by Richard Gowan | Feb 9, 2011 | Africa, Global system, Influence and networks, North America
Readers of this blog tend to be interested in things like transnational identities, the state of America and life in 21st century cities. So here’s some good news: there’s a new novel out that addresses all these things and then some. Open City by Teju Cole (full disclosure: he’s a friend) is “the story of a young Nigerian-German psychiatrist in New York City five years after 9/11” with a detour to Brussels thrown in. It came out in the U.S. yesterday, and is getting rave reviews. Here’s one from Booklist:
Possibly the only negative thing to say about Cole’s intelligent and panoramic first novel is that it is a more generous account of the recent past than the era deserves. America’s standing in the world is never far from the restless thoughts of psychiatry resident Julius, a Nigerian immigrant who wanders Manhattan, pondering everything from Goya and the novels of J.M. Coetzee to the bankruptcy of Tower Records and the rise of the bedbug epidemic. In other words, it is an ongoing reverie in the tradition of W.G. Sebald or Nicholson Baker, but with the welcome interruptions of the friends and strangers Julius meets as he wanders Penn Station, the Upper West Side, and Brussels during a short holiday, and amid discussions of Alexander Hamilton, black identity, and the far left–a truly American novel emerges. Julius pines over a recent ex, mourns the death of a friend, goes to movies, concerts, and museums, but above all he ruminates, and the picture of a mind that emerges in lieu of a plot is fascinating, as it is engaged with the world in a rare and refreshing way.
So, a bit more complex than the Very Hungry Caterpillar. Go out – or on Amazon – and buy it. Cole maintains an esoteric online notebook linked to the novel (here) and is a sharp photographer too. The funny fellow at the top of the post is one of his.
by Alex Evans | Feb 9, 2011 | What we're watching
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBGsxn_lvX4[/youtube]
by Alex Evans | Feb 9, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
The Guardian has a story on Wikileaked cables from the US Embassy in Riyadh this morning, which record conversations between the US Consul-General in Riyadh and Sadad al-Husseini, the former head of exploration at Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil monopoly in the country. The first cable, from November 2007, is quoted as saying that:
In a presentation, Abdallah al-Saif, current Aramco senior vice-president for exploration, reported that Aramco has 716bn barrels of total reserves, of which 51% are recoverable, and that in 20 years Aramco will have 900bn barrels of reserves.
Al-Husseini disagrees with this analysis, believing Aramco’s reserves are overstated by as much as 300bn barrels. In his view once 50% of original proven reserves has been reached … a steady output in decline will ensue and no amount of effort will be able to stop it. He believes that what will result is a plateau in total output that will last approximately 15 years followed by decreasing output.
While al-Husseini fundamentally contradicts the Aramco company line, he is no doomsday theorist. His pedigree, experience and outlook demand that his predictions be thoughtfully considered.
Seven months later, another cable:
Our mission now questions how much the Saudis can now substantively influence the crude markets over the long term. Clearly they can drive prices up, but we question whether they any longer have the power to drive prices down for a prolonged period.
The author of the Guardian analysis, John Vidal, also paraphrases the cables as reporting that,
Husseini said Saudi Arabia might reach an output of 12m barrels a day in 10 years but before then – possibly as early as 2012 – global oil production would have hit its highest point.
Of course, none of this will come as any great surprise to GD readers – we first picked up on questions about “whether … Saudi Arabia hasn’t got any spare capacity to give” back in April 2008.
by David Steven | Feb 8, 2011 | UK
Important – and exciting news from the UK Foreign Office – the BBC World Service is being closed down. Newsbiscuit has the scoop:
The BBC World Service is to be replaced by a rolling 24-hour radio show presented by Foreign Secretary William Hague.
‘I have always dreamed of being a DJ,’ said Mr Hague, ‘as a small boy I would regularly spin classic vinyl of the speeches of Winston Churchill. I can’t wait to get down and funky with the global massive.’
The World Service, which is funded through the Foreign Office, recently announced that it was axing 650 jobs and would be cutting five of its language services.
‘I can easily do the jobs of these people,’ insisted Mr Hague, ‘I may not be fluent in 32 different languages but music is a universal language. Listeners will soon forget their need for an impartial news service when I start playing them tunes from my Abba collection.’’ […]
The show will feature regular phone-ins allowing the 180 million listeners worldwide a chance to engage in light-hearted jovial banter with Mr Hague about war, famine and global hegemony. There will also be exciting new competitions in which people can win foreign aid, an arms shipment or military intervention.
by Claire Melamed | Feb 7, 2011 | Africa, Economics and development
What will happen if mobile phone use carries on expanding at its current rate in Africa, but literacy rates don’t improve? This graph, using data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, gives us the answer:
If (and it’s a quite colossal if), the projections in this graph are correct, then by the end of next year there will be more mobile phone subscriptions in Africa than people who are literate. That’s when illiteracy, and not lack of access to technology, might be the thing that stops people communicating.
You need a minimum of literacy to be able to use a mobile. And if mobile phones become the main way that people access the internet, which may well happen as people leapfrog straight to smartphones, then illiteracy and not lack of technology may become the barrier to internet access too.
Mobile phones can help with literacy, of course, and there are already many pilot programmes testing out how this could work in different contexts. But at the moment the trend seems pretty overwhelming.
This graph shows another source of widening inequalities open up in front of our eyes. People who cannot read will be excluded from the information and opportunties offered by mobile phones and, soon, the internet, as well as those offered by paper and ink.
Of course there are many reasons why it probably won’t happen exactly as predicted by this graph. The people who are hardest to reach with literacy programmes will be the ones least likely to get access to mobile technology too. And the spread of mobile phones may slow down. And data from Africa, particularly when added up across the whole continent, is notoriously unreliable (there are just two data points for adult literacy, for example, in 2000 and 2008, so that line at least may well be a bit off).
But it does show a problem. This graph shows that while we’re probably right to get excited by the possiblities offered by new technology, those same technologies might make the old problems more rather than less important.
(with thanks to Alex Evans, it was a conversation with him back in September which got me wondering about this)
