Anonymous in Current Affairs:
To those convinced that a secretive cabal controls the world, the usual suspects are Illuminati, Lizard People, or “globalists.” They are wrong, naturally. There is no secret society shaping every major decision and determining the direction of human history. There is, however, McKinsey & Company.
The biggest, oldest, most influential, and most prestigious of the “Big Three” management consulting firms, McKinsey has played an outsized role in creating the world we occupy today. In its 90+ year history, McKinsey has been a whisperer to presidents and CEOs. McKinsey serves more than 2,000 institutions, including 90 of the top 100 corporations worldwide. It has acted as a catalyst and accelerant to every trend in the world economy: firm consolidation, the rise of advertising, runaway executive compensation, globalization, automation, and corporate restructuring and strategy.
I came into my job as a McKinsey consultant hoping to change the world from the inside, believing that the best way to make progress is through influencing those who control the levers of power. Instead of being a force for good, I found myself party to the most damaging forces affecting the world: the resurgence of authoritarianism and the continued creep of markets into all parts of life.
More here.
A couple of months ago, Twitter user @emrazz asked women 
An army unit known as the “Six Triple Eight” had a specific mission in 
Jonathan Haidt, author of The Coddling of the American Mind and professor at NYU
IN A SERIES 
Grime music is catharsis delivered from a vertiginous height. Born and bred in London’s inner city housing projects in the early 2000’s, among a Black youth subculture that drew more on Jamaican reggae than American rap, grime was a product of confinement. London’s social housing tower blocks, in which many of grime’s pioneers grew up, became synonymous with the genre’s grittiness and hyperlocal roots, but they were also essential to the music’s distribution. Grime was first popularized by pirate radio stations broadcast from illegal transmitters and squatted “studios” erected on the rooftops of 20- and 30-story buildings. Up there, elevated from their impoverished upbringings, grime’s founders found space to breathe. What they created was unapologetically strange and uncompromising: music built from beats too irregular to dance to, rapping too fast to be intelligible on the radio, lyrics full of niche slang and swear words, and songs not geared around hooks and choruses. Moreover, all of this was produced by artists unwilling to play with a British music industry focused on developing homegrown guitar bands and importing rap and R&B from the United States.
A crisis of this magnitude almost invariably reveals wider dysfunctions, and so it has been with Macron’s debacle with the gilets jaunes. The President seemed oblivious to the plight of the provinces, and unable to show any personal empathy with the lives of ordinary citizens. Visiting all corners of the territory and making an emotional connection with the people are key functions of the French republican monarch. De Gaulle managed this with his systematic tournées across small towns and villages: by the end of his first term, he had visited every metropolitan département. The very incarnation of this esprit de proximité was Jacques Chirac, who genuinely delighted in his encounters with the public, especially when they afforded opportunities to sample tasty local victuals. Macron, in contrast, has failed to cultivate these organic (and gastronomical) ties with the citizenry. He has also communicated very patchily, with long periods of Olympian silence combined with clumsy off-the-cuff interventions – as when he grumbled about his compatriots’ “Gaulois tendency to resist change”, or when he told an unemployed man that he could find a job by “just crossing the street”. In his December 10 speech, he expressed his sorrow for having “hurt” the French people by “some of his words”, and for seeming “indifferent” to their everyday concerns. This is one of the areas where his combination of intellectual superiority and political inexperience – he never held elected office before becoming President – have come back to haunt him.
In 724 A.D., the twenty-three-year-old poet Li Bai got on a boat and set out from his home region of Shu, today’s Sichuan province, in search of Daoist learnings and a political career. He wasn’t headed anywhere in particular. Instead, he began a life of roaming—hiking up mountains to Daoist sites, meeting men of letters all over the country, and leaving behind hundreds of poems about his travels, his solitude, his friends, the moon, and the pleasures of drinking wine. In the centuries since, Li’s verse, by turns playful and profound, has made him China’s most beloved poet.
During a six-month period in 1889, nearly 900,000 people descended upon the sprawling Universal Exposition in Paris, the fourth world’s fair to be held in the city, this one constructed in the shadows of the new Eiffel Tower. For the average Parisian strolling down the Esplanade des Invalides, the sight of a Tunisian palace, an Algerian bazaar, or a Cambodian pagoda would have meant pure enchantment, and nobody was more enchanted than Claude Debussy. Inside a replica of a Javanese village, the 26-year-old composer encountered the ensemble of bronze metallophones, gongs, and other instruments known as a gamelan, the musicians in the pavilion joined by a male singer and four young female dancers. For an artist recoiling from the rigid orthodoxy of the conservatory, the music’s bright, sensuous timbres, its feeling of spaciousness, and its vaguely pentatonic scales offered Debussy a path toward something new, even if he struggled to make sense of what he heard in the context of western harmony and counterpoint.
From where I work at the University of Sydney, you cannot see the ocean. However, in Australia, the ocean is part of our national consciousness. This is perhaps why I think of the research literature as an ocean, linking researchers in disparate yet ultimately connected fields. Just as there is growing alarm about our rising, polluted oceans, scientists are increasingly talking about the swelling research literature and its contamination by incorrect research results.
Frederick Douglass
On Monday, a trail runner in Colorado was attacked by a mountain lion. While fighting to defend his life, the man managed to kill the lion. This is how he did that.
Researchers in 
As Zachary Lazar put it in his New York Times review: “It helps that James . . . is a virtuoso at depicting violence, particularly at the beginning of this book, where we witness scene after scene of astonishing sadism, as young men and boys are impelled by savagery toward savagery of their own.” Later he writes, “The novel’s great strength is the way it conveys the degradation of Kingston’s slums.” Lazar’s praise, the elements of the novel he highlighted, would be echoed again and again in each review I read, and I can’t say he’s wrong. James ismasterful with violence and sadism, and Kingston’s slums are vividly portrayed.
If, as one sometimes hears, people can be divided into two groups—those who run away from violence and danger and those who run toward it—something similar could be said about ones who, like Brassaï and Caravaggio, see themselves as nocturnal beings, as opposed to those who see themselves as creatures of daylight, or even identify with that loaded appellation morning person. Some, like Sancho Panza, wish only to go to bed at twilight and to sleep undisturbed—escaping the real and imagined terrors that they perhaps sense lurk in the dark. Others, like Don Quixote, feel the compulsion to stay awake for at least part of the night, to maintain a vigil.