Chasing your own shadow
There’s a constant hustle, and people are visibly struggling to make things work out for them, to make a living, make art or make a connection to another person.
Simone Haysom
Local government failure on the horizon?
You know it is a powerful front-page story when you can still, two years later, remember the time of day and what you had in your shopping basket when you saw the photograph. In the foreground a man was on his knees, weeping; in the background, black smoke billowed from a block of flats. It…
Lady Gaga, climate change, Gladwell and Armageddon
If time were a set of teeth chewing up infinity, Twitter and Facebook would be the cavities undermining its structure, and StumblUpon its customisable, widget-friendly gingivitis. You see, I know this fact keenly because I am trying to write up my dissertation. Back in the days of yore, when people still relied on email to…
Medupi means no more excuses for SA energy policy
The queen’s been in her parlour, eating bread and honey; the king’s been in his counting house, counting out his money: word is, Eskom’s been given the thumbs up on its Medupi loan by the high royalty of IFIs, the World Bank herself. Barbara Hogan is a laudable politician, brave and coolheaded, and I take…
Advertisers stoop to new lows, no one surprised.
Children alive today are not going to thank us for the world we are letting happen. That’s what I thought when I opened the newspaper about two weeks ago. David Mitchell (of Peepshow fame) published a column about a company called Dubit Insider which pays children to punt its client’s brands to each other during…
How do you know what you know?
Every day we use things we couldn’t make, eat things we haven’t prepared and take medication we don’t understand. The world is awash with competing claims about what we should do or believe: eggs will give you a heart attack! Eggs are great for you! Sleep eight hours! Hakuna Matata! Everyone likes to say they…
Are there really too many of us?
To support 9 billion in a sustainable fashion is possible, though it might neccessitate a world that many find unpalatable…
It shouldn’t be forgotten that the increased global population has so far led to many things that are generally considered to be positive changes
Agro-imperialism: Your one-stop hunger and dispossession shop
How long was the last lease you signed? Twenty pages? Ten? The last lease I signed was to sublet a room in a student digs and at five pages it was the barest of legal agreements. So it makes me a little queasy to read that national governments and private enterprises are signing three-page documents…
It’s the end of the Third World, in more ways than one
It’s a scene with West Wing-level political theatrics and it has been replayed frequently in post-Copenhagen columns: Obama jets into the Danish capital to wrap up the COP15 with full American unilateralist finesse. He demands to meet the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. Twice he is sent lower-level negotiators, twice he sends them away. “I don’t…