Kafka In Amadora

Following Toby Young’s article on funerals and the letter last week, I thought you might like to hear another example of British phlegm. My stepson, who is now a successful theatre director, was an assistant at Chichester Theatre. The audience tends to be predominantly pensioners. A few years ago when he was closing up the theatre, he noticed two people still in their seats. When he approached them the lady was very apologetic. ‘I think my husband died in the first act,’ she said, ‘but we didn’t want to cause a fuss.’ He was indeed declared dead on arrival at the hospital, and my stepson could not but admire her stoicism. I particularly admired the fact that she thought ‘we’ didn’t want to cause a fuss. - https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/letters-19-april-2018

If ethnic Italians were no longer a majority in Italy, would it still be Italy? Does it matter that ethnic British are no longer a majority in London? Would it matter if they weren't in Britain? Would it be a problem if ethnic Ugandans ceased to be a majority in Uganda, and Europeans overtook them? These are all essentially the same question, though the answers might feel different in each case. They are all asking about the relationship between an ethnic group and its home country, and about the meaning of becoming a minority in the country it considers its own. Does being the majority ethnic group in a country carry any moral or political significance? Is it something which an ethnic group may legitimately aim to preserve? How does this interact with ideas of racism—the taboo par excellence of post-war Western culture? Ethnicity and race are typically avoided these days when thinking about the constitutive features of a nation or state, particularly Western ones. In their pla

It's been said that software is "eating the world." More and more, critical systems that were once controlled mechanically, or by people, are coming to depend on code. This was perhaps never clearer than in the summer of 2015, when on a single day, United Airlines grounded its fleet because of a problem with its departure-management system; trading was suspended on the New York Stock Exchange after an upgrade; the front page of The Wall Street Journal's website crashed; and Seattle's 911 system went down. The simultaneous failure of so many software systems smelled at first of a coordinated cyberattack. Almost more frightening was the realization, late in the day, that it was just a coincidence. Software is special. Just by editing the text in a file somewhere, the same hunk of silicon can become an autopilot or an inventory-control system. This flexibility is software's miracle, and its curse. Because it can be changed cheaply, software is constantly ch