What is Money?
It’s time for the bitcoin to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. It could become merely a new way of ensuring the continuation of banking hegemony in its current form. That would be one of those final plot twists which leaves everybody thinking that although they enjoyed most of the show, the ending was so disappointing they now wish they hadn’t bothered. Or, along with peer-to-peer lending and mobile payments, it could have an impact as great as the new kind of banking introduced in Renaissance Italy. More
Crisis in Brazil
In January 2015 Dilma Rousseff began her second presidency. Within three months, huge demonstrations packed the streets of the country’s major cities, at least two million strong, demanding her ouster. In Congress, the Brazilian Social Democracy Party and its allies, emboldened by polls showing Dilma’s popularity had fallen to single figures, moved to impeach her. Her Workers’ Party, which had long enjoyed by far the highest level of approval in Brazil, became the most unpopular party in the country. How had it come to this? More
The Heaneid
Heaney was not in any simple sense a ‘Virgilian’ poet, or at least he was not the kind of poet who would make such a grand claim for himself. But the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid in particular – in which Aeneas culls the golden bough, descends to the underworld, meets fallen comrades, and then receives from his father a vision of souls recycled by imbibing the waters of Lethe and a roll-call of future Roman heroes – mattered more to his later writing than any other single text. More
The Real Thing
On a spring day in New York City in 1960, Grace Hartigan, then 38 years old, took the train uptown to visit Winston Price, a young scientist from Baltimore, and a new collector of her work. To anyone who saw her on the subway, she wouldn’t have looked like a painter; ‘when I go out,’ she said, ‘I’m all woman.’ Her work had just begun to sell, and to celebrate she had bought furs, jewellery and handbags. The woman who stepped onto Fifth Avenue looked like she belonged there. More
