Contemporary marketers must simultaneously think global, local, and glocal factors in order to stay ahead of the curve, or just keep up, given evolving market conditions and a growing attention to ‘bespoke’ needs. The IT revolution – plus the possibilities that AI, deep and machine learning have to offer – have washed away static approaches … Read more
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics “That’s how you learn. But after you make the same mistake one, or two, or five times, you’ll eventually get it. And then you’ll make new mistakes.” Louis Sachar, The Card Turner (2010) Managing … Read more
A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1966) It is, perhaps, notable that as a … Read more
In December 1899 Honolulu-based physicians attributed two deaths to bubonic plague, and a local paper duly announced that the ‘scourge of the Orient’ had arrived.[i] Within months a first plague fatality was reported in continental U.S. as Chinese-American Chick Gin (Wing Chung Ging or Wong Chut King depending on the transliteration) succumbed to the disease … Read more
The Russian bear looms in the English-speaking imagination as savage and barbaric, but with a native cunning in need of taming. Throughout the nineteenth century British imperialists looked on their seemingly ursine counterparts with a mixture of dread and superiority. William Makepeace Thackery’s poem ‘The Legend Of St. Sophia Of Kioff’ (1855) contains a typical … Read more
I am sticking my neck out to declare: Micheal O’Siadhail’s book-length poem, The Five Quintets, is the most important work of English-language literature that has been published so far this century. O’Siadhail’s towering achievement melds reflections on the arts, economics, politics, philosophy and, fascinatingly, science into lyrical verse that transfixes the reader. He urges we enter … Read more
We can only imagine how poetry entered human consciousness. I intuit that its emergence was linked to the first use of fire, that most seminal of technologies, whose devouring mysteries transfix us with a spirit that endows our own. I see one among a band awakening from a dream, and entering a trance. She incants … Read more
Last month’s opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem served to re-ignite Palestinian rage against what many there regard as a latter-day ‘Crusader’ state, a term with particular resonance in that region. No other city juxtaposes such piety and passion as Jerusalem. It is sacred to the three great monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and … Read more
Where to begin the story of Roger Casement, humanitarian crusader, knight of the British realm, and 1916 revolutionary? Lawrence of Arabia wrote that he had ‘the appeal of a broken archangel’; Joseph Conrad said: ‘He could tell you things! Things I have tried to forget, things I never did know”; Edmund Morel described him as … Read more