John Gray | New York Review Of Books | 19th April 2013 Review of Jonathan Sperber's Karl Marx: A 19th Century Life, which seeks to judge Marx as a 19C thinker, rather than by his 20C influence. "The positions Marx adopted were rarely dictated by any preexisting theoretical commitments regarding capitalism or communism. More often, they reflected his attitudes toward the ruling European powers and their conflicts, and the intrigues and rivalries in which he was involved as a political activist" Ashlee Vance | Business Week | 18th April 2013 Massive multiplayer game Eve Online is "a controlled experiment in human nature and unfettered capitalism". Players have three basic aims: "You mine asteroids for minerals, use the minerals to build spaceships, and deploy those spaceships in battles. Things get complex quickly ... Eve is a dark strategy game underpinned by libertarian philosophy, which attracts government operatives and hedge fund managers as much as space geeks" John Glionna | LA Times | 18th April 2013 Classic local reporting. Pork farming in Las Vegas. "With a satisfied grin, farmer Bob Combs watches the big truck slowly dump its greasy load, a Niagara Falls of yesterday's kitchen leftovers that sends off a sickening spray. Just 24 hours earlier, these food scraps, albeit in more appetizing form, were served up to customers at all-you-can-eat buffets on and off the Strip. Now a new, less finicky clientele awaits: 2,500 pigs on Combs' hog farm" David Remnick | New Yorker | 19th April 2013 Speculative profile of the Boston bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and their Chechen background. They lived an outwardly respectable life in America, and an inner one consuming violent propaganda on social media. "As the day was coming to an end, you could not help but feel something, too, for the parents of the perpetrators, neither of whom could fathom the possibility of their sons’ guilt, much less their cruelty and evil" Gene Demby | NPR | 15th April 2013 America's changing demographics are reshaping racial attitudes and group social relations. "For most of American history, the country’s racial dynamics have been cast in crudely black-and-white terms — with black folks on one side, white folks on the other, and everyone else falling onto some nebulous continuum in between. But our country is now very much in Technicolor, and many of our old ideas about its racial dynamics are getting scrambled" Thought for the day: "One becomes weary only of what is new" — Soren Kierkgaard
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