or to sleep at the same hotels. The Soviet Union oppressed its own citizens and ruled half of Europe. Blacks in South Africa were treated like serfs. In 1959, if you’d predicted that Nelson Mandela would one day be elected president of a free, multiracial South Africa, people would have said you were out of your mind. In my lifetime, I’ve seen segregation, the Berlin Wall, and apartheid vanish from the Earth. So I refuse to believe that the way we feed ourselves today must endure forever.


pages: 304 words: 87,702

The 100 Best Vacations to Enrich Your Life by Pam Grout

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, complexity theory, David Brooks, East Village, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, global village, Golden Gate Park, if you build it, they will come, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

What the 24,300-ton vessel does offer is an 8,000-volume library, nine classrooms, a computer lab, a student union, a campus bookstore, a swimming pool, a fitness center, a spa, and a health clinic. But the best perks are the interport lecturers. Over the years, students at sea have been treated to talks by Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Indira Gandhi, Corazon Aquino, Mother Teresa, and Fidel Castro, who one year met with students for eight entire hours. Desmond Tutu, a frequent interport lecturer and big fan of the floating campus for global studies, even signed on to be a guest lecturer for the entire spring semester voyage of 2007.


pages: 302 words: 95,965

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

George Washington Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. John F. Kennedy If you're not ready to die for it, put the word 'freedom' out of your vocabulary. Malcolm X I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free so other people would be also free. Rosa Parks Money won't create success, the freedom to make it will. Nelson Mandela Some people get rich first. Deng Xiaoping Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same. Ronald Reagan Freedom Matters Most The more I live, the more I travel, and the more people I meet, the more I realize that freedom matters most.


pages: 322 words: 87,181

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik

3D printing, airline deregulation, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global value chain, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, open immigration, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, éminence grise

In view of the international sanctions and the economic decline they faced, the elites would have been better off under democracy—but only provided that moderate future taxation could be assured. In the absence of such guarantees, it remained in the elites’ interest to keep suppressing the black majority even at substantial economic cost to themselves and the country. Nelson Mandela was keenly aware of the problem: “Especially in the first few years of the democratic government,” he said in 1991, “we may have to do something to show that the system has got an inbuilt mechanism which makes it impossible for one group to suppress the other.”6 In the run-up to the democratic transition of 1994, South Africa’s federal institutions were specifically designed to prevent the expropriation of the rich white minority by the poor black majority.


pages: 372 words: 92,477

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

In 1941 Franklin Roosevelt had worried that it might not be possible to shield “the great flame of democracy from the blackout of barbarism,” a fear repeated during the cold war. But democracy had eventually won. The great heroes of the late twentieth century were heroes of democracy: Think of Nelson Mandela leading the peaceful transition to majority rule in South Africa or Václav Havel constructing the velvet revolution in the Czech Republic. In the introduction to Democracy in America Tocqueville argued that “the effort to halt democracy appears as a fight against God himself.”5 Substitute the word “history” for “God” and by 2000 that was a statement of conventional wisdom.


pages: 309 words: 92,177

The Ghost by Robert Harris

airport security, carbon footprint, en.wikipedia.org, gentrification, Nelson Mandela, stakhanovite, white picket fence

He opened a door and I followed him into a room straight out of Rick’s London club: dark green wallpaper, floor-to-ceiling books, library steps, overstuffed brown leather furniture, a big brass lectern in the shape of an eagle, a Roman bust, a faint odor of cigars. One wall was devoted to memorabilia: citations, prizes, honorary degrees, and a lot of photographs. I took in Emmett with Bill Clinton and Al Gore, Emmett with Margaret Thatcher and Nelson Mandela. I’d tell you the names of the others if I knew who they were. A German chancellor. A French president. There was also a picture of him with Lang, a grin-and-grip at what seemed to be a cocktail party. He saw me looking. “The wall of ego,” he said. “We all have them. Think of it as the equivalent of the orthodontist’s fish tank.


pages: 344 words: 94,332

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity by Lynda Gratton, Andrew Scott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, asset light, assortative mating, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, diversification, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Glasses, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Economic Geography, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, pension reform, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, young professional

Given that across a 100-year lifespan there are 873,000 hours available and if, as is often claimed, a specialist expertise takes 10,000 hours to acquire, then mastery in more than one field is neither daunting nor impossible. Valuing knowledge Learning is an important part of life and has a value way beyond the income it can generate. Nelson Mandela was right when he said ‘Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world’, and he wasn’t talking about GDP or income. There is a lot of sense in choosing to learn what one is passionate about and interested in. However, for most people, income matters – and it matters even more over the course of a 100-year life.


pages: 349 words: 27,507

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Berlin Wall, British Empire, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Mercator projection, Nelson Mandela, pre–internet, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Thorstein Veblen, time dilation

They are individuals who can venture to that Other Side, before returning back to ordinary life, here with us on Earth. As a result, we’ll try to glimpse, in the expression on their face, or in the potent equations they’ve plucked and brought back down, what things are like up there, in that higher realm, which so many of us believe in, but know we’ll never get to visit directly. Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela have been considered such prophets, carrying down a vision of racial harmony, their words spreading afterward with a power that came from the feeling that they had originated from that higher source. In post–World War I Europe, Einstein’s findings were received with the veneration King’s or Mandela’s words would be granted later.


pages: 326 words: 88,905

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges, Joe Sacco

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, dumpster diving, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, food desert, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban decay, wage slave, white flight, women in the workforce

The more concessions one makes to privilege and power, the more it diminishes one’s capacity to fight for justice and truth. This understanding should have been heeded by Havel, who as president served systems of state power and supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Havel’s positions as a politician tarnished all he had fought for as an outsider and a dissident. The same can be said of Nelson Mandela, who, once in office, bowed to the demands of foreign investors and international banks and abandoned the African National Congress’s thirty-five-year-old socialist economic policy, known as the Freedom Charter, which called for the nationalization of mines, banks, and monopoly industries. 28.


pages: 347 words: 86,274

The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion by Virginia Postrel

Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Dr. Strangelove, factory automation, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, hydroponic farming, indoor plumbing, job automation, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, washing machines reduced drudgery, young professional

But if you understand his appeal as glamour, in which the audience supplies the meaning, then it’s not surprising that Obama means different things to different people and thus, especially in his first term, often had difficulty rallying his supporters in favor of a given course of action. Glamour is an asset in a campaign, but charisma is more useful once you’re elected. A few particularly gifted leaders—Ronald Reagan, Nelson Mandela, and, outside of politics, Steve Jobs—have had both. GLAMOUR CHARISMA Barack Obama Bill Clinton Che Castro Thomas Jefferson Andrew Jackson Jackie Kennedy Eleanor Roosevelt Michael Jordan Earvin “Magic” Johnson John Lennon Janice Joplin Leonardo Raphael Spock Kirk Tupac Shakur Snoop Dogg Joan of Arc dead Joan of Arc alive Early Princess Diana Late Princess Diana It’s rare for a charismatic leader to be as self-contained as Reagan or Mandela, which is one reason glamour rarely accompanies charisma.


China's Good War by Rana Mitter

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, land reform, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, sexual politics, South China Sea, Washington Consensus

It wants its presence in the region and the world to be regarded as based on more than pure self-interested realism. Of course, it is possible for a justice claim on one’s own behalf to be grounded in a broader moral footing (as was the case with the struggles of Martin Luther King, Jr., for civil rights and Nelson Mandela against apartheid), but China’s argument for justice relating to its wartime record has not yet found wide support. That deficiency has stimulated a set of discourses that seek to provide an interpretation of China’s experiences during World War II that compares them to the recognized global, largely European, understanding of the war.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

The Green Swan Scenario takes us in a very different direction, though it is eminently possible to imagine a future that combines elements of both scenarios. Meanwhile, we have no real choice but to dive in. Throughout the process of producing Green Swans, we had in mind a saying often attributed to Nelson Mandela, but with roots stretching back to Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”28 CHAPTER 1 MIRACLES ON DEMAND Making the Impossible Inevitable “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” science fiction author Arthur C.


Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

The horror of the present is realizing that many adults had no sense of what was really going on during my 1980s childhood either—and that those who did know, and lived to tell the tale, are the ones who stole the future. 3 The 1990s: Elite Exploits of the New World Order The early 1990s ushered in an anomalous period of accountability. This was the era after the Iran-Contra criminals were sentenced but before future Trump attorney general William Barr helped pardon them; when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union soon followed; when dissidents like Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, and Václav Havel went from prisons to presidencies; when America had a war and a recession and both of them came to a seemingly definitive end. This was an actual era of hope and change, and it did not last long. At the time, I was too young to appreciate the novelty of this reversal of fortune—or to appreciate that political and economic fortunes could be reversed at all.


pages: 269 words: 95,221

So Me by Graham Norton

Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, Nelson Mandela, sensible shoes, Stephen Fry

After the show we very rarely hear about any fallout, but I did once bump into the sister of a woman who had told a story on the show, and she told me about its tragic consequences. I remember meeting her because it was such an extraordinary day. I was supposed to be introducing some acts at a big concert in Trafalgar Square for Nelson Mandela. I was backstage with Richard E. Grant, chatting about nothing in particular, when we noticed a huddled group heading for a Portakabin dressing room. ‘There’s Nelson,’ declared Richard. ‘Follow me!’ I trotted behind him towards the little cabin that contained the world’s favourite leader. A word with the large South African lady with the clipboard outside and suddenly we were escorted in.


Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health by Laurie Garrett

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biofilm, clean water, collective bargaining, contact tracing, desegregation, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, Drosophila, employer provided health coverage, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Induced demand, John Snow's cholera map, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, phenotype, profit motive, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, stem cell, the scientific method, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

The new leader changed his own name from Joseph to Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga, or “the all-conquering warrior who triumphs over all obstacles.” The nationalistic veneer fooled many pan-Africanists, who thought Mobutu the equal of such contemporaries on the continent as Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere. Prophetically, on his cancer deathbed in 1961, the Algerian intellectual Franz Fanon warned, “Our mistake is to have believed that the [Western] enemy had lost his combativeness and his harmfulness. If Lumumba is in the way, Lumumba disappears….

Uganda and Rwanda had switched their allegiances, supporting Tutsi dissidents that formerly were part of the Kabila alliance. Zimbabwe sent military “advisers” to Kinshasa. Namibia flew in twenty-one tons of military equipment, also backing Kabila. Water and electricity for Kinshasa were cut off by rebels. From South Africa President Nelson Mandela pleaded for a peaceful resolution. He was ignored. By September 1998 troops from at least five African countries were on the ground in DROC, fighting alongside either the Kabila government’s soldiers or rebel forces. The entire east of the country was under rebel/Rwanda/Uganda control. By October it seemed that, thanks to foreign troops, Kabila had driven the rebels back to the far east and maintained control.

We are fortunate to have very qualified help in South Africa.” Prior to 1994 South Africa was cut off from its African neighbors, who opposed the nation’s apartheid policies, which separated the races and gave the white minority population virtually absolute control over every facet of the society. But with the election of Nelson Mandela to the presidency and elimination of all apartheid policies South Africa has become the darling of the continent, and the number one destination for young fortune seekers from every corner of Africa. “The old borders are colonial,” Dr. Neil Cameron, secretary-general of communicable diseases for South Africa, explained.


pages: 879 words: 233,093

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

A Christian parent at the close of the first millennium AD might look into the eyes of a newborn for clues as to whether the devil lurked somewhere deep inside, ready to possess them. Today, at the beginning of the third millennium AD, a parent is more likely to scrutinize a child’s inner being for signs of his or her inherent good nature and sociability. That’s not to say that parents expect their children to grow up to be a Mahatma Gandhi or a Nelson Mandela or a Martin Luther King, Jr. Only that they expect them to be more like them than, say, an Adolf Hitler or a Joseph Stalin. All of which points to the fact that while most human beings are neither saints nor monsters, we expect pro-social behavior rather than antisocial behavior of one another.

Freedom is never a solitary affair, as the rationalists contend—John Wayne alone in the frontier—but a deeply communal experience. We are only really free when we come to trust one another and allow ourselves to be open to sharing each other’s struggle to be and flourish. Trust, in turn, opens up the possibility of extending empathetic consciousness into new more intimate domains. Nelson Mandela is a good case study of the embodied sense of freedom. In the more than twenty-three years he was imprisoned, often in solitary confinement, he chose to befriend his jailers. He reached out to them as unique individuals with their own personal struggles. Rather than attempting to be invulnerable and stoic, he chose to be humane.


pages: 283 words: 98,673

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer

Bill Atkinson, Joan Didion, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, summit fever

Camped beside us at Base Camp was a twenty-five-year-old Norwegian climber named Petter Neby, who announced his intention to make a solo ascent of the Southwest Face,* one of the peak’s most dangerous and technically demanding routes—despite the fact that his Himalayan experience was limited to two ascents of neighboring Island Peak, a 20,274-foot bump on a subsidiary ridge of Lhotse involving nothing more technical than vigorous walking. And then there were the South Africans. Sponsored by a major newspaper, the Johannesburg Sunday Times, their team had inspired effusive national pride and had received a personal blessing from President Nelson Mandela prior to their departure. They were the first South African expedition ever to be granted a permit to climb Everest, a mixed-race group that aspired to put the first black person on the summit. Their leader was Ian Woodall, thirty-nine, a loquacious, mouselike man who relished telling anecdotes about his brave exploits as a military commando behind enemy lines during South Africa’s long, brutal conflict with Angola in the 1980s.


pages: 319 words: 95,854

You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity by Robert Lane Greene

anti-communist, British Empire, centre right, discovery of DNA, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, illegal immigration, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Parag Khanna, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Steven Pinker, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

South Africa’s Constitutional Court, in Pretoria, abounds in symbolism. In an unhappier, earlier era, it was a detention facility. It has the distinction of holding, at different times, two of the world’s most famously righteous freedom fighters: Mahatma Gandhi was held there by British authorities in the early twentieth century, and Nelson Mandela would be locked up there half a century later. Today, South Africa’s Constitutional Court is a symbol of reconciliation and justice. Some of the old brickwork has been kept as a reminder of what the building once was. But the rest is new. The ceiling is designed to evoke an outdoor setting beneath trees, making semiliteral a traditional African concept: “justice under the tree” is dispensed by elders in traditional communal gatherings.


pages: 317 words: 100,414

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive load, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, drone strike, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, forward guidance, Freestyle chess, fundamental attribution error, germ theory of disease, hindsight bias, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index fund, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, operational security, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, tail risk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

But if you are constantly thinking the question is “Will he get his visa?” your mental playing field is tilted in one direction and you may unwittingly slide into confirmation bias: “This is South Africa! Black government officials suffered under apartheid. Of course they will give a visa to Tibet’s own Nelson Mandela.” To check that tendency, turn the question on its head and ask, “Will the South African government deny the Dalai Lama for six months?” That tiny wording change encourages you to lean in the opposite direction and look for reasons why it would deny the visa—a desire not to anger its biggest trading partner being a rather big one.


pages: 334 words: 98,950

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

With no tariffs against American imports, disappearing subsidies and shrivelling government procurement programmes, compounded by a flood of lawsuits, Soares Tecnologia was in a dire state when Paulo – may his soul rest in peace – had a massive stroke and died in 2035. As a result, Luiz was forced to quit his MBA course at the Singapore campus of INSEAD, the French business school (which, by that time, was considered to be better than the original campus in Fontainebleau), break up with Miriam, his half-Xhosa/half-Uzbek girlfriend (a distant cousin of Nelson Mandela on her Xhosa side), and return to Brazil to take over the family firm at the age of 27. Things have not improved much since Luiz took over. True, he has successfully fought off several patent suits. But if he loses even one of the three that are still pending (none of them is looking hopeful), he will face ruin.


pages: 329 words: 102,469

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, centre right, clean water, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Peace of Westphalia, postnationalism / post nation state, Project for a New American Century, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

But there is no finite stock of terrorists to be eliminated. People are not born terrorists, as they are born English, Chinese, or Creek Indians. They become terrorists in specific political and personal circumstances, and might cease to be terrorists when those circumstances change. At one point in his career, Nelson Mandela was arguably, by the State Department’s definition, a terrorist. If you kill ten terrorists, without changing the political circumstances, they can become martyrs for their own community and give birth to a hundred more. Terror is a means, not an end—except for a few psychopaths. To be sure, even for non-psychopaths, terrorism can, with time, become a way of life, and of supposedly honorable death.


Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

And so, they worked quickly to wire their first community. Our car was now bumping to a stop outside one of these first-to-be-wired villages, Kofihuikrom. We got out and inspected the small, fenced-in array of solar panels and then walked to the most prominent building in the settlement, a cement-block clinic with a big poster on one wall showing Nelson Mandela talking about tuberculosis. The clinic’s director was there to shake our hands. “I always had to store vaccines in different villages—in a different district,” he said. “No refrigerator. Now—now I can make ice packs for people. When I came here, we were using flashlights to see patients. That had to stop.


pages: 417 words: 103,458

The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions by David Robson

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, classic study, cognitive bias, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, deep learning, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, fake news, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, post-truth, price anchoring, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Besides reducing bias, that’s also thought to be essential for creativity; tolerance of ambiguity is linked to entrepreneurial innovation, for instance.43 Given the effort involved, no one would advise that you learn a language solely to improve your reasoning – but if you already speak one or have been tempted to resuscitate a language you left behind at school, then the foreign language effect could be one additional strategy to regulate your emotions and improve your decision making. If nothing else, you might consider the way it influences your professional relationships with international colleagues; the language you use could determine whether they are swayed by the emotions behind the statement or the facts. As Nelson Mandela once said: ‘If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.’ One of the most exciting implications of the research on emotional awareness and reflective thinking is that it may finally offer a way to resolve the ‘the curse of expertise’.


pages: 347 words: 99,317

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

With no tariffs against American imports, disappearing subsidies and shrivelling government procurement programmes, compounded by a flood of lawsuits, Soares Tecnologia was in a dire state when Paulo – may his soul rest in peace – had a massive stroke and died in 2035. As a result, Luiz was forced to quit his MBA course at the Singapore campus of INSEAD, the French business school (which, by that time, was considered to be better than the original campus in Fontainebleau), break up with Miriam, his half-Xhosa/half-Uzbek girlfriend (a distant cousin of Nelson Mandela on her Xhosa side), and return to Brazil to take over the family firm at the age of 27. Things have not improved much since Luiz took over. True, he has successfully fought off several patent suits. But if he loses even one of the three that are still pending (none of them is looking hopeful), he will face ruin.


pages: 302 words: 97,076

The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War by Tim Butcher

Bletchley Park, centre right, colonial rule, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Scramble for Africa, trade route, urban sprawl, éminence grise

After crossing the mountain into safe territory we drove through the small hours to reach a hotel down on the Croatian coast, where I fell into a delicious sleep. When I woke I turned on the television to witness an event of great significance to the country I now call home: South Africa’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. It was a moment made magical by Nelson Mandela’s grand gesture of forgiveness. Rugby had long been associated with South Africa’s white community, the dominant minority that had so cruelly exploited the black majority, yet there was Mandela willing on the Springboks, even wearing a Springbok shirt. It was a rare but inspiring example of past hatreds being buried, people looking to tomorrow and letting go of yesterday, breaking the cycle of victimhood and vengeance.


Fodor's Dordogne & the Best of Southwest France With Paris by Fodor's Travel Publications Inc.

call centre, carbon tax, flag carrier, glass ceiling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, haute cuisine, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, subprime mortgage crisis, three-masted sailing ship, urban planning, young professional

CAPTIVATED BY CARLA Lucky for Sarkozy his best asset may be his popular wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy—the supermodel-turned-singer-turned–demure First Dame, whose every move is slavishly tracked by French magazines. The former bad girl has made headlines as much for her turns in the spotlight (performing for Nelson Mandela; signing on for a part in a Woody Allen film) as for her philanthropy (she’s an anti-AIDS ambassador; she has her own charitable foundation). The Italian-born Carla B holds considerable influence over her lovesick husband, and isn’t afraid to wield it. SIZING UP Despite a diet dripping in butter and fat, the French are among the world’s thinnest people, with one of the world’s longest life expectancies to boot.


pages: 299 words: 19,560

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

But 170 Utopia Reconsidered such attempted revisionism had been decisively refuted, especially in Mary Lefkowitz’s superb Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (1996). Meanwhile, in a throwback to that skepticism about Western science, South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki (born in 1942), the successor to Nelson Mandela and the nation’s second black president, set back his country’s response to its widespread AIDS epidemic during his administration. Mbeki repeatedly questioned what was the scientific consensus on the causes and treatment of AIDS, condemning these as remnants of Western colonial oppression, and simultaneously insisted on the use instead of traditional African medical remedies.


Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, colonial rule, dark matter, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global pandemic, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, placebo effect, social distancing, trade route, urban renewal

From that apogee, a long process of decolonisation would break up those empires and liberate their colonies. But 1918 also saw one of the last battles in one of the last colonial wars–the American Indian Wars, in which the European settlers of North America fought, and ultimately defeated, its indigenous peoples. Future heads of state Nicolae Ceau¸sescu and Nelson Mandela were born in 1918, as was the future dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the film director Ingmar Bergman and the actress Rita Hayworth. Max Planck won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum theory, while Fritz Haber won the chemistry prize for inventing a way of producing ammonia, which is important in the manufacture of fertilisers and explosives (the Nobel committees decided not to award prizes in medicine, literature or peace that year).


pages: 479 words: 102,876

The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich by Daniel Ammann

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, book value, Boycotts of Israel, business intelligence, buy low sell high, energy security, family office, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, peak oil, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, Yom Kippur War

Remarkably, a striking example of this pragmatism was the new democratic government in South Africa. Rich continued to do business with South Africa after the end of apartheid despite all of the anti-Rich rhetoric from the African National Congress, which won the first democratic elections. The new government under Nelson Mandela relied on Rich’s services. “We continued to do oil business with the new government,” Rich told me. “It was completely normal for us to continue the business. We think in the long term.” SURPRISING SERVICES How Rich Helped Israel and the USA sraeli tourist Anita Griffel was spending the weekend of October 5–6, 1985, in the Sinai Peninsula together with her five-year-old daughter and a couple of friends.


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

It grew from decades of work by thousands of African Americans and their allies, each doing the dangerous and difficult work of standing up for change. Rosa Parks was not a lone heroine who simply decided to stay in her seat one evening. She was a deeply committed civil rights worker whose decision that night was taken in close collaboration with a network of experienced female activists. Nelson Mandela did not single-handedly end apartheid in South Africa. He built on fifty years of struggle in which thousands of people participated and hundreds died. Remember Erik Osmundsen, the CEO who took a corrupt waste collection company and made it a leader in recycling? Whenever he visits my class, he begins by saying that it’s not about him.


pages: 300 words: 99,410

Why the Dutch Are Different: A Journey Into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands: From Amsterdam to Zwarte Piet, the Acclaimed Guide to Travel in Holland by Ben Coates

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, drug harm reduction, Easter island, failed state, financial innovation, glass ceiling, invention of the printing press, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, megacity, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, short selling, spice trade, starchitect, trade route, urban sprawl, work culture

Foreign news outlets expressed amazement at the latest example of crazy Dutch behaviour, while the Dutch media remained firmly in the pro-Piet camp. Soon after the event in Rotterdam, the leading Telegraaf newspaper reported of recent events in South Africa: ‘There have been reactions abroad and in the Netherlands to the death of Nelson Mandela, who died, of all times, on Sinterklaas evening, with Zwarte Piet.’ However, some of the more egregious features of the traditional celebrations had been ditched. In Amsterdam, the mayor refused to ban the annual Sinterklaas parade but conceded that change might be needed, emphasising (as any good Dutchman would) that ‘the first matter of importance is gradualness’.


pages: 335 words: 100,154

Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath by Bill Browder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist lawyer, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Clive Stafford Smith, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Donald Trump, estate planning, fake news, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Ponzi scheme, power law, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon

When Vladimir addressed the MPs in Ottawa, he switched effortlessly between French and English without a hint of a Russian accent. He had shed his accent through years of British schooling, first at high school in London and then at Cambridge University. He was so talented, charismatic, and articulate that whenever I heard him speak it felt like I was listening to a young Nelson Mandela or Václav Havel. As it happened, Vladimir and I had an opportunity to make our case for Magnitsky sanctions against the people responsible for Boris’s murder in Washington on April 30, 2015, a little more than two months after his assassination. We had both been invited to speak at a congressional memorial for Boris that would be held in room 2255 of the Rayburn House Office Building.


Rough Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area by Nick Edwards, Mark Ellwood

1960s counterculture, airport security, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, Day of the Dead, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, period drama, pez dispenser, Port of Oakland, rent control, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, transcontinental railway, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The Black Panthers once held court in West Oakland (see box above), and in 1989, Panthers co-founder Huey Newton was gunned down here in a drug-related revenge attack; later the same year, the double-decker I-880 freeway that divided the neighborhood from the rest of the city collapsed in on itself during an earthquake, killing dozens of commuters. Local AfricanAmerican leaders successfully resisted government plans to rebuild that concrete eyesore; the broad, street-level Nelson Mandela Parkway has replaced it, thereby removing the physical justification for the “other side of the freeway” stigma once linked to the place. Now the neighborhood is a magnet for artists and skate punks from across the Bay, who revel in its dirtcheap rents and open spaces – indicating that the first signs of its surprisingly tardy gentrification are finally afoot.

Magnes Museum ................................... 310 Justin Herman Plaza....... 61 Kesey, Ken.................... 133 King Ridge-Meyers Grade ................................... 368 kitesurfing...................... 268 435 i n de x | Miwok tribe.................... 391 mobile phones................. 43 money.............................. 41 Montara Lighthouse...... 341 Monte Rio...................... 387 Montgomery Block.......... 58 Mooney, Tom................. 399 Morcom Amphitheater of Roses.......................... 298 Mormon Temple............ 297 Morrison Reading Room ................................... 306 Moscone, George.......... 125 Moss Beach.................. 341 motor sports.................. 275 Mount Diablo................. 320 Mount Livermore........... 358 Mount St Helena........... 376 Mount Tamalpais........... 356 mountain biking............. 268 Mountain View Cemetery ................................... 298 movies................. 232–234, 412–420 Muir Beach.................... 355 Muir Woods National Monument.................. 356 Muir, John...................... 287 MUNI............................... 26 Municipal Rose Garden ................................... 337 Murphy Windmill........... 147 Musée Méchanique.... 12, 84 Museo Italo-Americano....90 Museum of Paleontology ................................... 306 Music Concourse.......... 144 music, live see “live music” N 436 Napa.............................. 371 Napa County Historical Society........................ 371 Napa Firefighters Museum ................................... 373 Napa Valley.......... 369–378 Napa Valley Wine Library ................................... 374 Napa Valley wineries..... 372 National AIDS Memorial Grove.......................... 144 National Institute of Art and Disabilities.................. 315 National Shrine of St Francis..................... 72 Nelson Mandela Parkway ................................... 296 Neptune Society Columbarium.............. 139 Newsome, Gavin........... 404 newspapers..................... 33 Newton, Huey................ 296 Nickelodeon.................. 131 nightlife........................... 16 East Bay............................ 322 Marin County.................... 364 Palo Alto............................ 332 San Francisco................... 224 San Jose........................... 339 Wine Country........... 377, 384, 388 Nike Missile Site............ 352 Nob Hill............................ 79 Noe Valley...................... 127 North Bay...................... 316 North Beach............. 69–74 North Beach and the hills. ..................................... 69 North Beach Museum..... 73 North Berkeley.............. 309 North Oakland............... 298 northeast waterfront........ 78 northern waterfront .............................. 81–98 northern waterfront and Pacific Heights...... 82–83 Northside....................... 310 Norton, Joshua................ 53 O O’Neill, Eugene.............. 319 Oakland................ 288–301 Oakland......................... 289 Oakland, downtown..... 291 Oakland Airport............. 287 Oakland Ice Center...... 270, 293 Oakland Museum.......... 294 Oakland Zoo.................. 298 Oakville.......................... 374 Oakville Grade............... 368 Ocean Beach................. 148 Ocean Shore Railroad Depot.......................... 340 Octagon Museum............ 91 Ohlone tribe................... 391 Old Faithful Geyser....... 375 Old Mint......................... 105 Old St Hilary’s Church ................................... 358 Old St Mary’s Church...... 66 Olema............................ 360 opera............................. 227 Orinda............................ 318 P Pacific Avenue................. 63 Pacific Coast Stock Exchange...................... 57 Pacific Film Archive....... 307 Pacific Heights......... 92–94 Pacific Heights and the northern waterfront. ............................... 82–83 Pacific Heritage Museum ..................................... 58 Pacifica.......................... 340 Painted Ladies, the........ 14, 134 Palace Hotel.................. 102 Palace of Fine Arts.......... 90 Palo Alto........................ 329 Palomarin Trailhead....... 356 Pan Toll Road................ 357 Panhandle..................... 130 Panoramic Highway...... 355 Paradise Beach............. 358 Paramount Theatre......... 16, 292 Paramount’s Great America ................................... 338 party buses.................... 224 Peace Pagoda............... 136 Peninsula, the...... 326–345 Peninsula, the............... 327 People’s Park................ 307 Peralta Adobe................ 335 Performance and Design, Museum of................. 115 performing arts and film ........................... 227–234 Pescadero..................... 344 Petrified Forest.............. 376 Pez Museum................. 326 Phelan Mansion............... 92 phones............................. 42 Piedmont Avenue.......... 298 Pillar Point..................... 341 Pink Triangle Park.......... 124 Pioneer Park.................... 74 Pixar.............................. 296 Plaza de Cesar Chavez ................................... 335 Point Bonita Lighthouse ................................... 352 Point Reyes Bird Observatory................ 356 Point Reyes National Seashore.................... 360 Point Reyes Station....... 360 Point Richmond............. 315 Polk Gulch..................... 109 Port Costa..................... 316 Port View Park............... 295 Portsmouth Square......... 64 postal services................ 40 Potrero Hill..................... 124 Power Exchange........... 111 Precita Eyes Mural Arts Center......................... 123 Preservation Park.......... 292 Presidio Visitor Center..... 95 Presidio, the............. 94–97 Princeton-by-the-Sea.... 341 Pumpkin Festival........... 343 Q Quarry Beach................ 359 Queen Wilhelmina Tulip Garden........................ 147 Safari West.................... 383 Sailboat House.............. 294 sake tasting................... 311 sales tax.......................... 37 Samuel Taylor State Park ................................... 360 San Anselmo................. 359 San Augustín................. 392 San Francisco Art Institute ..................................... 77 San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery .................................... 115 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art................... 14 San Francisco National Cemetery...................... 94 San Francisco Public Library......................... 113 San Francisco State University.................... 148 San Francisco Theological Seminary..................... 359 San Francisco Zeum..... 104 San Francisco Zoo........ 148 San Gregorio beaches ................................... 343 San Jose............... 333–339 San Jose....................... 334 San Jose Museum of Art ................................... 335 San Jose Repertory Theater....................... 336 San Mateo..................... 327 San Pedro Point............ 340 San Pedro Square......... 335 San Quentin State Prison ................................... 359 San Rafael..................... 361 Sanchez Adobe............. 340 Santa Clara.................... 338 Santa Rosa.................... 382 Sather Gate................... 306 Sausalito........................ 353 Sea Cliff......................... 141 Sea Horse/Friendly Acres Ranch......................... 341 accessories, shoes, and jewelry............................ 248 art galleries....................... 260 books........................ 243, 308 casualwear........................ 250 delis and groceries............ 255 department stores and malls . ..................................... 247 designer clothing.............. 251 East Bay............................ 324 farmers’ markets........ 62, 257, 295 fashion.............................. 248 food and drink................... 255 gifts and oddities.............. 261 health and beauty............. 258 music................................. 258 shopping streets............... 244 specialty stores................. 260 tea, coffee, and spices..... 256 vintage clothes and thrift stores............................. 253 wines and spirits............... 257 Shoreline Highway........ 354 Sierra Club.................... 319 Silicon Valley................. 330 Silverado Museum........ 374 Sir Francis Drake Boulevard ................................... 359 Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.................. 126 Six Flags Discovery Kingdom..................... 318 skateboarding................ 269 Skyline Boulevard.......... 340 Skywalker Ranch........... 362 Snoopy’s Home Ice . .... 383 soccer............................ 275 Society of California Pioneers...................... 105 SoFA (San Jose)............ 336 Solano Avenue.............. 309 SoMa (South of Market) ............................. 99–109 SoMa, the Tenderloin, and Civic Center....... 100–101 Sonoma......................... 380 Sonoma State Historic Park ................................... 380 Sonoma Valley............. 378 | radio................................ 33 Ramona Street.............. 329 Red Rocks nudist beach ................................... 355 Redwood Forest Theater ................................... 387 restaurants, see “eating” Rexroth, Kenneth.......... 132 Richardson, William....... 394 Richmond (East Bay)..... 315 Richmond Museum of History........................ 315 Richmond, the..... 138–140 Richmond, Golden Gate Park, and the Sunset. ................................... 138 Rincon Center............... 102 Rivera, Diego................... 74 Robert Crown Memorial Beach......................... 295 Robert Louis Stevenson Park............................ 376 Robert Sibley Regional Preserve...................... 299 Robson-Harrington Park ................................... 359 rock climbing................. 266 Rockridge...................... 299 Rodeo Beach................ 353 Rodeo Lagoon............... 353 Rodin, Auguste.............. 139 Rolling Stones............... 321 Rosicrucian Museum..... 337 Rowell House................ 310 S Seal Rock...................... 142 Seale, Bobby................. 296 senior travelers................ 43 Seventh Street (Oakland) ................................... 295 sex industry................... 111 SFMOMA...................14, 89 Shakespeare Garden..... 147 Sharpsteen Museum and Sam Brannan Cottage ................................... 375 shopping i n de x R running.......................... 266 Russian Hill...................... 77 Russian River Blues Festival....................... 387 Russian River Valley ........................... 384–388 Russian River Valley wineries...................... 386 437 i n de x | Sonoma Valley wineries ................................... 380 Sony Metreon................ 103 South Hall, UC Berkeley ................................... 306 South of Market, see “SoMa” sports and outdoor activities............ 264–276 Spreckels Mansion.......... 92 Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley ................................... 305 St Helena....................... 374 St Patrick’s Catholic Church........................ 106 St Paul’s Episcopal Church ................................... 317 Stanford Linear Accelerator ................................... 332 Stanford University ........................... 329–332 State Capitol, first......... 317 Steep Ravine................. 355 Stein, Gertrude.............. 290 Stern Grove................... 148 Stinson Beach............... 355 Stockton Street............... 67 Stow Lake..................... 147 Strauss, Levi.................. 122 Strybing Arboretum....... 147 Summer of Love............ 133 Sunset, the.................... 148 Sunset, Richmond, and Golden Gate Park . ... 138 surfing............................ 268 Sutro Baths................... 142 Sutro, Adolph................ 141 Sweeney Ridge............. 340 swimming...................... 267 Symbionese Liberation Army........................... 290 T 438 Takara Sake Tasting Room ................................... 311 Tank Hill......................... 127 Tao House..................... 319 taquerias.......................... 13 taxis................................. 28 Tech Museum of Innovation ................................... 335 Telegraph Avenue.......... 307 Telegraph Hill................... 74 telephones....................... 42 television......................... 33 Temelpa Trail................. 357 Temple Emanu-El.......... 139 Tenderloin, the..... 109–111 Tenderloin, SoMa, and Civic Center, the. ........................... 100–101 Tennessee Valley........... 354 tennis............................. 269 theater.................. 229–231 Theater District................ 54 Tiburon.......................... 357 Tilden Park.................... 310 Tomales Point................ 361 tour companies in San Francisco...................... 32 tourist offices................... 45 trains to San Francisco....21 Transamerica Pyramid 58 travel agents.................... 23 travel essentials............... 36 travelers’ checks............. 41 Tribune Tower................ 292 Triton Museum of Art..... 338 tule elk........................... 361 Twin Peaks.................... 126 U UC Berkeley Art Museum ................................... 307 UC Theatre.................... 307 Union Square.................. 49 Union Square.................. 52 Union Street.................... 91 United Nations Plaza..... 112 University Avenue (Palo Alto)............................ 328 University Avenue (Berkeley).................... 310 University of California (Berkeley).......... 304–307 US Mint......................... 132 USS Potomac................ 295 V Vaillancourt Fountain....... 61 Valencia Street.............. 122 Vallejo Naval & Historical Museum...................... 318 Vallejo............................ 318 Venice Beach................. 341 Veterans Building.......... 115 Veterans Memorial Beach ................................... 387 Victorian architecture...... 93 visas................................ 37 Volcanic Witch Project.... 299 W walking tours................... 31 War Memorial Opera House ................................... 115 Warren Billings.............. 399 Washington Square......... 73 Wave Organ..................... 91 Waverly Place temples.... 66 websites.......................... 46 Wells Fargo History Museum........................ 56 West Berkeley............... 310 West Oakland................ 295 West Portal.................... 152 Western Addition........... 135 Westfield San Francisco Center......................... 105 whale watching............. 270 Wildcat Beach............... 356 Winchester Mystery House ................................... 337 windsurfing.................... 268 Wine Country................ 11, 365–388 Wine Country................ 366 Wine Train...................... 368 wineries.........372, 380, 386 wire transfers................... 41 Wolf House.................... 381 Women’s Building.......... 122 Woodside...................... 328 Wright, Frank Lloyd....... 362 Y Yahoo!............................


