10 Jun 24 Monday Briefing
Dumplings in a Dragon Boat
What a lot of news to wake up to here in Asia-Pacific, dear readers, apart from the fact that today is a very bad, no good, terribly inauspicious day aka Tuen Ng Jit aka Dragon Boat Festival aka DUMPLING FESTIVAL, which is why we hang leaves outside our doors and concoct delicious treats to forget about the inauspiciousness. My culture is so about food that you can bet every single festival has some sort of special or seasonal food attached to it.
News Roundup
I knew the EU was headed to the polls this weekend, but what I did not really see coming was the Belgian PM resigning, Macron calling a snap election, the Danish PM getting attacked, and all this only a week after Iceland elects its second female president and Mexico, its first. Oh, and von der Leyen still thinks the centre holds in the EU. I’d love more of her blithe self-assurance, which I’m sure is what Modi had in spades pre-election.
Watch/Scroll
Imagine winning at a sport that most of your compatriots in a sports-obsessed country don’t even know about.
Han culture stuff pushed southwest 2,000 years ago, a bit earlier than I thought, actually.
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My partner, formerly a pastry chef in the F&B industry, boycotts buffets and informed me early on that I was on my own if I ever wanted to partake in gluttony and worse, waste. Being the first Asian generation to not suffer the deprivation of hunger and malnourishment seems to have taken us to the other end of the pendulum, where every brand-name chain hotel and hotpot restaurants tout their free-flow all-you-can-eat buffets and wastage charges apply. But what if the wastage happens at home? A “typical US citizen” keeps a diary of his “food mindlessness”, a venture both keenly self-aware and depressing.
RIP, Spurlock, you who turned me off McDonalds for a good five years after Super Size Me was released. I’ve since relapsed into the occasional Sausage Egg McMuffin, McSpicy and spicy McNuggets after I realised that you probably did not suffer any deleterious effects in the long-term, and were instead felled by cancer. May the legacy of your docudiary continue to be complicated.
Ponder
How much success can be directly attributed to our forebears’ decision to immigrate? I tweeted that I owe everything to my great-grandparents’ painful decision to uproot, and this profile of investor Wesley Chan valorises the sacrifices of first-generation immigrant single parents. Can two things be true at once, that people pushed to the brink of insanity can create beneficial outcomes for their descendants?
How on earth did the boring European Parliament foretell the Great Shuffle Right of 2024? It can be true that nothing much exciting happens in Brussels as much as it can also be true that the city is filled with orgies, bribes, arrest dodging, espionage and, as Pendle puts it, a finishing school for fascists.