12 Aug 24 Monday Briefing

Breaking the Dance

News Roundup

Friends, I’ve never been au fait with pop culture, and the past couple of days have proved that being blissfully unaware of the difference between breakdancing (street activity) and breaking (new Olympic sport) is the best way to exist. I blame my siblings for breaking that bliss by alerting me to the most bewildering video I’ve seen in a long time.

If Olympic sports have evolved over the years, some of them almost unrecognisable from their original entries, then it should be no surprise that dramatic physiological changes can also happen under evolutionary pressures.

Elsewhere, opposition Venezuelans have decided that if they can’t find the support they need locally, they’ll find it internationally, and on the topic of international spotlights, Musk is weighing in on the recent civil unrest in the UK. Only Musk knows what his end game is.

Watch/Scroll

Sure, lying flat or run-ing are trends, but so is doing something productive in the rural environments you’ve escaped to. Urban to rural migration seems to offer disenchanted Chinese youth a reasonable compromise by allowing them to utilise their Information Age education and skills in an environment that won’t burn them out on a hamster wheel.

Read

Books I’m currently reading, in no particular order, that I’d also recommend you read:

Majapahit: Intrigue, Betrayal and War in Indonesia's Greatest Empire – A tipsy court scribe deciding to record whatever he sees and hears makes for a rollicking read. Palace intrigue is palace intrigue anywhere in the world!

Following in the Nusantara vein, Crowley tells us why internecine Iberian competition drove Spice: The 16th-Century Contest That Shaped the Modern World. Thank goodness modern Iberian cuisines is still miles better than other spice raiders north of them.

Nowadays, if I want to communicate in written Chinese on my phone, voice-to-text does a pretty good job of that, mostly because I can be lazy with Hanyu Pinyin and only use that (or handwriting mode) when I’m in public and don’t want people overhearing my business. Before all these advances in technology, well… creating a typewriter for a script that only has 26 letters vs a logographic language with thousands of them was always going to be an intellectual and technological feat, which is what our forebears realised and worked with for the past hundred years. Scholars have created multiple romanisation systems of the Chinese language since the earliest Modern Age contact between the two spheres, and those efforts laid the groundwork for the eventual mass production of the Chinese typewriter. Mullaney has written an excellent “object history” about the challenges and triumphs of working with one of the most difficult-to-master languages in the world.

Ponder

The civil unrest that rocked the UK for the past two weeks and will no doubt continue to foment, no matter what mainstream outlets would have you believe, is nothing to be glib about. All my years of experience working at the intersection of civil society, communities and socioeconomics have taught me that what most people want is the very clichéd “happiness, prosperity and progress” recited in Singapore’s national pledge. When any one of those elements are missing, a different Hydra head rises, but if all three are missing, well, you get what you’ve seen recently or even worse. Sir Paul Collier addresses the economics of being left behind in his so-far excellent new book. It may even be worth a full review at some point.