pages: 319 words: 105,949

Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, computer age, dark matter, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Joan Didion, John Harrison: Longitude, Louis Blériot, Maui Hawaii, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, the built environment, transcontinental railway, Year of Magical Thinking

Point Reyes is the name of a lighthouse on the Northern California coast; a beacon near it, known by the same name, features on arrivals in San Francisco. On flights over India, we may fly over the beacon of Delhi, and like so many Taj Mahal–bound travelers below, our next stop is Agra. Robben Island, off Cape Town, where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated, was a prison even in the seventeenth century. It’s home, too, to a beacon of the same name, which appears on charts for Cape Town’s airport, and forms part of an often-used arrival pattern. I have a Canadian friend from a small town in interior British Columbia. When I first asked where she was from, she laughed and shook her head and said I would not know it; it was a tiny town where they didn’t close the school unless the temperature was colder than minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

China reversed its economic model, creating a new form of hybrid capitalism and pulling more than half a billion people out of poverty. The European Union was created. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect, integrating the United States, Canada, and Mexico into what is now the world’s largest free trade zone. Apartheid ended and Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa. While I was in college, the world was also newly coming online. The World Wide Web was launched to the public, along with the web browser, the search engine, and e-commerce. Amazon was incorporated while I was driving to a training site for my first job out of college.


pages: 372 words: 109,536

The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money by Frederik Obermaier

air gap, banking crisis, blood diamond, book value, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, family office, Global Witness, high net worth, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, mega-rich, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, out of africa, race to the bottom, vertical integration, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

There was a military coup, and then another one. Ultimately, in the first somewhat democratic elections in the country’s history, a man named Alpha Condé was elected. He’d left Guinea when it was still under French rule, studied law in Paris and lectured at the Sorbonne. When he entered office, Alpha Condé pledged to be the Nelson Mandela of Guinea. One of his first official tasks was to review the Simandou deal, the fishiness of which had reached even the furthest-flung corners. The Sudanese billionaire Mo Ibrahim summed it up at an African economic conference at the time: ‘Are the Guineans who did that deal idiots, or criminals, or both?’


pages: 459 words: 109,490

Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible by Stephen Braun, Douglas Farah

air freight, airport security, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, plutocrats, private military company, Timothy McVeigh

He was trying to get planes and moving them around. It seemed like he didn’t really have time to sleep.” South Africa was attractive for several reasons. He could remain relatively close to the Great Lakes region, where he was working, and to his operations in Angola. Despite the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela, the white-dominated security forces continued to send weapons to UNITA. And South Africa offered the best opportunities for legitimate business, something Bout correctly sensed could be a lucrative, if not dominant, part of his growing empire. No other African capital could match Johannesburg’s urban charm and sophistication.


pages: 322 words: 107,576

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

Asperger Syndrome, classic study, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, food desert, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, offshore financial centre, p-value, placebo effect, public intellectual, publication bias, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sugar pill, systematic bias, the scientific method, urban planning

He has been arrested and imprisoned under South Africa’s violent, brutal white regime, with all that entailed. He is also gay, and HIV-positive, and he refused to take anti-retroviral medication until it was widely available to all on the public health system, even when he was dying of AIDS, even when he was personally implored to save himself by Nelson Mandela, a public supporter of anti-retroviral medication and Achmat’s work. And now, at last, we come to the lowest point of this whole story, not merely for Matthias Rath’s movement, but for the alternative therapy movement around the world as a whole. In 2007, with a huge public flourish, to great media coverage, Rath’s former employee Anthony Brink filed a formal complaint against Zackie Achmat, the head of the TAC.


pages: 376 words: 110,796

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight by Chris Dubbs, Emeline Paat-dahlstrom, Charles D. Walker

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Dennis Tito, desegregation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Elon Musk, high net worth, Iridium satellite, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, private spaceflight, restrictive zoning, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, technoutopianism, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, young professional

The HIV study addressed an issue particularly important to Africa, where the disease has been devastating. Shuttleworth was the first person from Africa to fly in space, and he saw himself as an unofficial representative of his country and the continent. His flight aroused a national pride, and he would conduct in-flight phone calls with South African president Thabo Mbeki and former president Nelson Mandela, but he was also aware of how his experience could inspire all of Africa. When BBC News Online interviewed him from space, Shuttleworth stressed how important it was for Africa to embrace its future and create a sense of excitement for the people. "One of the things I hoped to do by fulfilling my own dream was to do it in a way that might reach out to particularly children and learners in Africa and show them that dreams can come true, and that's a very powerful thought.


pages: 367 words: 108,689

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis by David Boyle

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Goodhart's law, housing crisis, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mega-rich, Money creation, mortgage debt, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Ocado, Occupy movement, off grid, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pensions crisis, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, precariat, quantitative easing, school choice, scientific management, Slavoj Žižek, social intelligence, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, work culture , working poor

Boléat’s deputy Adrian Coles, soon to take over from him, had a new version of the estate-agent joke — that people had mortgages they couldn’t afford, houses they couldn’t sell and partners they couldn’t stand. But fast-forward a few years, to 1994, and there was a new prime minister, the economy had begun to pick up again, and demutualization seeped back on to the financial pages. April that year was a tumultuous month: the Rwandan genocide began, the multiple murder Fred West was arrested, and Nelson Mandela was elected South African president. Late in the evening of 20 April, Adrian Coles got a call tipping him off that the following morning Lloyds Bank would pay £1.8 billion for the Cheltenham & Gloucester Building Society and its million members. That took him aback in itself — a demutualization followed by an acquisition — but what really shocked him was the scale of the bid.


pages: 477 words: 106,069

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker

butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, Douglas Hofstadter, feminist movement, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, index card, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, language acquisition, lolcat, McMansion, meta-analysis, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, profit maximization, quantitative easing, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, short selling, Steven Pinker, the market place, theory of mind, Turing machine

On the other side we have Oxford University Press, most American book publishers, and the many wise guys who have discovered that omitting a serial comma can result in ambiguity:65 Among those interviewed were Merle Haggard’s two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall. This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God. Highlights of Peter Ustinov’s global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector. The absence of a serial comma in a list of phrases can also create garden paths. He enjoyed his farm, conversations with his wife and his horse momentarily calls to mind the famous Mister Ed, and a reader who is unfamiliar with the popular music of the 1970s might well be tripped up by the sentence on the left, stumbling over the mythical duo Nash and Young and the run-on sequence Lake and Palmer and Seals and Crofts: Without the serial comma: With the serial comma: My favorite performers of the 1970s are Simon and Garfunkel, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Seals and Crofts.


pages: 410 words: 106,931

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, power law, precariat, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

American advisors rushed to Moscow to facilitate Russia’s makeover into a liberal democracy; China and India began to open up their economies to trade and investment; new nation states and democracies blossomed across a broad swathe of Europe, Asia and Africa; the enlarged European Union came into being; peace was declared in Northern Ireland; Nelson Mandela ended his long walk to freedom; the Dalai Lama appeared in Apple’s ‘Think Different’ advertisements; and it seemed only a matter of time before Tibet, too, would be free. Over the last two decades, elites in even many formerly socialist countries came to uphold an ideal of cosmopolitan liberalism: the universal commercial society of self-interested rational individuals that was originally advocated in the eighteenth century by such Enlightenment thinkers as Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Voltaire and Kant.


pages: 406 words: 109,794

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, Checklist Manifesto, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deliberate practice, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, functional fixedness, game design, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, knowledge economy, language acquisition, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, messenger bag, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, multi-armed bandit, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, precision agriculture, prediction markets, premature optimization, pre–internet, random walk, randomized controlled trial, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, young professional

He knew he hadn’t done his best with three kids from a previous marriage, but now he could see that he’d been given a second chance to do the right thing with number four. And it was all going according to plan. The boy was already famous by the time he reached Stanford, and soon his father opened up about his importance. His son would have a larger impact than Nelson Mandela, than Gandhi, than Buddha, he insisted. “He has a larger forum than any of them,” he said. “He’s the bridge between the East and the West. There is no limit because he has the guidance. I don’t know yet exactly what form this will take. But he is the Chosen One.” * * * — This second story, you also probably know.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

In this part, we have discussed what economics is (a study of the economy), what the economy is, how our economy has become what it is today, how there are many different ways of studying it and who the main economic actors are. Having become ‘used to’ economics, let us now discuss how we can ‘use’ it to understand the real world economy. ‘It always seems impossible until it is done.’ NELSON MANDELA How to ‘Use’ Economics? My aim in this book has been to show the reader how to think, not what to think, about the economy. We have covered many topics, and I don’t expect my readers to remember all – or even most – of them. But there are a few important things to keep in mind when you are ‘using’ economics (this is, after all, a User’s Guide).


pages: 371 words: 109,320

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

Hastings’s account is a rare glimpse of how a network of extremely wealthy individuals operated in the old ‘vertical’ world in which information was passed down from on high. His proprietor had strong views on Europe, and the Conservative Party, and was an ‘energetic supporter of the Israeli cause against that of the Palestinians’. And then there was South Africa, which had the almost miraculous good fortune of having a leader as calm and enlightened as Nelson Mandela to oversee its transition from the evils of apartheid to a black-majority society. Black had other ideas – which, in turn, came from John Aspinall, a rakish multi-millionaire buccaneer who made his riches from running dimly lit upper-class gambling clubs in London. According to Hastings, Aspinall/Black wanted the Telegraph to back Chief Buthelezi, leader of South Africa’s Zulus.


pages: 334 words: 109,882

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol by Holly Glenn Whitaker

BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, fixed income, impulse control, incognito mode, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, medical residency, microaggression, microbiome, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, Rat Park, rent control, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Torches of Freedom, twin studies, WeWork, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game

Real power is the ability to be in your skin, to know who you are, to know you will always be okay. Real power comes from your gut and your heart and your courage and your bravery and your love. Real power can never be taken away from you and never lost once it’s found. It’s the kind of power that people like Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks and the Dalai Lama all had or have—a quality within unaffected by outer circumstances, an eternal flame that cannot be touched. I repeat Yogi Bhajan’s words here: You are very powerful, provided you know how powerful you are. I imagine you’re wondering where you even begin to acquire this kind of power.


pages: 370 words: 111,129

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, British Empire, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate raider, deindustrialization, European colonialism, global village, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Parkinson's law, trade route

The power of non-violence rests in being able to say, ‘to show you that you are wrong, I punish myself’. But that has little effect on those who are not interested in whether they are wrong and are already seeking to punish you whether you disagree with them or not. For them your willingness to undergo punishment is the most convenient means of victory. No wonder Nelson Mandela, who wrote that Gandhi had ‘always’ been ‘a great source of inspiration’, explicitly disavowed non-violence as useless in his struggle against the ruthless apartheid regime. On this subject Gandhi sounds frighteningly unrealistic: ‘The willing sacrifice of the innocent is the most powerful answer to insolent tyranny that has yet been conceived by God or man.


pages: 395 words: 103,437

Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officer's Insights Into North Korea's Enigmatic Young Dictator by Jung H. Pak

anti-communist, Boeing 747, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cryptocurrency, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, new economy, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment

“He left without getting any exam results at all. He was much more interested in football and basketball than lessons,” said Micaelo. Perhaps he just wasn’t interested in the school’s curriculum, which included coursework in Swiss history since 1291 and the evolution of democracy there, civil rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela, and human rights. But the competitiveness he lacked in the classroom showed up in spades on the basketball court. “He was very explosive,” one friend said. “He could make things happen. He was the playmaker.” Another friend said Jong Un was tough and fast: “He hated to lose. Winning was very important.”


pages: 341 words: 107,933

The Dealmaker: Lessons From a Life in Private Equity by Guy Hands

Airbus A320, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deal flow, Etonian, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flag carrier, high net worth, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, proprietary trading, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, traveling salesman

In 1964, Ian Smith, soon to be elected prime minister, was to declare his intention to resist Britain’s demand for majority rule and make a unilateral declaration of independence. ‘I don’t believe in Black majority rule ever in Rhodesia – not in a thousand years,’ Smith said. Both my parents objected to Apartheid. While a student, my mother had heard Nelson Mandela give a speech and was so impressed that she went out of her way to meet him afterwards. She told her parents that she thought he would be a future prime minister of South Africa. Their response was typical of the time – ‘Don’t be so stupid Sally, and keep that sort of thought to yourself.’ As a barrister, my father had a few run-ins with the judiciary over the laws that governed the Black population.


pages: 388 words: 111,099

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

Taylor had been one of the “bastards” singled out by John Major after their rebellion over the Maastricht Treaty in 1993 almost brought down his government. Scottish journalist and later Labour MP Brian Wilson once remarked that calling Taylor by a cuddly name like ‘Teddy’ was “like calling the hound of the Baskervilles ‘Rover’”.2 In the mid-1980s, Taylor said that Nelson Mandela should be shot. (He later said he was joking.) A few years earlier, Glasgow had become the first city in the world to give the African National Congress leader the Freedom of the City. Cook followed Taylor’s rightward political path. He became Scottish spokesman for the Campaign Against Political Correctness, railing against “overpaid salary-justifying busybodies who should go and get a proper job in the real world”.


pages: 872 words: 259,208

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

air freight, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brixton riot, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, congestion charging, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentleman farmer, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, loadsamoney, market design, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open borders, out of africa, Parkinson's law, Piper Alpha, post-war consensus, Red Clydeside, reserve currency, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War

Men trained at Sandhurst, brought up inside the British Empire, turned into corrupt dictators and in the worst case, that of Uganda’s Idi Amin, a monster. Few of those liberal, highly intelligent liberation leaders feted in London by the left during the fifties and sixties turned into great progressive figures back home in Africa – perhaps the only great exception being Nelson Mandela himself. Military coups, the imprisonment of opposition leaders, tribal feuds and famines followed and for all this, the former British rulers must take some responsibility. Did the British scuttle from Africa happen too fast, in a mood of political hysteria and without proper thought for what would follow?

