We took our visiting 12-year-old granddaughter out to dinner last night, and she insisted on ordering edamame, which I too love. I discovered it at age 60 and would never have seen it in the U.S. at age 12 in 1955. Earlier in the day, I had bought a cherimoya at the local grocery store.
The globalization of the economics profession is remarkable. I was chatting with a new Ph.D. from the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany. He did his undergraduate work in Shanghai, China; he went to Denver, USA, to attend the American Economic Association job market; and he just had a job visit to Monash University in Australia. Thus, his educational background and job activities span 4 continents!
What’s behind Germany’s economic success? It’s not a wirtschaftswunder; The Economist explains.
David Singh Grewal, an Eliot Fellow in the Social Sciences at Harvard University, is author of the book Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization, in which he explores, among other topics, the relationship between language, networks, and globalization. In the wake of the recent quorum we ran on this very subject, David has agreed to guest blog here. We . . .
The headline says it all, although the unspoken question is: will globalization indeed result in the hegemony of English, as has long been promised/threatened? We gathered up some wise people who spend their time thinking about such things — Christian Rolling, Mark Liberman, Henry Hitchings, and John Hayden — and asked them to answer our question. Many thanks for their . . .
Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio. Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio sat down to a meal with 30 families in 24 countries, photographing their one-week food intake and talking to them about food, dieting, and shopping habits for their 2005 book Hungry Planet. One U.S. family, after seeing a photograph of a week’s worth of their groceries, decided to make some . . .
From reader Paul O’Keef: Architectural Record reports that India’s richest man is building a sixty-story house for his family, including six floors for parking, a health club and a rooftop helipad. The University of Georgia is offering a new incentive to make student-athletes show up for class: fining them $10 per unexcused absence. In the policy’s first month, the number . . .
Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post has a funny take on the notion of outsourced journalism, taking off on a real story — about Indian journalists covering town meetings in Pasadena — that we blogged about here. You may recall that Weingarten is the same journalist who wrote the fantastic piece about world-class violinist Joshua Bell‘s undercover concert in a . . .
With global warming having become Topic No. 1 of so many discussions, to me the big question is the degree to which behavioral changes are produced on three separate levels: 1. The individual level — where change seems well underway, but probably won’t amount to all that much without major institutional/structural changes. 2. The governmental level — where change will . . .
Pasadena Now, a news Web site devoted to local coverage of the Pasadena region, has taken the term “outsourcing” to new heights, hiring two reporters in India (one of whom graduated from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism) to cover the goings-on of the Pasadena City Council from 9,000 miles away. The goal, according to editor and publisher James . . .