Back after a break

Indian democracy, digital trade, lab-grown meat, and wooden skyscrapers.

Aug 28, 2021

It’s been a while since I did one of these e-mails, so it seemed overdue to start again. A few of you were nice enough to say you missed the reading recommendations, so they are below as usual.

The interregnum is mostly down to my new new job, which is both busy and fun. I’ve tried to keep writing as best I can, including an FT books essay this weekend. Some of that is below too.

FWIW these messages will now go back to being a private monthly thing for friends and family, not a public substack. If you’d rather not get them just unsubscribe below.

Hope you are well and enjoy the weekend!

James

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Essays worth reading

A grandfather and grandson walk through a museum surrounded by artifacts of colonialism

Britain’s Idyllic Country Houses Reveal a Darker History by Sam Knight in the New Yorker. A thoughtful and often profound take on the UK National Trust grappling with slavery and race. Cue predictable bust-ups over wokeness. The introduction alone is a lesson in powerful writing.
On the second floor is the Balcony Room, which affords fine views of the gardens. The room, once an intimate place to sit and drink tea or coffee with visitors, is wood-panelled. It has exquisite brass door locks. The fireplace holds a collection of seventeenth-century delftware, above which hangs a museum-quality Dutch painting of ornamental birds, by a court artist to William III. Facing into the room, with their backs to the wall, are two statues of kneeling Black men with rings around their necks.
An Afghan Tragedy: The Pashtuns, the Taliban and the State by Anatol Lieven in Survival, the in-house journal of the IISS. I’m not going to plug my new employer much here, but this genuinely is the best thing i’ve read in recent weeks on what went wrong in Afghanistan. Long but worth it; download the PDF here.
Key to the West’s failure successfully to build a new order in Afghanistan after 2001 was not just an inability to understand the historic alienation of ordinary Afghans in general, and Pashtuns in particular, from ‘their’ state, but also a refusal to recognise that, given the miserable history and eventual collapse of Afghan states, the Taliban may have been the best state-building option left, at least as far as rural Pashtuns were concerned. Not by any means a good option – just better than all the others.
Man v food: is lab-grown meat really going to solve our nasty agriculture problem? A little while back Mary and I went to a dinner serving lab-grown chicken, and ended up being featured in the Wall Street Journal. This vg Guardian long-read tells the back story on the whole synthetic meat revolution.
Long the stuff of science fiction and philosophical musing, cellular agriculture is fast becoming a reality. In December 2020, the San Francisco-based food company Eat Just launched the world’s first commercially available cell-based meat at the private 1880 club in Singapore. Its form – a chicken nugget – was partly symbolic, partly necessary: the technology isn’t advanced enough yet to replicate a chicken’s breast, wings or legs. But the entire animal kingdom is ripe for replication.
George and Ann on Gawker. Yes, that Gawker. A sharp and funny take on the curious relationship between John le Carré’s George Smiley and his wife Ann — “one of the weirdest portraits of a marriage ever committed to the page.” (Hat tip as ever to friends at The Browser for spotting it.)
Ann is so, so unfaithful, and George’s colleagues are so, so rude to him about it.…. These men are always slapping George on the back and going on about how he will never divorce “the lovely Ann,” even as she is using George’s account at the tailors to buy suits for a Cypriot dockhand, and then after George lopes sadly away in his ill-fitting garments, they are saying “poor fellow” in a pleased voice. Nevertheless, to see George as a cuckold and Ann as a bitch is a reductive view of the arrangement, which I would argue is much stranger and more interesting than the standard interpretation would have it.

A good book to check out

Foreign Policy recently asked me to recommend my book of the year so far, which was easy: The Ministry For The Future.
“Part of a growing genre of climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” this dystopian novel describes a near-future of catastrophic climate change.… it’s brimming with compelling ideas. Kim Stanley Robinson lays out a plausible and terrifying future in which devastating heat waves and collapsing glaciers force desperate responses by climate terrorist groups and covert government black-ops… easily the best and most important book of its kind I’ve read in ages.”
I came across him via this glowing essay by Ezra Klein, and a subsequent podcast interview. KSR also wrote a good essay on climate in the FT a few weeks back.
My own reading has been a patchy this year: so far i’ve managed 21 books, which isn’t bad, but well behind the perennially unachievable 50 books a year target. As ever, do send recommendations for must-read fiction in particular.

Things to ponder

Slavery and British history. Between 1698 and 1807, around 2100 slaving shipping voyages departed from Bristol alone, one every nineteen days. (via the Sam Knight piece above).
Delta woes. Recent research seems to be changing the picture on which vaccine is most effective over time. Pfizer looks less pretty.
Singapore, USA. The lion city has some 1,000 military personnel stationed in the US, the second-largest military presence of any American foreign partner. (h/t Ryan Heath at Politico).
Stockholm’s spruce skyscrapers. A fifth of Sweden’s high-rise buildings are now made mostly of wood. See this in the NYT for more.
The world ❤️s Biden. Trump not so much, as this new Pew survey shows. (H/T David Skilling and his excellent substack).
Messi = GOAT. The Economist crunched the numbers in a clever new way. It turns out he really is.