A few days after these events, East Germany announced the opening of the border to the West and joyous Berliners began hacking their wall to pieces. Then the communists fell in Czechoslovakia. Then the Romanian dictator Ceaus¸escu was dragged from power. A few weeks after that, in February 1990, Nelson Mandela, a man she had once denounced as a terrorist, was released to global acclaim. In the middle of all this the Commons had witnessed an event which seemed the opposite of historic. Thatcher had been challenged as leader of the Conservative Party by Sir Anthony Meyer, an obscure, elderly pro-European backbencher much mocked as ‘the stalking donkey’.


pages: 338 words: 112,127

Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight by Margaret Lazarus Dean

affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, company town, Elon Musk, helicopter parent, index card, Joan Didion, Jon Ronson, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, sensible shoes

We watch until we can see only the outlines of the tail fin again, and as Atlantis navigates into its place of honor at the head of the area where the party is to be held, we hear a cheer rising from the crowd gathered there. Once we’ve all piled back into the stagnant, fragrant bus, we sit motionless for a long time. Our driver, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Nelson Mandela, keeps the bus idling in a vain effort to get us some air. Waiting long periods of time in close quarters makes people chatty. The photojournalists strike up conversations. They gossip about others among their number who couldn’t make it to this event. They gossip about layoffs, journalism being another one of the occupations, like space work, in which even the best among them are being laid off in large numbers.


pages: 395 words: 115,753

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America by Jon C. Teaford

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, conceptual framework, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, East Village, edge city, estate planning, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, plutocrats, Potemkin village, rent control, restrictive zoning, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, young professional

“What I want to know is how come it’s always the Cubans that’s shooting the niggers,” asked a local African American. A black former police officer admitted: “The Cu-bans will shoot a nigger faster’n a cracker will.”83 Then, in 1990, the black South African leader and renowned foe of racial apartheid Nelson Mandela visited Miami and ignited a clash that widened the chasm between blacks and Cubans. Mandela had expressed support for Cuban Communist leader Fidel Castro and had personally thanked Castro for his support for the battle against apartheid. This incensed Miami’s Cuban community, and five Cuban American mayors from Dade County, including the mayor of Miami, signed a statement condemning Mandela.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It Divided Nations: Why Global Governance Is Failing, and What We Can Do About It Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future Globalization for Development: Meeting New Challenges The Case for Aid The Economics of Sustainable Development Economic Reform, Trade and Agricultural Development Modelling Economy-wide Reforms Trade Liberalization: Global Economic Implications Open Economies The Future of Agriculture Economic Crisis: Lessons from Brazil Making Race About the Authors IAN GOLDIN is Professor of Globalization and Director of the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford. He was Vice President of the World Bank, Chief Executive of the Development Bank of Southern Africa and an adviser to President Nelson Mandela. You can sign up for email updates here. CHRIS KUTARNA is a Fellow at the Oxford Martin School and an expert on international politics and economics. He was a strategy consultant at the Boston Consulting Group and continues to advise senior executives in Asia, North America and Europe.


pages: 372 words: 115,094

Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War by Ken Adelman

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Haight Ashbury, It's morning again in America, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Sinatra Doctrine, Strategic Defense Initiative, summit fever, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

The arms race is slowing down.” The prize went to Gorbachev alone. The committee never mentioned Ronald Reagan. Previously, the committee had recognized joint contributions, such as Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho for negotiating the end of the Vietnam War (though that turned out poorly) and F. W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela for undertaking a peaceful transition in South Africa (which turned out well). Clearly the end of the Cold War and the termination of Communist rule across Europe—both of which Reagan helped hasten—are grand, historic achievements worthy of a Nobel Prize. Freeing 415 million men, women, and children from totalitarian Communist rule will not dissipate soon, or ever.


pages: 350 words: 112,234

Korea by Simon Winchester

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, life extension, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, union organizing

He was accused of fomenting the trouble in Kwangju, of paying the student leaders and persuading them to demonstrate and riot, and—worst of all, considering that his supposed allegation has since been manifestly proven as the truth—of putting round the story that Chun’s paratroops in Kwangju had mutilated the bodies of women they had killed. The verdict was a foregone conclusion. The martial law tribunal found Kim guilty, and the soldiers sentenced him to death. And so the man about whom the world was largely ignorant came to enjoy, almost overnight, the semi-mythic status of a Nelson Mandela or a Ninoy Aquino—a status, cynics would later say, that bore little relation to the actual character of the man. The realities of global politics intervened, and Kim Dae Jung was not executed. Just before President Chun left for an official tour of the United States in January 1981, the sentence—which the American government had bitterly criticized—was commuted to life imprisonment and then commuted again to twenty years.


pages: 445 words: 114,134

End of the World Blues by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

double helix, haute couture, hydroponic farming, Nelson Mandela

See what you can find out about it.” Still too bald, so Kit added, “And take care of yourself…” The last e-mail Kit opened contained a map showing a tight jumble of streets in the shadow of a new overpass. Layers of history in a muddle of names, as Napier and Maffeking, old generals and battles intersected with Nelson Mandela Drive. Somewhere in that jumble of streets was the bar where Neku was being held. All Kit had to do was find it. He was aware just how absurd that sounded. Clubs and pubs needed to be licenced. A place with live music probably needed a different type of licence again. Someone would have that list.


The Global Citizen: A Guide to Creating an International Life and Career by Elizabeth Kruempelmann

Berlin Wall, business climate, corporate governance, different worldview, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, global village, job satisfaction, Menlo Park, money market fund, Nelson Mandela, young professional

When the voyage ended in Hong Kong, I continued traveling with a group of students and staff on a postvoyage excursion to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and Bangkok, Thailand. During the trip I met and talked with Mother Teresa of Calcutta on the airplane from Ho Chi Minh City to Bangkok; Bishop Desmond Tutu invited the ship- board community to a special mass while we were in South Africa; and some of us attended a rally in honor of Nelson Mandela. The Semester-at-Sea experience not only made me more culturally aware, it made me appreciate what we have in the United States. As an ESL teacher, I try to get to know my students as students as well as people—where they come from, their traditions, and heritage. Semester at Sea has made me a different sort of traveler.


pages: 482 words: 117,962

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, Meera Balarajan

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, conceptual framework, creative destruction, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, life extension, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, open borders, out of africa, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

Consider, for example, the cases of Mohandas Gandhi, Kwame Nkrumah, Ho Chi Minh, or Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf—leaders who spent their young adult years overseas, where they assimilated new ideas that allowed them to later play crucial roles in nation building at home. Viewed collectively, the South African diaspora—in the form of people forced into exile and their children—made important contributions to the anti-apartheid struggle, and many went back in 1994 to support Nelson Mandela's government. Diasporas from many Latin American countries, who initially fled dictatorial regimes, went back following early democratic reform to provide leadership. Through their actions in their adoptive homes, the Jewish and Taiwanese diasporas have helped to sustain Israel and Taiwan politically and in terms of innovation and finance.


pages: 484 words: 120,507

The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel by Nicholas Ostler

barriers to entry, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, precautionary principle, Republic of Letters, Scramble for Africa, statistical model, trade route, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine

Rather, Akkadian as a lingua-franca seems to have been the beneficiary of the founder effect: all these powers (but Egypt) had derived their literacy from the tradition developed in Mesopotamia. Akkadian had been the language of every scribe’s school days, as they learned how to apply its system to their own languages. So, con ve niently, it was taken up for international correspondence. * Nelson Mandela had as a mother tongue Xhosa, practiced law in English, but became notorious for his consummate command of Afrikaans, which he urged his comrades to study, on the “know the enemy” principle: “To wage war, Mr. Mandela told his fellow inmate, Mac Maharaj, ‘you must understand the mind of the opposing commander.


pages: 390 words: 115,769

Healthy at 100: The Scientifically Proven Secrets of the World's Healthiest and Longest-Lived Peoples by John Robbins

caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean water, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, Donald Trump, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, land reform, life extension, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, telemarketer

These are not easy times to uphold ourselves and the greater human possibility, nor to feel confident in our collective future. It saddens me beyond telling that human beings can be so destructive. But I take strength from the reality that as a species we have also produced people like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, and millions of others whose names are not as well known but whose lives have also demonstrated profound generosity, wisdom, and courage. I am thinking, for example, of the hundreds of thousands of people who have worked day in and day out for decades so that we are now within a whisker of forever wiping out the last traces of both smallpox and polio from the face of the earth.


pages: 347 words: 115,173

Chasing the Devil: On Foot Through Africa's Killing Fields by Tim Butcher

barriers to entry, blood diamond, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, Google Earth, Kickstarter, Nelson Mandela, pre–internet, Scramble for Africa, trade route, upwardly mobile

In Sierra Leone, journalists like me were guilty of striving to oversimplify the war, looking always to frame it in terms of government troops versus rebels. We tended to overlook the complex, systemic regression that had taken a country with a capital city once viewed as ‘The Athens of Africa’ and turned it into arguably the world’s poorest country. The regression did not lend itself to easy analysis. Sierra Leone has no iconic figure, no Nelson Mandela nor Patrice Lumumba, and no great symbolic turning point, no Sharpeville Massacre nor Wind of Change speech. Indeed, one of the country’s one-time heroes of the independence era, Siaka Stevens, whose name is still borne by the main street in Freetown leading to the Cotton Tree, blurred two separate identities as he was revered by some as a democrat loved by the people and decried by others as a murderous plunderer.


pages: 379 words: 114,807

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth by Fred Pearce

activist lawyer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Cape to Cairo, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, corporate raider, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, Garrett Hardin, Global Witness, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, out of africa, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, smart cities, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

Whatever the promises to local ministers, he believes the contracts give the farmers the right to grow what they want, to take a five-year tax holiday, not to pay any rent, and to repatriate all their profits. Next up is Mozambique. There is some inauspicious history here. In 1996, an agreement between South African president Nelson Mandela and his Mozambique counterpart Joaquim Chissano gave South African farmers the chance to take up fifty-year leases to farm up to 500,000 acres of old Portuguese cotton farms. The land was in the Lugenda river valley in the country’s least populated, most forested, and most northerly province of Niassa, bordering Tanzania.


pages: 377 words: 115,122

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, emotional labour, game design, hive mind, index card, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, twin studies, Walter Mischel, web application, white flight

I’ve seen Tony Robbins’s infomercials—he claims that there’s always one airing at any given moment—and he strikes me as one of the more extroverted people on earth. But he’s not just any extrovert. He’s the king of self-help, with a client roster that has included President Clinton, Tiger Woods, Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher, Princess Diana, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mother Teresa, Serena Williams, Donna Karan—and 50 million other people. And the self-help industry, into which hundreds of thousands of Americans pour their hearts, souls, and some $11 billion a year, by definition reveals our conception of the ideal self, the one we aspire to become if only we follow the seven principles of this and the three laws of that.


pages: 387 words: 120,092

The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge by Ilan Pappe

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, disinformation, double helix, facts on the ground, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, one-state solution, postnationalism / post nation state, stem cell, Suez canal 1869, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

Since the start of the 1990s, Israel was under heavy attack by the post-Zionists. For some twenty years they enjoyed the halo of being fashionable, of being at one with the times. For all that they claimed we were ugly, they were beautiful. For all that they claimed we were evil, they were good. For all that they portrayed us as South Africa, they portrayed themselves as Nelson Mandela. The post-Zionists’ systematic attacks on the Jewish national home, on the Jewish national movement and against the Jewish people won them global acclaim. Their unconscious cooperation with anti-Semites, old and new, made them the darlings of international academia and the world media … Americans, Europeans, Arabs and Israelis are now being exposed – whether they know it or not – to the enormous gap between the (human) dimensions of Israeli injustice and the (inhuman) intensity of the brutality that surrounds it.


pages: 349 words: 114,038

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

And in the end, after decades of decrying the holocaust that would follow any transfer of power, the Boers lost control of their Narrative, and white South Africans, particularly the business community, experienced an Awakening. They realized that their vision of a thousand years of white rule was a lie. It was bad for business, and it was unpleasant both on the streets, and in global terms. President Frederik Willem de Klerk released Nelson Mandela from 27 years of prison and found a willing negotiation partner. In 1994, after years of violence and terrorism that turned out to be largely sponsored by the state security services themselves, negotiated multiracial elections swept the African National Congress (ANC) into office. Many whites left the country, bitter, and afraid of a retribution that never came.


pages: 405 words: 112,470

Together by Vivek H. Murthy, M.D.

Airbnb, call centre, cognitive bias, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, gentrification, gig economy, income inequality, index card, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, medical residency, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, stem cell, TED Talk, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

Lauderdale, and Carole Ober, “Loneliness Is Associated with Sleep Fragmentation in a Communal Society,” Sleep 34, no. 11 (2011): 1519–26, https://doi.org/10.5665/sleep.1390. 16Hlumelo Siphe Williams, “What Is the Spirit of Ubuntu – and How Can We Have It in Our Lives?,” Global Citizen, October 19, 2018, https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/ubuntu-south-africa-together-nelson-mandela/. 17Luzia C. Heu, Martijn Van Zomeren, and Nina Hansen, “Lonely Alone or Lonely Together? A Cultural-Psychological Examination of Individualism–Collectivism and Loneliness in Five European Countries,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 45, no. 5 (2018): 780–93, https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167218796793. 18Dan Buettner, The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2010). 19Ami Rokach, “The Effect of Gender and Culture on Loneliness: A Mini Review,” Emerging Science Journal 2, no. 2 (April 2018), https://doi.org/10.28991/esj-2018-01128. 20Barry Golding, The Men’s Shed Movement: The Company of Men (Champaign, IL: Common Ground Publishing, 2015). 21Lucia Carragher, “Men’s Sheds in Ireland: Learning through community contexts,” The Netwell Centre School of Health & Science, Dundalk Institute of Technology, February 2013, http://menssheds.ie/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Men%E2%80%99s-Sheds-in-Ireland-National-Survey.pdf. 22Ami Rokach, “The Effect of Gender and Culture on Loneliness: A Mini Review,” Emerging Science Journal 2, no. 2 (April 2018), https://doi.org/10.28991/esj-2018-01128. 23M.


pages: 393 words: 115,178

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins

Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capitalist realism, centre right, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, land reform, market fundamentalism, megacity, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, union organizing

The process had begun when the military got emergency powers to fight the CIA in 1958. Now, the military received equipment and training from the US to engage in fishing, farming, and construction, which increased its economic interests and role around the country.42 In Africa, the US took a different direction. With CIA assistance, white South African authorities arrested Nelson Mandela in 1962. US officials also set the Middle East on a new path, in 1963. Outside Indonesia, the largest Communist Party in the Bandung countries was the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), which had grown in opposition to dictator Abd al-Karim Qasim. The ICP thought of making a bid for revolution—and the Soviets advised against it.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

The massive wave of advertising to children is considered a contributing factor in the epidemic of juvenile obesity, the growth of attention-deficit disorders, and other psychological issues, as well as the rampant sexualization of girls at ever-younger ages.43 In 2010, Alex Bogusky, who was named Adweek’s Creative Director of the Decade in 2009 and called “the Elvis of advertising,” announced he was quitting the industry, in part to protest marketers “spending billions to influence our innocent and defenseless offspring.” Bogusky termed advertising to children a “destructive” practice with no “redeeming value.”44 “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul,” Nelson Mandela once stated, “than the way it treats its children.”45 It is difficult to study the commercial marination of children’s brains and not regard it as child abuse.46 Free Market in Action? The fatal flaw in the catechism is the notion that the commercial entertainment media system is based upon a free market.


pages: 654 words: 120,154

The Firm by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset light, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, book value, borderless world, collective bargaining, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, family office, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, vertical integration, young professional

It became the most celebrated company in the country, with revenues topping $60 billion in 2000. As Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind pointed out in The Smartest Guys in the Room, Enron was beloved by all: “Fortune magazine named it ‘America’s most innovative company’ six years running. Washington luminaries like Henry Kissinger and James Baker were on its lobbying payroll. Nobel Laureate Nelson Mandela came to Houston to receive the Enron Prize. The president of the United States called Enron chairman Kenneth Lay ‘Kenny Boy.’ ”10 Skilling took the McKinsey ethos with him to Enron. A description of him by McLean and Elkind reads like that of a typical McKinseyite: “He could process information and conceptualize new ideas with blazing speed.


pages: 403 words: 125,659

It's Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Easter island, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, foreign exchange controls, Kibera, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, out of africa, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, upwardly mobile, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

A born hack, he always felt at his best when things were on the move, when he had a defined target and a pressing deadline. After the long months of waiting, he felt a surge of adrenalin. I could gauge his gathering excitement in a growing tendency to resort to journalistic cliché. ‘I'm keen to get this monkey off my back,’ he told me. 14 Spilling the Beans ‘It always seems impossible until it is done.’ NELSON MANDELA Headquartered in one of Nairobi's most eccentric buildings – a zebra-striped, twin-pillar folly which bears more than a passing resemblance to a giant liquorice allsort, the Daily Nation is not Kenya's oldest newspaper. It is, however, its largest and its best, flagship of a vibrant media group whose radio studios, television stations and newspapers are sprinkled across Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya.


pages: 288 words: 16,556

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

But even there the system—which was deplored by Mahatma Gandhi and other spiritual leaders—is now declining. The same distaste for castes or their analogues was promoted by Vladimir Lenin in Russia, Kemal Atatürk in Turkey, Yukichi Fukuzawa in Japan, Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong in China, Eva Perón in Argentina, and Nelson Mandela in South Africa. These thought leaders couldn’t be more di erent from each other, but together they provide evidence of a worldwide trend that nds castes or their analogues repugnant. Just as these beliefs represent a trend toward greater social enlightenment, there is a parallel trend toward enlightenment about caste-analogues in the business world.


pages: 396 words: 123,619

Hope for Animals and Their World by Jane Goodall, Thane Maynard, Gail Hudson

carbon footprint, clean water, David Attenborough, Easter island, Google Earth, Maui Hawaii, Nelson Mandela, new economy, out of africa

I’ve even been called “a public nuisance” because my NPR radio broadcasts, Field Notes with Thane Maynard and The 90-Second Naturalist, promote a sense of wonder about nature rather than a sense of gloom. And while I know that we live lives of unprecedented destruction, I am blessed to also know many great people effectively working (and most of them quietly) to save what they can. To me they are like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, carrying on with their miracles that many others believe impossible. It is this same sort of passion that is represented in nearly every effective conservationist I have ever known. While the naysayers stand by wheezing and huffing and puffing about how “this will never work,” or “it’s too late to save this species or habitat,” or “be practical, we have to compromise with the developers,” it is the truly passionate conservationists who never give up.


pages: 353 words: 355

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

That country has gone from seemingly unresolvable guerrilla warfare over apartheid to a functioning democracy that balances the rights of whites and blacks. It is critically important that South Africa's example of embracing democracy spreads to the rest of the continent. South Africa's most prominent political prisoner, Nelson Mandela, became one of the most respected national leaders in the world. Instead of a riot of violent retribution, the country has engaged in a formal process of reconciliation. This is one of the most impressive displays in the world of trying to dissipate violence and hatred through dialogue. Africans have a deep belief in the value of forgiveness.


pages: 476 words: 124,973

The Desert and the Sea: 977 Days Captive on the Somali Pirate Coast by Michael Scott Moore

Albert Einstein, British Empire, clean water, Columbine, drone strike, European colonialism, Filipino sailors, fixed income, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, South China Sea, UNCLOS

