It sounds like a communist utopia, but a basic income program pioneered by German aid workers has helped alleviate poverty in a Nambian village. Crime is down and children can finally attend school. Only the local white farmers are unhappy.The full, red Namibian sun is setting outside his living room window, the workers are returning to their corrugated metal huts, and Siggi von Lüttwitz is hitting a wooden table with the palm of his hand to explain why the experiment cannot work. “They all drink, you know,” he says, smoking an unfiltered cigarette, “and if you give them 100 dollars, they’ll just drink more.” By “they” Lüttwitz means the people of Otjivero, a settlement adjacent to his farmland. And by “they” he means people who are poor and black. —“How a Basic Income Program Saved a Namibian Village,” Dialika Krahe, Spiegel Online
Inside Nero’s dining room, and his “excessive sexual lustings” (photos) (via);
the 1990s as history;
a recent Ph.D. tries to get on the tenure track
“Gott meiner,” said my father to my mother. “Again no money? But I gave you twelve dollars at the beginning of the week. What have you done with it?” —“Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” Saul Bellow, Granta
“Vooks” (not a racist slur) are the future of publishing;
Kim family, 1981;
photos from Nollywood film 666
“Anyone who spends any time inside football soon discovers that just as oil is part of the oil business, stupidity is part of the football business.” Well, football may not spend billions of pounds actively seeking out stupidity, piping, refining and selling it, but as Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski demonstrate over and over again in Why England Lose, it is certainly swimming in the stuff. —“The Profound Stupidity of Football,” David Goldblatt, Prospect
New building for poets in NYC;
candy leads to prison;
“Peppermint Mouthblast Now With Tartar Protection”