Global R&D race, KwaZulu visions of the jet age, single-parenting in America & Hegel's world revolutions

Great links, reading. andimages from Chartbook newsletter by Adam Tooze

The artist Tito Zungu was born somewhere between 1939 and 1946 in the Thukela valley, Maphumulo in KwaZulu-Natal. He never acquired a formal education. He was like so many others of his time. He worked on a farm as a labourer between 1957 and 1966. His love for the land permeated his entire life and defined the way he lived. He was a subsistence farmer and an artist. Visits were always prefaced by lengthy discussions about mielies, donkeys, goats, weather, and then art. He held a brief job at a dairy in Pinetown, just outside of Durban. In 1970 Zungu moved to Durban to work for the Dominican Order as a cook. It is there that he began his artistic life which was tentatively encouraged by the nuns. Zungu had a prolific memory which he often referred to for subject matter in his drawings. The lyricism of his work, due to his acute storytelling ability was often at odds with our rational, driven society that pedalled fact rather than memory.

Source: Africanah Thank you to Fiona Rankin Smith for introducing me to his work at the Wits Art Museum

How America and China’s tech giants became global R&D leaders

Justin Fox at Bloomberg brilliant as ever

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A tale of two government bond markets: China v. USA

h/t Alice Evans

The lung cancer revolution

For subscribers only

How solar and wind are accelerating

For subscribers only

Coke Ovens, West Virginia John Vachon

Source: ICP

Source: Revisions

“Chair a canon” - the French origins of the phrase: “cannon fodder”

the expression appears for the first time in literature under the pen of Chateaubriand, in the anti-Napoleonic pamphlet that he published in 1814 under the title De Buonaparte et des Bourbons. "It had come to this point of contempt for the lives of men and for France, of calling the conscripts raw material and cannon fodder," he wrote, which seems to indicate that the expression was used, if we believe it, by the population. But it is this accusation of "contempt for human life" that is repeated in every war.

In France, the term dotted the Republican press from 1870 to accuse the officers of Napoleon III's army of allowing soldiers to be exposed to the fire of Krupp cannons; its use intensified during and after the war of 1914 against the generals who would send the soldiers without flinching to be massacred on the barbed wire of the German trenches. 

Source: Le Monde h/t google translate. Looked it up because I was struck by the French usage in War and Peace, written in the 1860.

Only in Vegas? Or somehow associated with Bikini Atoll?

A book I am really excited about

G.W.F. Hegel was widely seen as the greatest philosopher of his age. Ever since, his work has shaped debates about issues as varied as religion, aesthetics and metaphysics. His most lasting contribution was his vision of history and politics. In Hegel’s World Revolutions, Richard Bourke returns to Hegel’s original arguments, clarifying their true import and illuminating their relevance to contemporary society. Bourke shows that central to Hegel’s thought was his anatomy of the modern world. On the one hand he claimed that modernity was a deliverance from subjection, but on the other he saw it as having unleashed the spirit of critical reflection. Bourke explores this predicament in terms of a series of world revolutions that Hegel believed had ushered in the rise of civil society and the emergence of the constitutional state. Bourke interprets Hegel’s thought, with particular reference to his philosophy of history, placing it in the context of his own time. He then recounts the reception of Hegel’s political ideas, largely over the course of the twentieth century. Countering the postwar revolt against Hegel, Bourke argues that his disparagement by major philosophers has impoverished our approach to history and politics alike. Challenging the condescension of leading thinkers—from Heidegger and Popper to Lévi-Strauss and Foucault—the book revises prevailing views of the relationship between historical ideas and present circumstances.

Out in October 2023 with Princeton UP

Tito Zungu, Source: Revisions