I felt ornery enough to fight him, just out of my head enough to leap to my feet and do whatever damage I could, so it took a deliberate act of will to keep myself quiet on the floor and watch to see how far Bashko would let his temper carry him. Violence unprovoked by a physical threat was against the rules for these men, and to test their limit I had to “renew my anonymity,” or remove myself from the equation, mentally, so I could locate a fulcrum point between my temper and my self-control. Near the end of 2013, Nelson Mandela died, and the BBC’s coverage of his funeral lasted several days. The news electrified my guards. He was their hero, an African resistance leader who’d stood up to white supremacy. They sat there with rifles, like jailers, but identified with Mandela, who’d sat in jail. His greatness, of course, consisted in transcending both tribe and race, and the radio coverage led with his remarkable line from an interview after his release from prison in 1990.


pages: 405 words: 121,999

The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World by Paul Morland

active measures, agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, clean water, Corn Laws, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, open immigration, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, sceptred isle, stakhanovite, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

The political institutions continue to bear the mother country’s stamp, as do important symbols like the flag (in Australia and New Zealand) and the head of state (in all three)–in other words, they continue to be predominantly ‘white’ countries. In contrast, the European presence in South Africa never became dominant against the presence of Africans–whether strictly ‘indigenous’ or more recent arrivals from neighbouring territories north of the Limpopo–and so the imprint of Europe has proved less permanent. In the year that Nelson Mandela was born, more than one in five South Africans was white. In the year he died, the figure was less than one in ten. Had the trend gone the other way, it seems unlikely that he would ever have become president of the republic and a numerically bolstered white population would probably have continued to hold on to a monopoly of power for longer.


pages: 531 words: 125,069

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt

AltaVista, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, hygiene hypothesis, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microaggression, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, Wayback Machine

Treating it as such is an interpretive choice, and it is a choice that increases pain and suffering while preventing other, more effective responses, including the Stoic response (cultivating nonreactivity) and the antifragile response suggested by Van Jones: “Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity.” In the quotation that opened this chapter, Nelson Mandela warned us against the danger of demonizing opponents and using violence against them. Like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other advocates of nonviolent resistance, Mandela noted that violent and dehumanizing tactics are self-defeating, closing off the possibility of peaceful resolution.


pages: 471 words: 124,585

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

And it was a company that took full advantage of its impeccable political connections to ride all the way to the top of the bull market. Named by Fortune magazine as America’s Most Innovative Company for six consecutive years (1996-2001), that company was Enron. In November 2001, Alan Greenspan received a prestigious award, adding his name to a roll of honour that included Mikhail Gorbachev, Colin Powell and Nelson Mandela. The award was the Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service. Greenspan had certainly earned his accolade. From February 1995 until June 1999 he had raised US interest rates only once. Traders had begun to speak of the ‘Greenspan put’ because having him at the Fed was like having a ‘put’ option on the stock market (an option but not an obligation to sell stocks at a good price in the future).


pages: 525 words: 116,295

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

History suggests that opposition movements need time to develop, and that the checks and balances that shape an emergent movement ultimately produce a stronger and more capable one, with leaders who are more in tune with the population they intend to inspire. Consider the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa. During its decades of exile from the apartheid state, the organization went through multiple iterations, and the men who would go on to become South African presidents (Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma) all had time to build their reputations, credentials and networks while honing their operational skills. Likewise with Lech Walesa and his Solidarity trade union in Poland; a decade passed before Solidarity leaders could contest seats in parliament, and their victory paved the way for the fall of communism.


pages: 407 words: 121,458

Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff by Fred Pearce

additive manufacturing, air freight, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blood diamond, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, demographic transition, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food miles, ghettoisation, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kibera, Kickstarter, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, profit motive, race to the bottom, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

He must already have known he was dying of cancer. He didn’t let on, but I had the sense of a man nearing the end of his life and wanting to set the record straight. Only a few months later, he announced that he had turned down chemotherapy in order to die a quicker death. The African adventure ‘started with a conversation with Nelson Mandela, when he was president of South Africa,’ Paul said. ‘We got into a discussion about why ecology was not high on the priority list of his government. He said he had other things to do first to help the poor, but I said the poorest people in Africa lived in the remotest areas, where his programmes on education and water and housing weren’t working.


pages: 424 words: 122,350

Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life by George Monbiot

Chance favours the prepared mind, cognitive dissonance, en.wikipedia.org, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, land reform, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, place-making, precautionary principle, rewilding, seminal paper, social intelligence, trade route

Monbiot is the author of the books Captive State, The Age of Consent, Bring on the Apocalypse, and Heat, as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed, and No Man’s Land. Among the many prizes he has won is the UN Global 500 award for outstanding environmental achievement, presented to him by Nelson Mandela. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2014 by George Monbiot All rights reserved. Published 2014. Printed in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-20555-7 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-20569-4 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226205694.001.0001 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Monbiot, George, 1963– author.


pages: 540 words: 119,731

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech by Geoffrey Cain

Andy Rubin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, business intelligence, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double helix, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Hacker News, independent contractor, Internet of things, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, patent troll, Pepsi Challenge, rolodex, Russell Brand, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

Jobs, 1955–2011: Redefined the Digital Age as the Visionary of Apple.” In some alternate universe, the loss of Apple’s guiding hand could be seen as good news for Samsung. But not here on earth, in our current universe. Techies and passionate Apple users exalted Jobs to the saintly pantheon of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. “Outside the flagship Apple store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, people had left two bouquets of roses and some candles late Wednesday,” the Times reported. “By 11 P.M., the crowds gathering outside the store were thickening.” “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently,” a recording of Steve Jobs called out at his memorial.


pages: 516 words: 116,875

Greater: Britain After the Storm by Penny Mordaunt, Chris Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, accelerated depreciation, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, failed state, fake news, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, impact investing, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, Live Aid, lockdown, loss aversion, low skilled workers, microaggression, mittelstand, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ocado, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, quantitative easing, remote working, road to serfdom, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, transaction costs, transcontinental railway

For many others this was Britain’s key quality: ‘When you travel around the world, you realise that it’s the combination of the democratic traditions, culture and respect for fairness and justice that most characterises Great Britain.’ As evidence for this, panel members cited the actions of the British people as least as much as they talked about government policies: ‘the Live Aid concert, the actions to free Nelson Mandela and the Make Poverty History campaign’ and more. One panellist said, ‘It’s remarkable that in the historical records of social change it is the legislative and political parties’ role that is emphasised. The public agitation is ignored and yet this was often the most crucial part of the social changes that occurred.’


pages: 387 words: 123,237

This Land: The Struggle for the Left by Owen Jones

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, call centre, capitalist realism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, European colonialism, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Floyd, gig economy, green new deal, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, open borders, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, short selling, The Spirit Level, War on Poverty

Williamson supported the war in Libya, Western airstrikes in Iraq in 2014, and refused to vote against Conservative workfare programmes in 2013 – hardly the stuff of Corbynism. But when he lost his seat in 2015, Williamson apparently re-invented himself as a revolutionary, his new political outlook proclaimed by a Twitter profile picture of Fidel Castro accompanied by Nelson Mandela. Re-elected in the 2017 general election, he returned to the House of Commons, positioning himself as the tribune of the membership. To the fury of fellow Labour MPs, he launched a ‘Democracy Roadshow’ to promote the party’s democratization, travelling to constituency Labour parties. This was interpreted by his colleagues as a ‘Deselection Roadshow’ to encourage the removal of anti-Corbyn Labour MPs, but for some grassroots members infuriated by attempts to undermine the leadership, it made him a champion.


pages: 1,013 words: 302,015

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, centre right, deindustrialization, demand response, Desert Island Discs, endogenous growth, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, global village, greed is good, inflation targeting, lateral thinking, means of production, millennium bug, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, period drama, post-war consensus, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

All scheduled programmes on BBC One were dropped in favour of a rolling news show, Radio 4 and Radio 5 Live trod the same ground with a joint broadcast, while Radio 3 played only slow movements from popular works of classical music and Radio 1 only slow pop songs – for the first time in the latter station’s existence, it did not broadcast the chart show. ITV made the commercially painful decision to abandon all advertising, at least until the evening. Tributes were relayed from other revered figures – Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Margaret Thatcher – and interviews were given by the likes of David Mellor, demanding action against an intrusive press, while Jeffrey Archer and David Starkey drew comparisons respectively with the murder of John Kennedy in 1963 and the death of James Dean in 1955. The state of the nation was captured best on GMTV: ‘You might not believe this,’ said newsreader Anne Davies, sounding as though she couldn’t quite accept it herself, ‘but I’m afraid it is true.’

More generally, however, the National Front’s slogan ‘Hang IRA Scum!’ found little or no support in a country fatigued by years of random atrocities. The conflict had become a seemingly inescapable part of British life, a running sore that disfigured the nation with no hope of healing. Yet change was in the air. In 1990 the world had watched Nelson Mandela walk free from jail after twenty-seven years of incarceration, and the expectation was that South Africa was on the brink of abandoning apartheid, just as Eastern Europe had chosen to turn away from communism. If such progress could be made elsewhere, the possibility surely existed too in Northern Ireland.


The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

The new culture and global economy created a different order, one that a popular observer called ‘‘McWorld.’’9 Life in the new world order was a kind of global village, where everyone knew everyone else’s business. Americans watched nightly updates on Operation Desert Storm, followed by the election of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and knew the intimate details behind the divorce of Princess Diana and Prince Charles. The decade was remembered as having moved slightly away from the more conservative 1980s, but keeping the same mindset. The world experienced a rapid progression of global capitalism following the collapse of the Soviet Union.


pages: 509 words: 137,315

Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling

back-to-the-land, belling the cat, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, disinformation, industrial robot, Malacca Straits, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, South China Sea, VTOL, wage slave

“Azanian black people are the finest black people in the world!” They sat there sweating. Laura could not let it pass. “Look, I’m no big Yankee nationalist, but what about … you know … jazz, blues, Martin Luther King?” Selous shifted on her bench. “Martin King. He had a dinner party, compared to our Nelson Mandela.” “Yeah but …” “Your Yankee black people aren’t even real black people, are they? They’re all Coloureds, actually. They look like Europeans.” “Wait a minute …” “You’ve never seen my black people, but I’ve certainly seen yours. Your American blacks crowd all our best restaurants and gamble their global hard currency in Sun City and so on.… They’re rich, and soft.”


pages: 518 words: 128,324

Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap by Graham Allison

9 dash line, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, facts on the ground, false flag, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, game design, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, long peace, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, one-China policy, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, UNCLOS, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Instead, as he said, “I see the detention houses, the fickleness of human relationships. I understand politics on a deeper level.”4 Xi emerged from the upheaval with what Lee called “iron in his soul.”5 In what is surely the most unusual comparison anyone has ever made between Xi and another international leader, Lee likened him to Nelson Mandela, “a person with enormous emotional stability who does not allow his personal misfortunes or sufferings to affect his judgment.”6 Xi’s vision for China is similarly iron-willed. His “China Dream” combines prosperity and power—equal parts Theodore Roosevelt’s muscular vision of an American century and Franklin Roosevelt’s dynamic New Deal.


pages: 539 words: 139,378

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

affirmative action, Black Swan, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, invisible hand, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Necker cube, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game

21 Can the artist simply tell religious Christians, “If you don’t want to see it, don’t go to the museum”? Or does the mere existence of such works make the world dirtier, more profane, and more degraded? If you can’t see anything wrong here, try reversing the politics. Imagine that a conservative artist had created these works using images of Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela instead of Jesus and Mary. Imagine that his intent was to mock the quasi-deification by the left of so many black leaders. Could such works be displayed in museums in New York or Paris without triggering angry demonstrations? Might some on the left feel that the museum itself had been polluted by racism, even after the paintings were removed?


pages: 419 words: 130,627

Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business logic, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, housing crisis, interest rate swap, Jeff Bezos, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk/return, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

One thing he did was read what he wanted to—not what he had to read for work—something he’d had little time for in the past decade. He began to do so voraciously, knocking down about two books a week, primarily history. “History is humbling and inspiring,” he later told a reporter. “It puts you in your place.” He read biographies of Caesar, Alexander, Napoléon, Nelson Mandela, and ten U.S. presidents, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. (Dimon’s reading taste runs to both business and history, but he’ll read just about anything, from the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant to Bill Bryson’s 2003 best seller A Short History of Nearly Everything. He admires Grant particularly, he says, for the lucidity of the man’s thinking.


pages: 386 words: 127,839

The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest by Anatoli Boukreev

Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid

A Taiwanese expedition headed by Makalu Gau was the source of endless jokes, which thinly veiled serious concerns about his team’s qualifications and their ability to get off the mountain alive. One climber said, “I’d as soon have been on the mountain with the Jamaican bobsled team.” And then there was the Johannesburg Sunday Times Expedition, which had publicly been embraced by Nelson Mandela. Stories about the relative inexperience of many of their climbers and questions about the veracity of their wiry and short-tempered leader, Ian Woodall, were roundly exchanged over Henry Todd’s Scotch. American climber and Everest veteran Ed Viesturs was heard to say, “A lot of people are up here who shouldn’t be.”


pages: 493 words: 132,290

Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores by Greg Palast

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, back-to-the-land, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, centre right, Chelsea Manning, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Glass-Steagall Act, invisible hand, junk bonds, means of production, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, random walk, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Seymour Hersh, transfer pricing, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra

Nice Vulture had let me in on the game because he thought I could find out if Straus kept a connection with Hamsah; or, if he is Hamsah. If Hamsah is in fact the hand of Straus, he’d suckered Greylock and every other holder into taking short money. And the ultimate suckers? The people of the United States and Europe who had responded to the heart-grabbing pleas of Bono and Nelson Mandela to pay off the murderous debt burden crushing Africans. Instead, the budgets for “debt relief” would be snatched by this hand called Hamsah. But what the heck does this have to do with Dr. Hermann? Hermann, said Hans, was a good guy, no Vulture at all. Oddly, though, Hermann seemed to defend the creep Straus, taking Straus’s side on details of the division of the spoils.


pages: 538 words: 138,544

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

air freight, banking crisis, big-box store, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, dematerialisation, employer provided health coverage, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, Firefox, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, liberation theology, McMansion, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Wall-E, Whole Earth Review, Zipcar

Thor documents, leaked to the South African organization Earthlife Africa, revealed that some workers had mercury concentrations in their urine hundreds of times higher than limits set by the World Health Organization. In 1992, three workers fell into mercury-induced comas and eventually died. The situation garnered international attention when Nelson Mandela visited one sick worker’s bedside in 1993.116 Local environmentalists in South Africa, including Earthlife Africa and the Environmental Justice Networking Forum, joined forces with Greenpeace International to publicize and stop this disaster. Protests and letter writing campaigns were organized to pressure the waste exporters and Thor in both the United Kingdom and South Africa.


pages: 484 words: 136,735

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Because economics is driven by both secular trends and cyclical patterns, we need to start by looking at both sets of forces separately and then consider how they interact. Only in this way can we properly understand why recent events happened and where they may lead. CHAPTER FOUR Annus Mirabilis Why did I free Nelson Mandela in February 1990? Because of the Berlin Wall. Once Communism collapsed in 1989, I felt sure that the ANC would abandon its revolutionary aspirations. This meant we had a chance to negotiate a peaceful end to Apartheid.1 —F.W. de Klerk, president of South Africa, 1989-94 You ask me why India broke out of the Hindu rate of growth in 1991.


pages: 872 words: 135,196

The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security by Deborah D. Avant

barriers to entry, continuation of politics by other means, corporate social responsibility, failed state, Global Witness, hiring and firing, independent contractor, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, operational security, Peace of Westphalia, post-Fordism, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, The Nature of the Firm, trade route, transaction costs

In this context, Executive Outcomes (EO), a company originally set up to train the apartheid South African Defense Forces (SADF), began to recruit from the restructuring army, particularly from special operations regiments.72 EO was attractive to those worried about what they perceived to be a politicized working environment in the restructuring army.73 Though some claim that Nelson Mandela’s government facilitated EO’s activities as a way of getting otherwise troublesome personnel busy outside of South Africa’s borders,74 others argue that PSC recruitment pulled competent soldiers from the army and put them in private companies rather than transforming their allegiance to the new government.75 Regardless, the ANC government had little trust in the rising number of South African PSCs.


pages: 453 words: 130,632

Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood by Rose George

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, airport security, British Empire, call centre, corporate social responsibility, Edward Snowden, global pandemic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, period drama, Peter Thiel, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, stem cell, TED Talk, time dilation

I don’t know his status and I don’t ask, but when he goes and does outreach, trying to get men to test, he tells them he is HIV-positive. It’s what activists used to do in the bad days. It is to shock them. You have it? A healthy man like you? In the entrance hall of the Khayelitsha office is a photograph of Nelson Mandela wearing a white T-shirt. In black letters, it reads HIV-POSITIVE. It had the same effect. You have it? Madiba? You? * * * HIV is hard to get. You will not hear this in public health messaging. Rates of transmission depend on many factors from geographical location to your preferred sexual position to how much viral load the infectious person has.


pages: 458 words: 136,405

Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party by David Kogan

Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Brixton riot, centre right, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, falling living standards, financial independence, full employment, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, open borders, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War

By April 1989, this fever of liberalism had spread to China and Gorbachev became the first Soviet leader to visit China since the 1960s. Students occupied Tiananmen Square for a month only to be crushed by Chinese Army tanks on 4 June 1989. In August that year, F. W. de Klerk became the State President of South Africa, leading to the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990. The Berlin wall opened in November 1989. It was incredible; the world had transformed. These were the most dramatic changes since the second world war. In Britain, 1989 saw the start of Margaret Thatcher’s hubris. She introduced the poll tax in Scotland, which was ultimately to be the main instrument of her downfall.


pages: 518 words: 143,914

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Brooks, Dr. Strangelove, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, global supply chain, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, liberation theology, low skilled workers, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, stem cell, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

Many of America’s leading pastorpreneurs are focused on export. Take three of the figures we have already looked at in America. T. D. Jakes is probably as well known in Africa as he is in the United States. In the summer of 2006, when he preached to forty thousand in Atlanta’s Georgia Dome, inmates in South Africa’s Drakenstein Correctional Center, where Nelson Mandela was once incarcerated, got up at two a.m. to watch him perform.23 Indeed, Jakes says that Africa is where he feels most at home, outside his own country. In October 2005 he took four hundred followers, most of them black, with him to Kenya, including his church choir, political dignitaries, business leaders and fellow pastors.


Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert

index card, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Socratic dialogue, telemarketer

So this was my position—I would neither defend myself from him, nor would I fight him. For the longest time, against the counsel of all who cared about me, I resisted even consulting a lawyer, because I considered even that to be an act of war. I wanted to be all Gandhi about this. I wanted to be all Nelson Mandela about this. Not realizing at the time that both Gandhi and Mandela were lawyers. Months passed. My life hung in limbo as I waited to be released, waited to see what the terms would be. We were living separately (he had moved into our Manhattan apartment), but nothing was resolved. Bills piled up, careers stalled, the house fell into ruin and my husband’s silences were broken only by his occasional communications reminding me what a criminal jerk I was.


The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Edward Glaeser, end world poverty, European colonialism, failed state, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Live Aid, microcredit, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, TSMC, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

Tragedies like that of the man in southern Uganda and Constance have happened many times over the past decades, and will happen many more times in the future. More than 2 million people in Africa died from AIDS in 2002. Their places in the epidemic were taken by the 3.5 million Africans newly infected in 2002. AIDS gets attention. Celebrities and statesmen—ranging from Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela to Bono and Ashley Judd—call for action. The anti-globalization activists also focus on AIDS. Oxfam calls for access to life-saving drugs for AIDS patients in Africa. American activists at international AIDS conferences (such as American health secretary Tommy Thompson at a conference in Barcelona in 2002) shout down anyone not responding with sufficient alacrity, pour encourager les autres.


pages: 537 words: 135,099

The Rough Guide to Amsterdam by Martin Dunford, Phil Lee, Karoline Thomas

banking crisis, gentrification, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, place-making, plutocrats, spice trade, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, young professional

Anne Frank was only one of about 100,000 Dutch Jews who died during World War II, but this, her final home, provides one of the most enduring testaments to its horrors and, despite the number of visitors, most people find a visit very moving. Her diary has been a source of inspiration to many, including Nelson Mandela and Primo Levi, who wrote the following: “Perhaps it is better that way [that we can concentrate on the suffering of Anne]; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live”. Due to the popularity of the Anne Frank Huis, the queues can be on the long side; try to come early or late to avoid the crush – or book a slot online and skip the queue altogether.


Fodor's Normandy, Brittany & the Best of the North With Paris by Fodor's

call centre, car-free, carbon tax, flag carrier, glass ceiling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, Kickstarter, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, subprime mortgage crisis, urban planning, young professional

Captivated by Carla Lucky for Sarkozy his best asset may be his popular wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy—the supermodel-turned-singer-turned–demure First Dame, whose every move is slavishly tracked by French magazines. The former bad girl has made headlines as much for her turns in the spotlight (performing for Nelson Mandela; signing on for a part in a Woody Allen film) as for her philanthropy (she’s an anti-AIDS ambassador; she has her own charitable foundation). The Italian-born Carla B holds considerable influence over her lovesick husband, and isn’t afraid to wield it. Sizing Up Despite a diet dripping in butter and fat, the French are among the world’s thinnest people, with one of the world’s longest life expectancies to boot.


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

The Everything Blockchain 10. Square Peg Meets Round Hole 11. A New New Economy Conclusion: Come What May Acknowledgments Notes Index Also by Michael J. Casey About the Authors Copyright Introduction DIGITAL CASH FOR A DIGITAL AGE Money won’t create success, the freedom to make it will. —Nelson Mandela Even though Parisa Ahmadi was in the top of her class at the all-girls Hatifi High School in Herat, Afghanistan, her family was initially against her enrolling in classes being offered by a private venture that promised to teach young girls Internet and social-media skills—and even pay them for their efforts.


A Paradise Built in Hell: Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, David Graeber, different worldview, dumpster diving, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, illegal immigration, Loma Prieta earthquake, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, San Francisco homelessness, South of Market, San Francisco, Thomas Malthus, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

It was not the shelter at the center of the world, but all that was left: a prison. The world is much larger, and these other loves lead you to its vastness. We are often told of public and political life merely as a force, a duty, and occasionally a terror. But it is sometimes also a joy. The human being you recognize in reading, for example, Tom Paine’s Rights of Man or Nelson Mandela’s autobiography is far larger than this creature of family and erotic life. That being has a soul, ethics, ideals, a chance at heroism, at shaping history, a set of motivations based on principles. Paine writes that nature “has not only forced man into society by a diversity of wants that the reciprocal aid of each other can supply, but she has implanted in him a system of social affections, which, though not necessary to his existence, are essential to his happiness.


First Time Ever: A Memoir by Peggy Seeger

belling the cat, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, Easter island, index card, Kickstarter, Nelson Mandela, place-making, pre–internet, Skype, the market place

When you sing against the System, the March of the Issues never ends. Ewan concentrated on Margaret Thatcher, whose successive terms triggered a decade-long series of political earthquakes and destroyed decades of citizen-friendly legislation. I wrote songs about Reagan, Greenham Common, El Salvador, apartheid, Nelson Mandela and various strikes. In 1983, I discovered that nuclear waste chugged daily through our local train station. I discussed it with several of the mothers who stood at Kitty’s school gate. We formed BANG, the Beckenham Anti-Nuclear Group. It solidified with a few men and half a dozen older women, of whom my Irene was one.


pages: 486 words: 139,713

Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, climate change refugee, colonial rule, Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jones Act, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Tragedy of the Commons, white flight, white picket fence

During the thirty-year rule of Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe, there were many episodes of the forced confiscation of land from white farmers by so-called war veterans bent on what the government saw as retributive justice. Elsewhere on the continent, the redistribution of the immense expanses of potentially fertile countryside has met with similar problems, though seldom marked by such violence. In South Africa in 1998, Nelson Mandela enthusiastically championed the same kind of “willing-seller, willing-buyer” redistribution program that the British had supported in Zimbabwe; but it worked only fitfully, and since his death in 2013 there has been a clamor for a more robust program of restitution: expropriation without compensation being the phrase of today.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

Yarvin’s views would eventually harden into a full-blown ideology, “neo-reaction,” which included positions like the belief that climate science was largely a fraud perpetrated by elites; that inflationary currencies, like the U.S. dollar, are “diabolical”; and that genetic differences cause some groups to be “more suited to mastery,” while others (including Africans, he said) were “more suited to slavery.” Thiel, of course, subscribed to the first two views, if not the third. Yarvin also had views on apartheid similar to those ascribed to (though denied by) the undergraduate Thiel, and had compared Nelson Mandela to the Norwegian mass shooter Anders Breivik. Neo-reactionary thought came with its own vocabulary: To “red pill” someone meant to open their eyes to this new worldview. “The Cathedral” was the elite orbit occupied by government officials, the media, and, most of all, university professors. Thiel was also making connections with other far-right provocateurs.


AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

In this special place, people somehow magically put aside the conflicts of ethnicity and class, united with one another—and indulged together in the pleasure of alcohol. Today, he had come to say goodbye. The Afrika Shrine, old and new, enshrined Black gods and goddesses: Kwame Nkrumah, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Thomas Sankara, Nelson Mandela, Esther Ibanga, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Florence Ozor…great souls who dedicated their lives to freedom, democracy, and equality. Performers, during their shows, would often pause and pay homage to these cultural ancestors. Quietly, Amaka engraved those faces one by one in his memory.


pages: 575 words: 140,384

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette, John Koblin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, Exxon Valdez, fake news, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, out of africa, payday loans, peak TV, period drama, recommendation engine, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, WeWork

Until one night, years later, amid a dark Las Vegas gale, when the truth at last would wriggle free. CHAPTER 5 Quality Noise With each passing year, HBO’s original film department was growing darker, more Tyson-like in its delivery. From its inception, HBO had made a bunch of uplifting movies about men of high moral character, including biopics of Nelson Mandela, Edward R. Murrow, and Simon Wiesenthal. With time, HBO’s choice of historic figures grew more violent and misanthropic. “In the beginning, I wanted to make movies about heroes,” Michael Fuchs said. “We ran out of heroes very quickly. We started doing villains.” HBO subscribers reacted favorably to the darker material.


Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

I had no inside knowledge, but it’s slightly less weird when you consider that Campbell testified as a witness at the international war crimes trial of the former Liberian president Charles Taylor, over allegations that the notorious butcher had gifted Campbell a pouch of blood diamonds after they met at a dinner party hosted by Nelson Mandela. From which we can only conclude that once you reach a certain level of fame, wealth, and/or power, everyone takes one another’s calls. (It’s this intuitive awareness that elites occupy an interconnected world of their own, one where the laws governing the rest of us are shrugged off, that is the wellspring of today’s conspiracy singularity.)


pages: 522 words: 150,592

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester

Beryl Markham, British Empire, cable laying ship, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, financial engineering, friendly fire, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Isaac Newton, Louis Blériot, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

On we pressed into the calm and sheltered expanse of the bay, passing a scattering of anchored ships, some waiting for a berth in the docks, or others rusty and most likely riding out their time in demurrage. To port lay Robben Island, where the colonial rulers had once kept their lepers securely isolated, and where the Afrikaaners did much the same for Nelson Mandela, though with rather less success. There used to be sheep and rabbits on Robben Island, the only ones in the entire continent, it used to be said with pride. Now only the rabbits remain, as pests, and in their thousands. We were easing very close now, and slowing. A sudden tom-tom of hammer blows could be clearly heard and we could see the sudden blue sparkle of welding torches, all from a new stadium being built on the waterfront.


pages: 535 words: 158,863

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making by David Rothkopf

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, carried interest, clean water, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, fake news, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global village, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Elkington, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Skype, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, William Langewiesche

They wanted to hire some pros to help him with his “debate prep,” another term, like “war room,” “rapid response” (or “rapid rebuttal”), and “opposition research” that has made its way from the world of American pols to the world at large. Stanley Greenberg, whose firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner has worked on dozens of international campaigns, cites among his most prominent clients Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Tony Blair, Ehud Barak, and Gerhard Schroeder. In the connections among some of these is seen one fledgling trend that may gather momentum as such consultants and those associated with them fan out into an expanding network across the globe. Clinton, Blair, and Schroeder were all “new” voices for their center-left parties, and an effort was made among them to remain in touch, forming a kind of global “third way” alliance.


pages: 498 words: 153,927

The River at the Centre of the World by Simon Winchester

British Empire, Deng Xiaoping, Great Leap Forward, Khartoum Gordon, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, placebo effect, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route

* The city housed the Nationalist government twice – once during the commonly remembered eight years from the fall of Nanjing in 1937 to the end of World War II and the Japanese defeat in 1945; and then again for three strange months at the end of 1949. When the Nationalists fled to Taiwan, they did so from Chongqing, after which the new capital was set up by the Communists in the city where it exists today – Beijing. * These days it is reckoned as politically incorrect to call Yang a warlord as it would be to use the word to describe Nelson Mandela or, indeed, George Washington. He could perhaps be more properly termed ‘a local political leader in command of a small and highly mobile army‘, and there were many like him. But in China few were motivated by ideology or much more than territorial greed. Mr Yang was not; he was no Mandela. He was, rather, a menace


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

In the name of pan-Africanism, he invited millions of African workers to come to Libya but then treated them like animals. Then he fought a fruitless decadelong war with Chad over the Aouzou Strip, along the border between the two countries, only to be humiliated in defeat. More recently he forged a friendship with South Africa’s Nelson Mandela to posture as a mediator of African conflicts (including Darfur) while demanding European reparations for colonialism to all African nations. Most significantly, Gaddafi’s sponsorship of the PLO and IRA, his complicity in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland, and his blatant attempts to acquire nuclear weapons technology have all contributed to making Libya a founding member of America’s “state sponsors of terrorism” watchlist.


pages: 459 words: 144,009

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, invention of writing, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, medical malpractice, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-work, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Ideally, those models are friends or other people with whom you can talk, and from whom you can learn directly how they solved a problem similar to yours. But the model can also be someone whom you don’t know personally, and about whose life and coping methods you have merely read or heard. For example, while few readers of this book could have known Nelson Mandela, Eleanor Roosevelt, or Winston Churchill personally, their biographies or autobiographies have still yielded ideas and inspiration to other people who used them as models for resolving a personal crisis. 6. Ego strength. A factor that’s important in coping with a crisis, and that differs from person to person, is something that psychologists call “ego strength.”


pages: 517 words: 155,209

Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation by Michael Chabon

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, clean water, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, land tenure, mental accounting, microdosing, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, off grid, off-the-grid, Right to Buy, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

The message that came across was that Palestinians want to play soccer, but are not allowed to do so. The FIFA committee finally made it to the Palestinian territories in May 2016. It was headed by Mosima Gabriel “Tokyo” Sexwale, himself a fascinating character. A black South African from Soweto, he was a member of the ANC who had fought against apartheid and sat in jail alongside Nelson Mandela, and after apartheid had risen in the ranks of the South African government. His ambitions to replace Mandela as president were ultimately thwarted, and he started a successful career as a businessman in the diamond mining industry. He acquired his nickname in childhood after becoming a karate champion.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

The new wheat plants could be grown twice a year or alternated with rice; it became possible to get 2 tons of wheat and 3 tons of rice from an acre that had previously produced only half a ton of either. Borlaug received both the Nobel peace prize and the Congressional gold medal for his work, a combination reserved for the likes of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.45 Without the green revolution, Paul McMahon reckons that 2bn people might not be alive.46 In the late 1960s, doom-mongers were warning of world famines and “population bombs”, but while Asia’s population more than doubled from 1.9bn to 4.4bn between 1965 and 2015, cereal production tripled.


pages: 678 words: 148,827

Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization by Scott Barry Kaufman

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, classic study, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, impulse control, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, overview effect, Paradox of Choice, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury

Humble: They demonstrate “a sense of realistic humility about one’s own importance relative to the world at large, implying a relative lack of concern for one’s own ego.” Based on expert ratings of influential figures using these criteria, Frimer and his colleagues identified moral exemplars. The list of moral exemplars included Rosa Parks, Shirin Ebadi, Nelson Mandela, Mohandas Gandhi, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King Jr., Andrei Sakharov, Emmeline Pankhurst, and Eleanor Roosevelt. These individuals scored high on all five criteria as put forward by Colby and Damon. In contrast were highly influential figures ranging from “tyrants” such as Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong, who scored low on the principled/virtuous and humble dimensions but neutral on the remainder; to “sectarians” such as Vladmir Putin, Kim Jong Il, Eliot Spitzer, Donald Rumsfeld, and Mel Gibson, who scored low on all five moral dimensions; to “achievers” such as Marilyn Monroe, Bill Belichick, David Beckham, Condoleezza Rice, Hu Jintao, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who scored close to the neutral point on all moral dimensions.


pages: 772 words: 150,109

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age by Matthew Cobb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Apollo 11, Asilomar, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Build a better mousetrap, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Higgs boson, lab leak, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, Project Plowshare, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Wayback Machine, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

This protocol was rejected by the United States, which claimed that inspections on US soil would threaten the country’s biodefence and pharmaceutical sectors. The Convention remains toothless. The relative weakness of the BWC is shown both by the Soviet example and by South Africa, which developed a programme called Project Coast that was revealed only in 1996, two years after Nelson Mandela became president.40 From 1981 onwards, the apartheid government, which had signed up to the BWC from the very beginning, sought to develop weapons that could be used against individuals or crowds, under the leadership of Wouter Basson, later known in South Africa as ‘Doctor Death’. The Project Coast production facility, Roodeplaat Research Laboratories, was privatised in 1991 but went bust in 1994 under a cloud of rumour and claims of misappropriation.


pages: 554 words: 168,114

Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century by Tom Bower

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, bonus culture, California energy crisis, corporate governance, credit crunch, energy security, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Global Witness, index fund, interest rate swap, John Deuss, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, land bank, LNG terminal, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, megaproject, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Oscar Wyatt, passive investing, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, price stability, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-sum game, éminence grise

By then, Saro-Wiwa’s fate had become an international issue. Across America and Europe he was portrayed as the victim of Shell’s conduct, and the company was accused of polluting the Ogoni farmlands and of failing to protest against the rigged trial while financing the government’s destruction of the delta. President Clinton, Nelson Mandela and other international leaders protested to Abacha. The World Bank, church leaders, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, PEN, the International Writers’ Association and even members of the Royal Geographical Society demanded that Shell abandon its operations in Nigeria. The opprobrium spread across all of Big Oil.


pages: 497 words: 161,742

The Enemy Within by Seumas Milne

active measures, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, corporate governance, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, Etonian, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, union organizing, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, éminence grise

But, for the Tory Prime Minister in particular, the survival of ‘King Arthur’ – albeit scarred, bloodied and presiding over a much-diminished kingdom – was a permanent affront and a constant reminder of a job uncompleted.41 The Scargill myth remained as stubbornly strong as ever, despite the decimation of the NUM leader’s industrial and political base. He was far and away Britain’s best-known union leader, both at home and abroad: the trade-union movement’s one and only celebrity. It is hard to imagine the then South African president and African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, for example, talking about any other British union official as a ‘workers’ hero, respected by progressives of all continents’. Scargill’s popularity among trade-union and Labour Party activists remained high and his power to sway labour-movement audiences unchallenged. As one exponent of 1980s-style ‘new realist’ business unionism wrote in the wake of the collapse of the 1990 campaign: ‘Few people could have survived the pounding that Mr Scargill has taken … Mr Scargill is not only surviving, but thriving … By any logical standards, he is a busted flush.


