What transport tells you about a city — When the bus stops I throw my kids up the steps. The old Ashok Leyland starts moving before I get in, but I’m not worried about them. A dozen hands immediately reach out for my babies, holding their unsteady bodies steady. Three people offer their seats. It is these times…

To satisfy the inflation gods, there must be blood — Obama’s Treasury Secretary Larry Summers recently said, “We need five years of unemployment above 5% to contain inflation… or one year of 10% unemployment.” In response, here’s Brad Pitt in The Big Short: “You know what I hate about fucking banking it reduces people to numbers. Here’s a number. Every…

Just fine, thank you — I’m rich in Sri Lanka. Indirectly, but it’s one household. What I will detail here is honestly embarrassing and goes unspoken in polite company, but you should know how rich people are doing at this time of terrible suffering. We’re mostly fine, and it’s a crime. For a brief period…

It’s Weimar time — Last year, I wrote that America looked like Weimar Germany, you know, before the Nazis. Now that it’s one year later, let’s check in on how the American Republic is doing, referencing Weimar Germany by Eric D. Weitz again. Biden Time Unfortunately, the collapse of America seems to be proceeding faster than…

These terrible years are actually better than what’s to come. Sorry to harsh your buzz — I don’t even believe what I’m writing here. This is something knowable but unbelievable. You can read this whole article and agree with it, but part of your brIain will just stubbornly say ‘No’. And our brains are right. Processing this information is not helpful. If the world is ending…

Yuval Noah Hariri has written the White Man’s Burden for atheist tech fuckbois — I love prehistory, history, and future speculation, so I started Yuval Noah Hariri’s Sapiens with great joy. This quickly turned to trepidation, then anger, then rage. Sapiens is a hate crime, a modern work of colonial apologia, and just dismally, dismally wrong. But don’t take my word for it. Here…

Lol I don’t fucking know — The news has long since started to intrude on my life, but it’s still stories to my children. Stories of poverty, stories of shortage, stories of suffering. But, as of yet, nothing that they’ve experienced. We’ve protected them from that with a wall of family money, but I wonder how…

You can’t take and take from people and the planet forever — In Sri Lanka, we proudly display tea plantations and tea pluckers on tourism posters. The whole thing is a crime scene. The British uprooted both ecosystems and Indian Tamils to plant and pluck tea. This was the entire premise of colonialism. Take from the land and the people and make…

GDP is a dead end. We’ve got to go back and start over — Y’all say we need to reduce emissions now, but I don’t think you understand what that means. My country has, out of sheer poverty, reduced emissions dramatically. Sri Lanka simply cannot get fuel, for cooking, for transport, for electricity, for anything. That’s what reducing emissions now actually means. It’s misery. …