Geoffrey Wheatcroft, writer, and historian, noted in 2018 in the New York Review of Books that "the encrustations of mythologising and hero worship have gone beyond the point that they can be easily corrected". This phenomenon was neatly summarised in a line at the end of the 1962 Hollywood blockbuster movie, The man who shot Liberty Valance: When the legend becomes fact, [...]
After the fog of war lifted from the industrial-scale slaughter which characterised the killing fields of the First World War, which ended in 1918, a psychoanalyst offered an acute observation. Sometimes, he suggested, the difference whether a soldier was awarded a medal for gallantry or was executed for cowardice, "depended in which direction the person [...]
Last week's death of social psychologist Daniel Kahneman, 90, was commemorated by economists across the world even though he never studied economics even as an undergraduate. But he did win the 2002 Nobel Prize for economic science. Puzzles, biases and paradoxes were core to Kahneman's insights. In fact, he, along with his lifetime collaborator Amos [...]
More than a decade back, I had a memorable dinner in Buenos Aires with a former White House speechwriter for President George W Bush. One of the guests present asked him what it was like to work for the 43rd President of the United States. Bush was famously regarded by voters as being both a [...]
Last Thursday in the United States, a special prosecutor, Robert K Hur, exonerated President Joe Biden on charges of mishandling classified documents in a report of more than 400 pages. But just nine words of it could mark the epitaph for the president and herald the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Hur (appointed [...]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWsTm6T3aOs
In the degraded discourse around local politics a niche backhander on social media — aimed at dissenting or decamping DA figures that are usually black — is “watch out, you’ll soon be sent to Harvard”. This meme suggests, absurdly, that the official opposition has the magical ability to use Harvard, the world’s pre-eminent and richest [...]
As a Brics scene-stealer, it was hard to beat the offstage and out-of-the-sky antics of Pretoria’s absent friend, Vladimir Putin. Apparently on Wednesday a plane crash in Russia killed Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, once known as “Putin’s chef”. His death exactly two months after his short-lived mutiny against the Kremlin proves anew the adage [...]
Last week’s opposition get-together at Emperor’s Palace (previously World Trade Centre) in Kempton Park provided fodder for both cheerleaders and cynics about prospects for a post-ANC future in South Africa. For the sceptics, there was plenty of evidence that this “sideshow”, to quote our esteemed president, will not move the voting dial much in 2024. [...]
Novelist John le Carre offered the thought that “a desk is a dangerous place to view the world”. These past weeks, true to his dictum, I have been far from my South African desk and about in the world. Two days in Israel was to be thrust into the maelstrom of the largest civil discontent [...]