pages: 600 words: 174,620

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van Der Kolk M. D.

anesthesia awareness, British Empire, classic study, conceptual framework, deskilling, different worldview, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, false memory syndrome, feminist movement, Great Leap Forward, impulse control, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, sugar pill, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Yogi Berra

I can’t begin to imagine how I would have coped with what many of my patients have endured, and I see their symptoms as part of their strength—the ways they learned to survive. And despite all their suffering many have gone on to become loving partners and parents, exemplary teachers, nurses, scientists, and artists. Most great instigators of social change have intimate personal knowledge of trauma. Oprah Winfrey comes to mind, as do Maya Angelou, Nelson Mandela, and Elie Wiesel. Read the life history of any visionary, and you will find insights and passions that came from having dealt with devastation. The same is true of societies. Many of our most profound advances grew out of experiencing trauma: the abolition of slavery from the Civil War, Social Security in response to the Great Depression, and the GI Bill, which produced our once vast and prosperous middle class, from World War II.


pages: 1,015 words: 170,908

Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global village, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, late capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois

The perils ofnational liberation are even clearer when viewed externally, in terms ofthe world economic system in which the T H E D I A L E C T I C S O F C O L O N I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y 133 ‘‘liberated’’ nation finds itself. Indeed, the equation nationalism equals political and economic modernization, which has been her- alded by leaders ofnumerous anticolonial and anti-imperialist strug- gles from Gandhi and Ho Chi Minh to Nelson Mandela, really ends up being a perverse trick. This equation serves to mobilize popular forces and galvanize a social movement, but where does the movement lead and what interests does it serve? In most cases it involves a delegated struggle, in which the modernization project also establishes in power the new ruling group that is charged with carrying it out.


pages: 446 words: 578

The end of history and the last man by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, centre right, classic study, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, life extension, linear programming, long peace, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nuclear winter, old-boy network, open economy, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

With the passing of much of the old guard in the ruling Guomindang party, there has been growing participation by other sectors of Taiwanese society in the Nationalist Parliament, including many native Taiwanese. And finally, the authoritarian government of Burma has been rocked by prodemocracy ferment. In February 1990, the Afrikaner-dominated government of F. W. de Klerk in South Africa announced the freeing of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the African National Congress and the South African Communist party. He thereby inaugurated a period of negotiations on a transition to power sharing between blacks and whites, and eventual majority rule. In retrospect, we have had difficulty perceiving the depths of the crisis in which dictatorships found themselves due to a mistaken belief in the ability of authoritarian systems to perpetuate themselves, or more broadly, in the viability of strong states.


pages: 526 words: 158,913

Crash of the Titans: Greed, Hubris, the Fall of Merrill Lynch, and the Near-Collapse of Bank of America by Greg Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbus A320, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bonus culture, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, Long Term Capital Management, mass affluent, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, yield curve

There was one other thing, Wise said: O’Neal needed at least one meeting in Cape Town on December 31 to justify a stopover with the corporate jet. Henderson leaned on the managing directors in Merrill’s Johannesburg office to come up with a few meetings for the boss. He was thus able to put together a business itinerary for O’Neal, and even arranged for the first African-American CEO on Wall Street to visit with Nelson Mandela, the legendary apartheid opponent who had helped bring a peaceful end to white rule in South Africa. By generating a work-related premise for the African safari vacation, O’Neal was able to fuse the family adventure with a legitimate business trip, underwritten in part by Merrill Lynch shareholders.


pages: 648 words: 165,654

Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East by Robin Wright

Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, colonial rule, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, power law, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment

Yet the fledgling agents of change are a stubborn lot. Syria is a wrenching example. Shortly before leaving for Syria, I went to the Beirut home of a Syrian dissident to view a homemade documentary, filmed secretly in Damascus, about Riad al Turk. Turk is the Old Man of Syrian opposition. Syrians call him their Nelson Mandela because of his noisy and unwavering resistance to authoritarian rule and his long incarceration. Turk was imprisoned four times, the total a bit shorter than Mandela’s twenty-seven years. But the conditions were significantly tougher. Mandela at least had a trial. The subtle film is about Turk’s third prison stint.


pages: 561 words: 167,631

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean tech, double helix, full employment, higher-order functions, hive mind, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, late capitalism, Late Heavy Bombardment, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Neolithic agricultural revolution, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, phenotype, post scarcity, precariat, quantum entanglement, retrograde motion, rewilding, Skinner box, stem cell, strong AI, synthetic biology, the built environment, the High Line, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent

Genette was still working on the problem of Ernesta Travers, for instance, which thirty years before had troubled them all with the fundamental question of why their friend Ernesta had engineered a disappearance from Mars, as well as how; it was a case Jean could pursue in exile, and from time to time did, but Travers was still as absent as if she had never existed. Same with the puzzle of the prison terrarium Nelson Mandela, a locked-room mystery if ever there was one, as the asteroid seemed to have afforded no ingress or egress for whoever had brought in the fatal gun. Mysteries like that abounded in the system; it was part of the affect realm of the balkanization, many felt, but balkanization per se was not enough to explain some of these mysteries, and the inspector remained puzzled and more—transfixed, existentially confused, frustrated—by their aura of impossibility.


The Companion Guide to London by David Piper, Fionnuala Jervis

British Empire, cakes and ale, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Ford Model T, gentrification, haute couture, Isaac Newton, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Nelson Mandela, South Sea Bubble, V2 rocket

It was erected in 1843 and intended for William IV but there was no money. The present policy is to place modern sculpture there over the millennium, one work a year for three years, and a Committee has been appointed to find a permanent successor; suggestions have ranged from Emily Pankhurst and Nelson Mandela to Red Rum. The roll of statues actually in the Square is completed outside the National Gallery by George Washington, sword put aside in favour of his walking stick, and by one of the best bronzes in London, James II. Although again affected in costume, in Roman kilt and laurel wreath, this has an easy, charming, elegance; Grinling Gibbons was paid for it, but the Flemish sculptor Quellin may have had a considerable hand in it.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Leaders, like hierarchies, are seen as a burden, as something that “the Internet” has eliminated—only to make political struggle more effective. Alec Ross, a senior State Department official who oversees technology and innovation, is very optimistic about the Arab Spring. “If you think about revolutionary heroes of the past—whether it was Lech Walesa in Poland or Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic or Nelson Mandela in South Africa—we don’t see those kinds of figures in these revolutions taking place in the Middle East right now and that is in part because the Internet has distributed leadership.” Or could it be that we simply didn’t see those figures because Hosni Mubarak’s government had been systematically jailing and torturing its opponents, often with Washington’s tacit approval?


Peggy Seeger by Jean R. Freedman

anti-communist, anti-work, antiwork, cotton gin, feminist movement, financial independence, glass ceiling, job satisfaction, Multics, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Skype, We are the 99%, Works Progress Administration, young professional

“Naming of Names,” also called “We Remember,” is an elegiac listing of twentieth-century activists, a text that Peggy describes as, “one of those songs that can be constantly updated.”66 The list is international and heavily weighted toward revolutionaries who died or were imprisoned for their acts: Ernst Thaelmann, Joe Hill, James Connolly, Patrice Lumumba, Victor Jara, Nelson Mandela, César Sandino, Karen Silkwood, Rosa Luxemburg. Ewan was no doubt proud of the list, but he did not sing it on the recording. Peggy and Jade sang “Naming of Names” in a stately call-and-response style, and the leading voice was not Peggy's but Irene's.67 Peggy never told Ewan of her relationship with Irene, and Ewan never confronted her, but Peggy believed that he guessed.


Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, Kowloon Walled City, land tenure, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing

For the next fifty years the Mfengu were to serve as British auxiliaries in the Cape’s frontier wars, and to take their reward in cattle and land. The Mfengu were quick to take advantage of mission education and the skills it provided. By the late nineteenth century, they settled as far afield as Kimberley and Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe). Within the Cape Colony, they formed an African elite. ‘When I was a boy,’ remembered Nelson Mandela (a Xhosa), ‘the amaMfengu were the most advanced section of the community, and furnished our clergymen, policemen, teachers, clerks and interpreters. They were also among the first to become Christians … they confirmed the missionaries’ axiom that to be civilised was to be Christian and to be Christian was to be civilised.’66 The Mfengu were loyalists, but their loyalty was not blind.


pages: 549 words: 170,495

Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said

Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, lone genius, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, public intellectual, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, traveling salesman, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

The debate continues until today among historians in Europe and the United States. Were those early “prophets of rebellion,” as Michael Adas has called them, backward-looking, romantic, and unrealistic people who acted negatively against the “modernizing” Europeans,16 or are we to take seriously the statements of their modern heirs—for example, Julius Nyerere and Nelson Mandela—as to the continuing significance of their early, usually doomed efforts? Terence Ranger has shown that these are matters not simply of academic speculation, but of urgent political moment. Many of the resistance movements, for instance, “shaped the environment in which later politics developed; … resistance had profound effects upon white policies and attitudes; … during the course of the resistances, or some of them, types of political organization or inspiration emerged which looked in important ways to the future; which in some cases are directly and in others indirectly linked with later manifestations of African opposition [to European imperialism].”17 Ranger demonstrates that the intellectual and moral battle over the continuity and coherence of nationalist resistance to imperialism went on for dozens of years, and became an organic part of the imperial experience.


Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy by Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson

Andrei Shleifer, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, declining real wages, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, minimum wage unemployment, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, rent-seeking, seminal paper, strikebreaker, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, William of Occam, women in the workforce

Throughout the 1950s, the ANC continually contested in the streets and in the law courts the policies of the NP. In one such demonstration in Sharpeville in 1960, a riot exploded and police fired into the crowd, killing eighty-three people. After this incident, the government moved to finally eradicate the ANC and, in 1964, Nelson Mandela and other top leaders were imprisoned on Robben Island. Despite losing much of their leadership to South African prisons or exile, the ANC continued to be the focus of opposition to the regime. The NP pressed ahead with its goal of creating independent homelands (or bantustans), where all Africans would be citizens.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Since the age of accelerations involves a change in the physical, technological, and social environment for so many people, leadership today is about nurturing the right cultural attitudes and specific policy choices that best enable the mimicking of Mother Nature’s killer apps. The power of a visionary leader to help a society and culture navigate its way through big moments requiring adaptation is beautifully depicted in one of my all-time favorite movie scenes. The film Invictus tells the story of how Nelson Mandela, in his first term as president of South Africa, enlists the country’s famed rugby team, the Springboks, on a mission to win the 1995 Rugby World Cup and, through that, to start the healing of that apartheid-torn land. The almost all-white Springboks had been a symbol of white domination, and blacks routinely rooted against them.


pages: 603 words: 186,210

Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West--One Meal at a Time by Stephen Fried

Albert Einstein, book value, British Empire, business intelligence, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, disinformation, estate planning, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, Ida Tarbell, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, indoor plumbing, Livingstone, I presume, Nelson Mandela, new economy, plutocrats, refrigerator car, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The shell of the Montezuma—which was used as a seminary from 1937 to 1972, and then sat vacant for nearly a decade—was purchased by billionaire Armand Hammer’s foundation in 1981. It became a hulking Victorian backdrop for the new buildings of the American campus of Hammer’s pet project, United World Colleges (UWC), an ambitious international program for high school students, now prominently supported by Queen Noor of Jordan, Prince Charles of England, Nelson Mandela, and other world leaders. Then in 2001, the UWC spent $10.5 million to dramatically restore the old building and make it the cornerstone of the educational retreat. You can arrange to tour the hotel’s luxurious public spaces, although the creaky third-floor turret, which offers a breathtaking view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, is off-limits to anyone but the staff and the occasional student who sneaks up there.


pages: 649 words: 185,618

The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland—Then, Now, Tomorrow by Gil Troy

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, demand response, different worldview, European colonialism, financial independence, ghettoisation, guns versus butter model, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, open immigration, Silicon Valley, union organizing, urban planning, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Born in Montreal in 1940, educated at McGill University and Yale University, Cotler served as a professor of law at McGill and directed its Human Rights Program from 1973 until he was elected to the Canadian Parliament in 1999. For decades he crisscrossed the globe, defending Andrei Sakharov and Anatoly Scharansky in the Soviet Union, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Jacobo Timmerman in Argentina, Muchtar Pakpahan in Indonesia, and many other dissidents. Serving as Canada’s minister of justice and attorney general from 2003 to 2006, Cotler championed indigenous rights. Once, when meeting with aboriginal—First Nations—law students, Cotler said the rabbis taught that true love comes from knowing what hurts the other.


pages: 3,002 words: 177,561

Lonely Planet Switzerland by Lonely Planet

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Eyjafjallajökull, Frank Gehry, G4S, Guggenheim Bilbao, Higgs boson, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, smart cities, starchitect, trade route

Hotel AllegroBUSINESS HOTEL€€ ( GOOGLE MAP ; %031 339 55 00; www.kursaal-bern.ch; Kornhausstrasse 3; s/d from Sfr189/278; aiW) Cool and modern, this curved sliver of a building across the river from the Old Town offers excellent views from its front rooms, along with multiple fine dining and drinking spaces. The 7th-floor penthouse suite is an ode to Paul Klee. oBellevue PalaceLUXURY HOTEL€€€ ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %031 320 45 45; www.bellevue-palace.ch; Kochergasse 3-5; s/d from Sfr329/440; pW) For many years this was Bern’s only five-star hotel and the guest list has included bigwigs from Nelson Mandela down. It’s gilded, polished, sashed and swathed, and suitably discreet, with classic period antiques and service that will make you feel like royalty. Don't turn up looking shabby unless its shabby-chic. oHotel SchweizerhofBOUTIQUE HOTEL€€€ ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %031 326 80 80; www.schweizerhof-bern.ch; Bahnhofplatz 11; s/d from Sfr289/329; paiW) This classy five-star offers lavish accommodation with excellent amenities and service.


pages: 498 words: 184,761

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland by Ali Winston, Darwin Bondgraham

affirmative action, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ferguson, Missouri, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden Gate Park, mass incarceration, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Port of Oakland, power law, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra

When elected in 2006, Dellums was viewed by many in the Black community as a reprieve from Jerry Brown’s eight-year reign, during which the Riders ran roughshod over West Oakland, the OPD was placed under court oversight, reforms floundered, and communities of color were left behind as their superstar mayor courted real estate developers to remake downtown. Drafted by a Black/progressive coalition, at first blush, Dellums’s victory promised a new radical era for city politics. As a congressman, he had played a small but key role in helping Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress topple apartheid in South Africa and was a steady voice of conscience against state violence, from police brutality to nuclear weapons. Furthermore, he had impeccable pedigree: his uncle, C. L. Dellums, was an iconic labor activist with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the local NAACP chapter, and many other civil rights organizations.5 But Ron Dellums’s shy style of governing led to a perception that he was an absentee mayor.


pages: 717 words: 196,908

The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, bread and circuses, British Empire, David Attenborough, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Future Shock, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Joan Didion, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois

“Garveyism” also reached far beyond the United States. The Negro World and collections of Garvey’s speeches and editorials resonated with educated and nationalist-minded African youth in a way that the more staid and old-fashioned Du Bois never did. Kenneth Kuanda of Zambia, Harry Thuku of Kenya, and Nelson Mandela of South Africa were all directly or indirectly influenced by Garvey’s doctrines.* Another leader, Kwane Nkrumah of Ghana, would later write, “The book that did more than any other to fire my enthusiasm was the Philosophy of Marcus Garvey.” This was ironic, since Nkrumah would serve as the final role model for Garvey’s bitterest enemy, W.E.B.


Bali & Lombok Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, first-past-the-post, Kickstarter, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, retail therapy, Skype, spice trade, sustainable-tourism

There's a good range of restaurants, beachside cafes, bars where you can get a pizza and maybe hear some music, or fun places that defy description. oGlobal Village KafeCAFE ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %0362-41928; Jl Raya Lovina, Kalibukbuk; mains from 15,000Rp; h8am-10pm; W) Che Guevara, Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela are just some of the figures depicted in paintings lining the walls of this artsy cafe. The baked goods, fruit drinks, pizzas, breakfasts and much more are excellent. It has a welcoming, mellow vibe. There's free book and DVD exchanges plus a selection of local handicrafts. Watch for art-house movie nights.


pages: 859 words: 204,092

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

But the ubiquity of the white role-model in so many spheres - business, law, accounting, academe, fashion, global political leadership - still overwhelmingly prevails. Figures like Barack Obama and Tiger Woods remain very much the exception, though the former’s election as American president is highly significant in this context. Nelson Mandela came to enjoy enormous moral authority throughout the world but enjoyed little substantive power. With the rise of China, white domination will come under serious challenge for the first time in many, if not most, areas of global activity. The pervasive importance of racial attitudes should not be underestimated.


