| | | An optimist's guide to the future: the economist who believes that human ingenuity will save the world | | by David Shariatmadari Apr 30, 2022 | | Oded Galor’s ‘Sapiens’-like history of civilisation predicts a happy ending for humanity. But should we trust him? Why is the Anglo-Saxon world so individualistic, and why has China leaned towards collectivism? Was it Adam Smith, or the Bill of Rights; communism and Mao? According to at least one economist, there might be an altogether more surprising explanation: the difference between wheat and rice. You see, it’s fairly straightforward for a lone farmer to sow wheat in soil and live off the harvest. Rice is a different affair: it requires extensive irrigation, which means cooperation across parcels of land, even centralised planning. A place where wheat grows favours the entrepreneur; a place where rice grows favours the bureaucrat. The influence of the “initial conditions” that shape societies’ development is what Oded Galor has been interested in for the past 40 years. He believes they reverberate across millennia and even seep into what we might think of as our personalities. Whether or not you have a “future-oriented mindset” – in other words, how much money you save and how likely you are to invest in your education – can, he argues, be partly traced to what kinds of crops grew well in your ancestral homelands. (Where high-yield species such as barley and rice thrive, it pays to sacrifice the immediate gains of hunting by giving over some of your territory to farming. This fosters a longer-term outlook.) Differences in gender equality around the world have their roots in whether land required a plough to cultivate – needing male strength, and relegating women to domestic tasks – or hoes and rakes, which could be used by both sexes. Continue reading... | | | | | Theatres need more plus-sized black actors, says Broadway and West End star | | by Nadia Khomami Arts and Culture correspondent Apr 30, 2022 | | Marisha Wallace wants to inspire young girls and call out lack of diversity as she takes on role in Oklahoma! A professional career in theatre was not always on the cards for Marisha Wallace. The Broadway and West End star, who was born and raised on a pig farm in North Carolina, rarely saw people that looked like her on stage. As she takes on the coveted role of Ado Annie in the revival of Oklahoma! at London’s Young Vic theatre, Wallace is on a singular mission to call out the lack of plus-sized black actors on stage and to inspire young girls just like her. Continue reading... | | | | | The Sound of Being Human by Jude Rogers review – lost in music | | by Sukhdev Sandhu Apr 30, 2022 | | A brilliantly unjaded exploration of the power of songs to intoxicate, enthuse and reassure Jude Rogers’s The Sound of Being Human begins in January 1984. She is five years old and standing at the front door of her parents’ house in south Wales. Her father is about to leave for what should be a routine hospital surgery. He’ll be gone for five days – a lifetime for someone that young. Still, five days. Like him – because of him – she loves pop radio. The new Top 40 will be announced the following day. “Let me know who gets to No 1,” he says. He died, just 33, a couple of days later. Years go by, decades. Often, at moments she can’t anticipate, in ways she can’t always grasp, she finds herself caught short, lonely. Music becomes a crutch for Rogers. A community – or at least a notion of one. She thinks about the songs she and her father shared. The songs they might have shared. In pop she discovers father figures, fantasies of escape, ways to feel less unmoored. She grew up in small towns before the era of the internet. Pop seemed miraculous then, a kind of abduction. She chances upon a copy of Smash Hits – all funfair colours and splashy exclamation marks – in a local newsagent: “It lifted me above the red-tops, the black-and-blue Biros, the duplicate receipts books, the faded toys on the carousel, the sun-blasted birthday cards, the old boxes of penny sweets.” She progresses to buying REM bootleg tapes from a grimy record fair held in a hotel showroom “next to the market that sold polystyrene pots of cockles and laverbread”. Continue reading... | | | | | The Right review: conservatism, Trump, regret and wishful thinking | | by Lloyd Green Apr 30, 2022 | | Matthew Continetti’s history of 100 years of the American right is ambitious, impressive and worrying America’s tribes frequently clash but they rarely intersect. Over the past 60 years, the Democratic party has morphed into an upstairs-downstairs coalition, graduate-degree holders tethered to an urban core and religious “nones”. Meanwhile, Republicans have grown more rural, southern, evangelical and working class. Within the GOP, Donald Trump has supplanted the legacies of Ronald Reagan and Abraham Lincoln. According to Matthew Continetti, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, being a conservative in 2022 is less about advocating limited government and more about culture wars, owning the libs and denouncing globalization. Continue reading... | | | | | Love Life: TV's best ever depiction of romance | | by Joel Golby Apr 30, 2022 | | Series two of this romantic anthology gives its storyline years to breathe – leading to a densely textured subverting of romcom tropes that showcases William Jackson Harper’s brilliance Every streaming service has to have its own romantic anthology programme: this is the law. Netflix has a dozen of them. Prime has Modern Love. There’s that one where Dave Franco is always getting angry and making craft beer. They all have one-word titles, unless they have a two-word title, in which case one of those words has to be “love”. They all have a scene where, after flirting in a bar, a very good-looking couple go out to a late-night food stall and eat something while standing up. That, the streaming platforms tell us, is what love is. It’s a chewy slice of pizza, eaten laughing at 1am, while being watched as you glow gorgeously through a window. The second series of Love Life, then, which is HBO Max’s version (also available on iPlayer and Netflix, where it joins Love, Life & Everything In Between, Lovesick, Love Hard, Sex/Life and, of course, just Love), and the best of the lot. The first series took 10 episodes to explain why Anna Kendrick wasn’t married, while the second follows William Jackson Harper as he consistently says the wrong thing to the wrong person at exactly the wrong time. Continue reading... | | | | | Joe Alwyn on Conversations With Friends and sex scenes: 'They're like filming fights – quite mechanical' | | by Rebecca Nicholson Apr 30, 2022 | | He’s about to make you swoon in the new adaptation of the Sally Rooney blockbuster. The actor talks about earning the author’s seal of approval and winning a Grammy alongside Taylor Swift The plan was to meet Joe Alwyn at an old‑fashioned pub in the area of London where he grew up. It’s a nice pub, tiny, a selection of beers with wacky names on tap, percentage proofs that would make your eyes water. But we both arrive just before noon, and the doors are locked, so we awkwardly hang around outside, peering in through the window, looking to all the world as though we are desperate for a late-morning drink. I am not sure that Alwyn is as desperate to speak to me, though over the course of a slow and steady pint, he is very polite and easy company. The actor, 31, has been on the brink of being a big star ever since he left drama school in 2015, but his route to fame has run at a slightly different angle from his route to acting success. His partner is Taylor Swift, one of the most famous women on the planet, so there is that. He is tall, handsome, with floppy 90s heart-throb hair. He is quick and funny and confident, low-key in a fleece and jeans. Continue reading... | | | | | Depp v Heard: second week of trial takes sheen off celebrity glamor | | by Edward Helmore Apr 30, 2022 | | Court – and public – hears a painful story of substance abuse, a deeply dysfunctional marriage, professional woes and plotting Amber Heard has sat impassively through 10 days of Johnny Depp’s $50m defamation against her stemming from their volatile 15 month marriage. Next week, the 36-year-old actor will get to present her version of events in support of a $100m counter claim for nuisance. Whomever prevails in the end, and perhaps neither, the trial between the pair has been an unedifying spectacle of a horrifying relationship that so far only Depp has had the opportunity to present to the court. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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