It’s October 2019 and Beethoven and Schumann are on the program… the good old days! This blog post has been sitting and waiting for a while and with everything that’s been happening this year, 2019 really feels like a lifetime ago. But before discussing the performance itself, there was something more noteworthy to anybody who … Read More →
It goes to show us how quickly things can change. A little less than 2 years ago, Reid Hoffmann published his book ‘Blitzscaling’. While his thesis is actually much more nuanced and focused on the management aspects of rapidly scaling business models, the term blitz-scaling has come to be loosely associated with some of the … Read More →
New York police violently attacking unemployed workers in Tompkins Square Park, 1874 First a chart… The chart above recently sparked a debate in my family. What does rising wealth inequality mean for millennials’ expectations to continue living in a peaceful, open society? Is the U.S. now really similar to the time of The Great Gatsby when it comes to the “wealth gap”? Or is this chart misleading … Read More →
Johann Sebastian Bach is NOT overrated. While it’s difficult to pick favourites among the greatest composers of classical music, when pressed, I just love Bach a little bit more than the other great musical geniuses and admitted as much in an earlier book review. In a slightly morbid thought-experiment, I sometimes find solace in the … Read More →
With the classical music season 2018/2019 in full swing, I already listened to a lot of wonderful concerts in the last couple of weeks and months. As always when attending live performances, there was more to them than just the music. While a lot of classical music has proven timeless (although even hundred-year-old classics come … Read More →
Singapore - A modern city state Around 700 days since 51.9% of the participating UK electorate voted to leave the EU and around 500 days since Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as 45th president of the United States (with a disappointingly small turnout), I’m beginning to make sense of it all. After months of endlessly reading articles on the subject of … Read More →
Portrait of Leonhard Euler (1707-1783). By Jakob Emanuel Handmann [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons From the first moment it all sounded very promising. A biography about a mathematical genius in the enlightenment period – thus checking off three of my favourite topics in just the book’s title already. With some caveats, I wasn’t disappointed. While not too well-known in popular culture, it is hard to overstate Euler’s accomplishments in … Read More →
In December of 2008, the FT’s columnist Gideon Rachman wrote a controversial article titled “And now for a world government”. Rachman outlined that, for the first time in his life, he thought that the formation of some sort of world government, for instance modeled on the E.U., might be plausible. Rachman based this on three … Read More →
Henry Kissinger is one of the architects of our current political order. First sworn in as fifty-sixth secretary of state on September 22, 1973, he received the Nobel Peace Prize that same year, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Medal of Liberty in 1986. This was a world away from Fürth, Germany, where he was born in 1938 as Heinz Alfred Kissinger to an Orthodox Jewish school teacher. With the election of Donal Trump and rising nationalism across the world, we are looking into the next chapter, a new New World Order. As ever, it helps to understand the past to make predictions for the future, which is why I was looking forward to reading Dr. Kissinger’s new biography by Niall Ferguson.
This post came about in the light of Holocaust Remembrance Day and the Trump administration’s recent ban on immigration to the US for people of certain nationalities despite them holing valid US visa or green cards – which both fell on the same day past weekend. As the descendant of European refugees, many of whom died … Read More →
