Well-crafted narrative history of Nazi Germany's relentless bombing campaign against Britain during World War 2 centered on Winston Churchill, his family and various hangers on. Larson isn't a historian and this isn't intended to be an acadmeic history of the period (and can veer into outright hagiography at times) but it is nonetheless an engaging read. The thing that I found really interesting was the awkward courthsip between Britain and the US prior to the US entering the war. It was…
The rise and fall and rise again of Etherium and the cryptocurrency ecosystem more generally. Written by a Bloomberg journalist so her grasp of the technical issues is a bit tenuous but informative on the organization and sociological phenomenon. Something about this story speaks to a more general theory of innovation. New technologies are often adopted “too fast” in the sense that they are used for some rather important things before they are fully mature and cracks in the…
Xi Jinping has been at the helm of a third revolution in the evolution of the Chinese State, the first two revolutions being the communist revolution in 1949 and the reforms started under the rule of Deng Xiaoping starting in the late 1970s. In some sense it is two separate trends, the re-centralization of power and authority in the central government which is largely an undoing of the decentralization under Deng Xiaoping and his successors and China stepping into a more assertive role on the…
