David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Mankind is a tour de force and intellectual feast. I finally finished it over the holidays. There are many write-ups on the book out there, but I add my short one below for the record.
Hangzhou, China
I am a development finance professional and urban economic historian based in Sydney. Below find scribbles from my inchoate explorations in space and time.
New Town Housing in Burma
By the dictates of closing browser tabs, I just wanted to jot down a very small number of reading notes on this gem of a PDF I found when researching post-independence South Asian New Town designs. Continue reading
Sydney
It’s almost been a year that we have moved down under from Thailand. Moving countries doesn’t get easier the more one does it (I find, at least), but now it seems more and more to me that we’ve “arrived” here. Continue reading
FX liquidity situation in Bangladesh
For record keeping, here the abstract of a short piece I wrote on Bangladesh for my day job: “The FX liquidity of Bangladesh’s banking sector has been deteriorating significantly recently. Apart from sector-wide data and anecdotal evidence, the exposure of individual banks can be estimated by weighing the relative mix of the various constituents of the banks’ FX businesses (import, export, remittances). A challenging macroeconomic outlook is set to put further pressure on the banks’ FX position going forward.”
Urban indicators of living standards
I have decided to distil one more article out of my dissertation and then call it quits. I want to focus on the measurement of urban living standards and the “civil minimum” as well as other innovations carried out by TMG in the late 1960s and early 1970s chiefly under the Minobe administration. Continue reading
Giving effectively
Writing a blog post is often related to that feeling of having too many browser tabs open. Before I close them, I wanted to jot down some unstructured thoughts on my recent reading around effective altruism (EA). Continue reading
Wrapping up the publications
With my piece on the 1967 Robson Report forthcoming, I am nearing the final stretches of publishing the research of my dissertation in peer-reviewed journals. Finishing my PhD in three years from 2015-18, I wasn’t able to do it while engaged in my doctoral research. This was fortuitous in hindsight (I am biased of course) as it kept me from being distracted by the vagaries of scientific publishing. It would have made both processes–the publishing and the research–longer and altered the final product significantly. Continue reading
Happy birthday blog!
I am a little early, but who knows how October will pan out this year. So, happy birthday blog! It’s been ten years since I wrote my first post on “Art Space Tokyo”, followed by countless more. Time to reflect and look ahead. Continue reading
New intellectual ventures
Having a little more mental space –a major paper on the Robson Reports is currently under review with an academic journal and work is still in summer mode– I have had some time to think about new potential intellectual ventures, or “future ideas”, as this category on the blog is called. Continue reading
Memory and space
For the walker in Tokyo, the unexpected is always waiting (Jinnai Hidenobu)
Craig Mod is a publisher / artist / entrepreneur and flaneur whose newsletters I follow. He is based in Tokyo and accompanies his regular dispatches with great photography in which he captures details of the Japanese capital that are sometimes hard to describe in words.
His most recent “pop up” mailing list was a weeklong walking tour through the Tokyo of his memories. I was reminded of some of the academic stuff I have been teaching my students at Temple about space and memory, but also of my own time in the city.