21 Aug 23 Monday Briefing

Hey Siri, play Karma by Taylor Swift

Ageing is such a curious thing, isn’t it, dear readers? We tend to ignore the quotidian process, or stay actively conscious about it, or embrace it fully. I’m at the age where my basic health screenings are starting to yield what I call mixed-but-overall-positive results – bring BMI down, but body composition is more important; cholesterol LDL that not hot but overall your ratio is fine; start planning for your routine mammograms! As it turns out, I really only need to be immediately concerned about my visual acuity results, which hint at possible glaucoma in my future. Joy.

British Museum staff member sacked after items were reported “missing, stolen or damaged” (time to take a page from the Dutch and make amends before more karma strikes), Nabila Ramdani pithily explains why West Africa (most recently, Niger) is saying nope to France, Canadian anthropologist and professor Isabel Crook passed away yesterday at the age of 107 in Beijing, and VinFast makes an eye-watering debut on the stock market (but, as always, look beneath the hood – pun intended). Oh, and 19th August marks the 618th anniversary of Cheng Ho’s arrival at Semarang, Indonesia.

See my RBF at your RBO

An esteemed friend and respected educator, @zunamondin, shared with me an editorial in the Leiden Journal of International Law – thank you, sir. What is this “rules-based order” or RBO, so frequently thundered across the US of A’s pulpit? Apparently, whatever they want it to be. It is murky by necessity, and inventive in reality. An effective carte blanche to shape the world in your powerful hands. Hey, to the winner the spoils, right? As you were, fellas – writing things down might be beyond you at the moment.

Ooooooooooh shiny!!

Our species seem to love shiny things to ornament ourselves with. Courtesy of the ever excellent @seaarch, and from the same Cambridge Core site, we head back to Indonesia to discover the poetically-named “sequins from the sea” – nautilus shells – used in human ornamentation. This region of Southeast Asia will continue to yield archaeological discoveries as funding and interest increases.

Burn Baby Burn

Any news remotely climate-related is depressing nowadays – this week is BC’s turn to burn. I’m not sure I like living through interesting times, I can tell you that much. Foreign Policy gives us a cheerful take on the highway to climate hell – literally roads, bridges, power grids and other critical infrastructure giving up the ghost.

Preserved Reserves

If you have time to watch something this week, make it Channel News Asia’s 2-part special on Singapore’s substantial reserves, and how we got there. If you need any more of a teaser, in Part 2 they reveal never-before-televised letters from the archives, in which you will discover the stones on Singapore’s founding fathers in standing up to our former colonial masters on the matter of currency reserves. The big question is, how much will this endure in future generations?

Meta-Data

Guess we can’t blame everything on a platform, can we? Meta deigned to collaborate with academics on a study about whether or not content was manipulated during the 2020 US election. It could be described as a bit of an own goal, or more accurately perhaps, horse-has-bolted-from-barn situation. The horse is the human condition, the barn is life before social media, and the fields contain polarities and very little in between. Whither shall thoughtful, nuanced discussion fly? We leave this Monday Briefing with the sobering sentence at the end of the article: “To fully acquit algorithms of any role in the increase in polarization in the United States and other countries would be a much harder task, he said—“if even possible.”