In an attempt to actually justify my use of this space, I will make myself compile a list of things I like every week. I fully expect this to last one whole week, maybe two if you’re really lucky.
- Damir Sagolj’s Reuters feature on hunger in North Korea. No matter how politically correct one may aspire to be, there’s only really one way to put it – natural disasters and rising commodity prices do not create poverty. Bad governance creates poverty (compare Chile and Haiti). The cycle of poverty can only be broken by good governance (see Botswana). Totalitarianism is a fundamental evil and a crime against humanity, and any means to end it will be justified.
- Samuel Culbert’s anti-performance review tirade in The Wall Street Journal. I read it this morning just before finishing up my own annual review (or self-assessment, or whatever it’s actually called), and I can’t argue with a single one of his points. Of particular note was the idea that team performance, as opposed to individual performance, should be the ultimate goal. A good manager should recognize that a subordinate’s failure is a result of his or her shortcomings, too, yet this notion is strangely absent from most work environments.
- Here’s a video of an Australian pet crocodile. While the concept itself is not new, the fact that this crocodile watches TV and goes for walks in a little pink harness kills me.
- I finished My Father’s Keeper this week and crossed the third title off my immeasurably long to-read list for the fall. This book was part of an eclectic collection of, oh, let’s see, approximately 16,542 titles I received from my mother’s house during her transatlantic relocation. These included everything from coffee table books of the Borneo rainforest to things like Gauguin by Himself. I inherited my mother’s obsession with bookstore bargain bins, and I will eventually be discovered dead under what would have once been my teetering towers of books. My seventeen cats will nibble on my limbs in the meantime. Anyway, this was actually a great read – a compilation of interviews with the children of prominent Nazis by a father-son duo done forty years apart. Some sought atonement for their parents’ sins, while others maintained defiance. The obvious question for anyone, of course, would be whether they would have stood by their father in such an event, and, if so, what reasons would have been behind this decision? Would it even be a conscious decision? Would anyone be able to separate their parents as parents from their parents as murderers, or as ideologues of mass murder? How would the severity of a parent’s crime affect their children’s perception of their parents?
- Titles like the above, of course, are natural attractions for me, because I am seemingly physically incapable of processing fiction. I did, however, briefly break with this tradition for Super Sad True Love Story (but only because it’s a politicized dystopia, really). It was fantastic – everyone wears apparati, those too poor to afford flying China Southern Airlines take UnitedContinentalDeltamerican, the most desirable sexual partners work in Media or Credit, images are preferable to text, and everything of value is measured in yuan-pegged dollars. When I cleared customs at Dulles several hours after finishing the book, I half-expected to be asked whether I had had intimate relationships with any non-Americans during my absence, as well as what my credit score looked like. Highly recommended if you’re weird like me.
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