Side View: Being Steve Smith

HELL IN A HANDCART PART 71

There’s a direct link between Trump’s juvenile posturing for a trade war with whoever will take him on, and the undermining of European security. And who knew the German armed forces were in such a shambolic state?

Elsewhere, the triumph of the Netanyahu government in courting Trump, and the consequences for the Middle East of the US, Israeli and Gulf hostility to Iran, are the basis of this long, disturbing New Yorker piece. And an expert on Turkish political history explores the victory of the autocrat Erdogan in the nation’s most recent elections.

After all that, it may be more cheering to read a detailed assessment of Bernie Sanders’ ’60s activism.

SELF AND PERSPECTIVE

Last weekend Jane Cadzow delivered an excellent profile of former Australian cricket captain Steve Smith and the culture that drove the collapse of the Australian team earlier this year. Even if you neither know nor care about sport, her portrait of a cricketing genius caught amidst a grotesque kind of insularity is compelling.

On a different but not totally unrelated note, the scary condition of depersonalisation, or self-detachment, in which people feel detached from their own lives, as if they are automata living by remote control, is attracting growing interest.

NEW(ISH) RELEASES

Two books on post-war European history, here for different reasons. John Foot (yes, related to Michael — his grand-nephew) has written an history of post-war Italy. Eminent historian Donald Sassoon gives it a qualified thumbs up here; I’ve started it myself and will report back.

Also, London-based French journalist Agnès Poirier has written a history of Paris from 1940-1950. US historian Robert Zaretsky was, it’s fair to say, unimpressed, and delivers one of the more scathing critiques you’ll read for a while.

AGREE TO DISAGREE

In the spirit of avoiding an echo chamber and remaining open to new ideas — something easier committed to than actually done — I’m going to occasionally offer arguments I may not agree with (or stridently disagree with) but which at least provoked thought.

Here are three: tolerance isn’t a healthy basis for any society, instead we should embrace “reciprocity”; the US is being too provocative toward China; and (eyeroll) why we need to stop italicising non-English words. 

COME UP TO THE LAB/AND SEE WHAT’S ON THE SLAB

From the world of science: thinking about bringing dinosaurs back to life? Not a good idea, paleontologists say, as if we hadn’t worked that out from the Jurassic Park franchise. And Albert Einstein remains undefeated as the heavyweight champion of modern physics after the latest and largest-scale effort to validate general validity. Galactic-scale gravitational lensing (the way the gravity of a large object bends light) matches observational data about the rotation of stars around the same galaxy, and thus the presence of dark matter.

STAT OF THE WEEK

“So, this is a very significant improvement, and it’s far better than many people expected, and it’s far better than anything that Japan has ever been prepared to offer any other country.” — Tony Abbott, April 2014, on the Australia-Japan Free Trade Agreement, which came into force in January 2015.

Yeah, not so much.

INTERNET OF SHIT

Yes, it’s back! That fetid combination of idiot consumer gimmickry and the surveillance state! First, the run-of-the-mill stuff: a whole range of internet-enabled home cameras have security so poor that hacking them would barely test the kind of small children being watched with them. Now, the totalitarian stuff: China is planting an RFID in every car in the country to enable tracking. But then again anyone with a sat-nav or a mobile phone, is providing similar information here in our paradise of freedom.

And now for the sickening: IoT devices give domestic abusers a rich new area of power dynamics within which they can abuse and harass their partners — and one still poorly understood.

PODCAST OF THE WEEK

You’ve all seen Narcos. But what happened to Medellin after Escobar’s reign of terror was brought to an end? Turns out it’s become a model for effective urban planning. The 99percentinvisible podcast has the story.