Switzerland by Damien Simonis, Sarah Johnstone, Nicola Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, bank run, car-free, clean water, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, the market place, trade route, young professional

Nicer than its central sister, the Ador, it’s only a short bus ride from the train station. Take bus No 12 to Mittelstrasse to get there. Hotel Allegro (%031 339 55 00; www.allegro-hotel .ch; Kornhausstrasse 3; s/d with views from Sfr250/290, without views Sfr215/255, ste from Sfr600; ain) Cool TOP END Bern’s power brokers, and international statesmen like Nelson Mandela, gravitate towards Bern’s only five-star hotel. Near the parliament, and recently renovated, it’s the address to choose if you need to impress. Rates are cheaper on weekends. Eating www.lonelyplanet.com AUTHOR’S CHOICE Schwellenmätteli (%031 350 50 01; Damaziquai 11; meals Sfr18-55; h9am-11pm) ‘Bern’s Riveria’ announces a sign near these two very classy restaurants on the Aare, and the experience certainly shouldn’t be missed.


pages: 416 words: 204,183

The Rough Guide to Florence & the Best of Tuscany by Tim Jepson, Jonathan Buckley, Rough Guides

air freight, Bonfire of the Vanities, car-free, classic study, housing crisis, land reform, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

The €9 “membership” fee gets you down into the medieval brickvaulted basement, where the atmosphere’s informal and there’s live music most nights. Mon night is usually a jam session. Cocktails are good, and you can also snack on bar nibbles and focaccia. Mon–Fri 9pm–2am, Sat 9pm–3am. Closed July & Aug. Nelson Mandela Forum Viale Pasquale Paoli 3 T055.678.841, Wwww.mandelaforum.it. Along with the Saschall and Tenax (see p.199), this 7000-capacity hall – located at Campo di Marte – is the city’s main venue for big-draw mainstream acts, such as Lenny Kravitz and Zucchero. Bus #3 takes you there. Festa delle Rificolone The Festa delle Rificolone (Festival of the Lanterns) takes place on the Virgin’s birthday, September 7, with a procession of children to Piazza Santissima Annunziata, where a small fair is held.


Lonely Planet London City Guide by Tom Masters, Steve Fallon, Vesna Maric

Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, Crossrail, dark matter, death from overwork, discovery of the americas, double helix, East Village, Edward Jenner, financial independence, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, haute cuisine, Isaac Newton, James Bridle, John Snow's cholera map, Mahatma Gandhi, market design, Nelson Mandela, place-making, Russell Brand, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Among the most important documents here are the Magna Carta (1215); the Codex Sinaiticus, the first complete text of the New Testament, written in Greek in the 4th century; a Gutenberg Bible (1455), the first Western book printed using movable type; Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623); manuscripts by some of Britain’s best-known authors (eg Lewis Carroll, Jane Austen, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy); and even some of the Beatles’ earliest handwritten lyrics. You can hear historic recordings, such as the first one ever, made by Thomas Edison in 1877, James Joyce reading from Ulysses and Nelson Mandela’s famous speech at the Rivonia trial in 1964, at the National Sound Archive Jukeboxes, where the selections are changed regularly. The Turning the Pages exhibit allows you a ‘virtual browse’ through several important texts including the Sforza Book of Hours, the Diamond Sutra and a Leonardo da Vinci notebook.


The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health and Disease by Lanius, Ruth A.; Vermetten, Eric; Pain, Clare

autism spectrum disorder, classic study, cognitive load, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, delayed gratification, epigenetics, false memory syndrome, Helicobacter pylori, impulse control, intermodal, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, p-value, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, twin studies, yellow journalism

The goal and moral imperative of the next decade must be to mitigate the effects of early life trauma through a major public health response that focuses on prevention and effective intervention. If successfully accomplished, this will be a major public health advance of our time and alleviate the tremendous suffering and costs associated with the devastating effects of adverse childhood experience. Nelson Mandela said “Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” We are idealistic enough to believe he is right! References 1. Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D. F., Spitz, A. M., Edwards, V., Koss, M. P. and Marks, J. S. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults.


The Rough Guide to Norway by Phil Lee

banking crisis, bike sharing, car-free, centre right, company town, Easter island, glass ceiling, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, out of africa, place-making, sensible shoes, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, walkable city, white picket fence

With the overhead lights dimmed down, the stalks make a sort of miniature electrical forest, which really looks both effective and very engaging. As for the winners of the Peace Prize themselves, there are many outstanding individuals – Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and Willy Brandt to name but four – but some real surprises too, notably Theodore Roosevelt, who was part of the American invasion of Cuba in the 1890s, and the USA’s Henry Kissinger, who was widely blamed for destabilizing Cambodia in the 1970s, his award prompting a leading comedian of the day to announce that political satire was dead.


pages: 684 words: 212,486

Hunger: The Oldest Problem by Martin Caparros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, commoditize, David Graeber, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index fund, invention of agriculture, Jeff Bezos, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, plutocrats, profit maximization, Slavoj Žižek, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%

If we have made advances toward containing and eradicating those afflictions, why do we struggle to do so for world hunger? We’ve tried, we continue to try, but we’ve failed, and we continue to fail. In June 2019, in a lecture given before the Food and Agricultural Organization, Graca Machel, the widow of Nelson Mandela, stated the world was nowhere near achieving a global goal to end hunger and malnutrition by 2030 because decision-makers are not held to accunt. “We are not doing enough on the pace and level of investment,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation after her lecture, “and we’re not going to get there.”


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia served for twenty-seven years, Mobutu for thirty-two, Jomo Kenyatta for fourteen, Sékou Touré of Guinea for twenty-six, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana for fifteen, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia for seventeen, Paul Biya of Cameroon for thirty-two, Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea for thirty-five, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda for twenty-seven, and Eduardo dos Santos of Angola for thirty-five (Biya, Obiang, Museveni, and dos Santos are still in power, as of this writing). Among the reasons that Nelson Mandela, the first black president of South Africa, stood out among revolutionary African political leaders was the fact that he voluntarily relinquished the presidency after a single five-year term. A second characteristic of African neopatrimonialism was massive use of state resources to cultivate political support, which resulted in pervasive clientelism.


The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common by Alan Greenspan

addicted to oil, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, equity premium, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, information security, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, pets.com, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

I n the midst of such Washington melodramas, it was sometimes easy to forget that there was a real world out there in which real things were happening. That summer, flooding from the Mississippi and Missouri rivers paralyzed nine midwestern states. NASA astronauts went into orbit to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. There was a failed coup against Boris Yeltsin, and Nelson Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize. There were disconcerting outbreaks of violence in the United States: the bombing of the World Trade Center, the siege at Waco, and the killing and maiming of scientists and professors by the Unabomber. In corporate America, something called business-process reengineering became the latest management fad, and Lou Gerstner began an effort to turn around IBM.


pages: 736 words: 233,366

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

W. de Clerk, also became ready to negotiate with the African National Congress once it was deprived of Soviet backing and the threat of communist revolution in southern Africa had consequently receded. The release from prison, where he had been incarcerated for twenty-seven years, on 11 February 1990 of Nelson Mandela, internationally lauded as the face of opposition to the racist apartheid regime in South Africa, was symbolically the moment of new hope for the future. But with the demise of the Soviet Union a number of African states – and, in Latin America, Cuba – lost a protector (of sorts) and a source of financial support.


pages: 1,909 words: 531,728

The Rough Guide to South America on a Budget (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, banking crisis, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, centre right, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, company town, Day of the Dead, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Francisco Pizarro, garden city movement, gentrification, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, off grid, openstreetmap, place-making, restrictive zoning, side project, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city

Kitchenettes in some rooms are a bonus for self-caterers. €91 Le Dronmi 42 Av du Général de Gaulle 594 31 77 70, ledronmi.com; map. A brothel in a previous incarnation, this trendy and central hotel is just a few staggers from a lively watering hole. It has flat-screen TVs and kitchenette; breakfast included. €95 Hôtel Ket Tai 72 Blvd Nelson Mandela 594 28 97 77, g.chang@wanadoo.fr; map. Brazilian telenovelas in the lobby, friendly service and compact, featureless, tiled rooms with struggling a/c. If every other hotel in town is full, there’s a good chance you can still find a bed here. €60 French Guiana tours If you wish to explore Guiana‘s jungle and rivers, virtually the only way to do so is to join an organized excursion, although it‘s cheaper to hire local guides by asking around.

Fri 9pm–1am (check Facebook page for next event). Directory Banks and exchange ATMs along Av du Général de Gaulle; there are half a dozen at the post office at the avenue's east end. Change Caraïbes offers good exchange rates at 68 Av du Général de Gaulle (Mon–Fri 7.30am–12.30pm & 3–5.45pm, Sat 8am–11.45pm). Car rental Avis, 68 Blvd Nelson Mandela (594 30 25 22); Budget, 55 Zone Artisanale Galmot (594 35 10 20). Embassies and consulates Brazil, 444 Chemin Saint-Antoine (594 296 010); Suriname, 3 Av Leopold Héder (594 282 160); UK, Honorary British Consul, 16 Av du Président Monnerville (594 311 034). Hospital Centre Hospitalier de Cayenne Andrée Rosemon, 3 Av des Flamboyants (594 395 050, ch-cayenne.fr).


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

Depending on their sympathy or antipathy for communism, they were propped up by the Soviet Union or the United States under the principle “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”37 The 1990s and 2000s saw a spread of democracy (chapter 14) and the rise of levelheaded, humanistic leaders—not just national statesmen like Nelson Mandela, Corazon Aquino, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf but local religious and civil-society leaders acting to improve the lives of their compatriots.38 A third cause was the end of the Cold War. It not only pulled the rug out from under a number of tinpot dictators but snuffed out many of the civil wars that had racked developing countries since they attained independence in the 1960s.


pages: 796 words: 242,660

This Sceptred Isle by Christopher Lee

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, failed state, financial independence, flying shuttle, glass ceiling, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Northern Rock, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, urban decay

Mr President, my hopes centre in the perpetuation of the British connection which in my belief is a guarantee of the advancement of my country and of her future greatness . . . one thing is certain – if those who have come to this conference go back to India without the Parliament of Britain making it clear that the minimum constitutional demands of India will be conceded, not only will this conference have been held in vain, but I am much afraid that such a fiasco would strengthen beyond measure the extremist party in India. The 1931 round table was the first of three. The third, in 1933, mattered most – although Gandhi never would accept dominion status. There is an illusion that Gandhi brought about the independence of India and the end of the British Raj. He did not. To say that he did is like saying Nelson Mandela brought about the end of apartheid in South Africa. What can be said is that, like Mandela, Gandhi became the symbol of change. Gandhi did not even achieve what he set out to do. There was no peaceful change at the end of British rule. There was no return to a national identity in 1947 – whatever that could ever have meant in a sub-continent of perhaps 400 million people with different religions and castes along with fourteen languages and as many as 200 dialects.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

Madiba 195 Dekalb Ave, at Carlton Ave 718 855 9190, madibarestaurant.com; subway C to Lafayette Ave, or G to Fulton St; map. Half the fun of this South African restaurant is its ambience – the tin tables come in all sorts of colours, tapestries and art hang wherever you look, and bright paintings of Nelson Mandela rub elbows with soda bottles repurposed as chandeliers. The menu is flavourful and authentic: bobotie with curried mince, almonds and yellow rice ($17), oxtail stew ($24) and pumpkin fritters ($7). A neighbourhood institution, the patio positively buzzes in good weather. You might even spy Beyoncé.


pages: 2,020 words: 267,411

Lonely Planet Morocco (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Paul Clammer, Paula Hardy

air freight, Airbnb, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, Day of the Dead, Dr. Strangelove, illegal immigration, low cost airline, Multics, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, place-making, Skype, spice trade, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Djellabar BAR, RESTAURANT OFFLINE MAP GOOGLE MAP ( 0524 42 12 42; 2 Rue Abou Hanifa, Hivernage; cocktails Dh100; 7pm-2am) If you’ve been to a branch of Buddha Bar, you’ll be familiar with the playful pop-art, fusion menu and fashion-forward crowd at Claude Challe’s newest venture. Challe’s Maroc n’Roll style works a treat in this converted stucco-tastic 1940s wedding hall with an eye-popping zellij -backed bar, snakeskin loungers and a collection of portraits sporting fez-wearing icons from Marilyn Monroe to Nelson Mandela. Check out its Facebook page for impromptu private sales and events. Reservations required. Dar Cherifa CAFE OFFLINE MAP GOOGLE MAP ( 0524 42 64 63; 8 Derb Chorfa Lakbir; tea & coffee Dh20-25; noon-7pm) Revive souq-sore eyes at this serene late-15th-century Saadian riad near Rue el-Mouassine, where tea and saffron coffee are served with contemporary art and literature downstairs, or terrace views upstairs.


pages: 492 words: 70,082

Immigration worldwide: policies, practices, and trends by Uma Anand Segal, Doreen Elliott, Nazneen S. Mayadas

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, centre right, conceptual framework, credit crunch, demographic transition, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

They are, it seems, really refugees, expelled by economic processes.’’ According to the World Bank the countries surrounding South Africa, with the exception of Namibia and Botswana, are among the poorest in the world (World Bank, 1999). Many of these migrants trek to South Africa due to the changed political climate. It was assumed that since President Nelson Mandela’s government had taken over, the country was overflowing with economic opportunities. Surveys conducted by SAMP have suggested that the majority of migrants have no intention of settling permanently in South Africa (Mattes et al., 1999). Reitzes (1997) has similarly argued that migrants were transient and wanted to commute across borders rather than to live permanently in South Africa.


pages: 768 words: 291,079

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell

Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, full employment, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, wage slave, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Television play, Give Us This Day: The Life and Times of Robert Tressell, directed by Phil Mulloy, broadcast. Falklands War. Alan Bleasdale, The Boys from the Blackstuff. Stephen Lowe’s stage adaptation of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Famine in Ethiopia. Gorbachev calls for glasnost and perestroika. Anglo-Irish Agreement. Berlin Wall falls; collapse of Communist Eastern Europe begins. Nelson Mandela freed. Collapse of Soviet Union. South Africa repeals Apartheid laws. Gulf War. Manuscript of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, now held at London Metropolitan University, professionally conserved and microfilmed. Mandela elected president of South Africa. Waterstone’s Bookshop public poll places The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists 62nd among 4,600 nominated best- loved novels of the twentieth century.


pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Instead, Hamel and Prahalad argued for an approach that recognized the major transitions in industrial structure then underway, acknowledged the interplay of economics with politics and public policy, and involved those charged with executing strategies in their original design.23 Hamel’s explicitly revolutionary turn came two years later. Although the medium was the Harvard Business Review, Hamel invoked Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, and even Saul Alinsky. Corporations, he argued, were reaching the limits of incrementalism. Everything now was at the margins, so there might only be a bit extra market share and a bit less cost, a bit faster response to customers and a bit more quality.24 Hamel assumed his audience would not be satisfied with just getting by.


Central Europe Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Defenestration of Prague, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, Gregor Mendel, Guggenheim Bilbao, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Peter Eisenman, place-making, Prenzlauer Berg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, trade route, urban renewal, white picket fence, young professional

Hotel Landhaus HOTEL $$ ( 031 331 41 66; www.landhausbern.ch; Altenbergstrasse 4; dm from Sfr33, d from Sfr160, without bathroom from Sfr120; ) Backed by the grassy slope of a city park and fronted by the river and Old Town spires, this historic hotel oozes character. Its soulful ground-floor restaurant, a tad bohemian, draws a staunchly local crowd. Bellevue Palace HOTEL $$$ ( 031 320 45 45; www.bellevue-palace.ch; Kochergasse 3-5; s/d from Sfr360/390; ) Bern’s power brokers and international statesmen such as Nelson Mandela gravitate towards Bern’s only five-star hotel. Near the parliament, it’s the address to impress. Cheaper weekend rates. Hotel National HOTEL $ ( 031 381 19 88; www.nationalbern.ch, in German; Hirschengraben 24; s/d Sfr100/140, without bathroom from Sfr60/120; ) The quaint, charming National wouldn’t be out of place in Paris, with its wrought-iron lift, lavender sprigs and Persian rugs over creaky wooden floors.


pages: 1,293 words: 357,735

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, biofilm, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, contact tracing, correlation does not imply causation, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, double helix, Edward Jenner, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global macro, global pandemic, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, invention of air conditioning, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, land reform, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, phenotype, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, seminal paper, South China Sea, the scientific method, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Zimmermann PGP

Like their counterparts throughout the Western world, U.S. physicians tended to view the TB risk for people with HIV as a Third World problem. They were partly right; tuberculosis was an enormous, and escalating, problem in the developing world. In 1990 Africa’s most famous contemporary hero, Nelson Mandela, developed acute tuberculosis during his twenty-sixth year of imprisonment. Spitting up blood during the bitter Cape Town winter, Mandela was gravely ill. At the age of seventy at the time, Mandela fit three classic risk groups for active tuberculosis: elderly, living in cramped, densely populated quarters, and black.


England by David Else

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, country house hotel, Crossrail, David Attenborough, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, sceptred isle, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

Located in the town hall, the tourist office (01234-221712; www.bedford.gov.uk/tourism; Town Hall, St Paul’s Sq; 9am-4.30pm Mon-Sat & 10am-2pm Sun May-Aug, 9.30am-5pm Mon-Sat Sep-Apr) stocks a free guide to places with a Bunyan connection, and runs free guided walks on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings between May and August. If you’re visiting in July 2010, you can join the festivities at the Bedford River Festival, a bi-annual event featuring theatre, dance, music, historic re-enactments, rowing and Dragon Boat racing. Sights Want to know just how Glenn Miller, Ronnie Barker and Nelson Mandela are connected to the area? Start your sightseeing with a trip to the Bedford Room at the tourist office for a potted history of the town. The Bunyan Meeting Free Church (01234-213722; www.bunyanmeeting.co.uk; Mill St; 10am-4pm Tue-Sat Mar-Oct) was built in 1849 on the site of the barn where Bunyan preached from 1671 to 1688.


pages: 2,323 words: 550,739

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed. by Patricia Schultz

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, country house hotel, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, East Village, El Camino Real, estate planning, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Mars Rover, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, sexual politics, South of Market, San Francisco, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, wage slave, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Opened in 1991, the National Civil Rights Museum established the nation’s first comprehensive exhibit chronicling America’s civil rights movement. In the spirit of King’s legacy, each fall the museum’s Annual Freedom Awards honor distinguished individuals who have fought for justice, peace, and human rights. Among past honorees are Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Colin Powell, Bill Clinton, Bono, and Oprah Winfrey. A series of lectures and special programs are planned each year in conjunction with the awards ceremonies, with some of these star-studded events free and open to the public. WHERE: 450 Mulberry St. Tel 901-521-9699; www.civilrightsmuseum.org.