Добавил:
ivanov666
Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.
Вуз:
Предмет:
Файл:Speak and Write like The Economist говори и пиши как The Economist
.pdf
Food, wine, fun, joy, pleasure, luck, beauty, happiness
“A good neighbour lends you a cup of sugar,” read an ad in the
Washington Post last month. “A great neighbour supplies you
with 1.4 million barrels of oil a day.”
Weeds like dandelions which you can fi nd all over the world and which
nobody really gives a second glance to are the happiest.
If yogurt is strategic for the French, olive oil has the same exalted
status in Spain.
By tradition a British butcher is a jolly chap; and few could be jollier than
a man whose life was devoted, fi rst, to making the perfect sausage, and,
second, to matching it with the perfect foaming pint.
In Arthur Miller’s 1949 play “Death of a Salesman”, Happy’s
dream was a simple one: “My own apartment, a car, and plenty
of women.”
Early Hindu mythology held that pearls were made from dewdrops that
the pearl mollusc absorbed when it rose to the surface of the sea at night
to breathe.
Roquefort, camembert, brie de Meaux, Saint-Félicien, gruyère,
comté, münster, pont l’évêque, cantal, reblochon, tomme de
Savoie, crottin de chavignol. A spontaneous familiarity with the
display on a three-tier cheese trolley is essential to the national
identity of the French.
The Chinese love pork and as their incomes soar they want it more than
ever. A domestic herd of 476m pigs, around half of the global pig population, already seems insuffi cient; China has been a net importer of pork
since 2008.
Wisconsin state law prohibits selling milk to the public without
pasteurising it fi rst. But Mr Hershberger tried to get around this
stricture by setting up a “club” which provided raw milk (also
known as “moo-shine”) to its members— until state food inspectors raided his farm, destroyed the milk they found and put him
on trial.
Most Britons would rather eat scorpions rather than Hershey bars.
There is a large Greek fl y in the ointment.
61
Часть I
Spain is the Saudi Arabia of olive oil, accounting for nearly half of global
production.
California has been eating its “seed corn”.
Recipes are like fl ying buttresses, you fi nd out whether they work only
by trying them out: no souffl éd sandwiches, no Chartres cathedral.
As Mrs Obama writes in her new book, “American Grown”, not
since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden during the second world
war had anyone grown food on the White House lawn. And what
a garden it is. Pak choi in springtime! Tomatillos in the summer!
Seventy thousand bees producing hundreds of pounds of honey
to donate to local homeless shelters and give to “visiting dignitaries and heads of state”!
Ataturk’s aphorism: “Happy is he who calls himself a Turk.”
Louis XIII cognac is a blend of up to 1200 different eaux-de-vie
aged between 40 and 100 years old and the prices are starting
from $1.500— to $40.000 for a magnum of the Black Pearl edition.
In making cookies, does the use of butter or margarine affect the size of
the cookie?
France’s tradition of making exquisite luxuries dates back at least
to the court of Louis XIV. The sun king fi nanced ébénistes (cabinet-makers), tapisseurs (upholsterers), menuisiers (carpenters)
and other artisans who made beautiful and largely useless things
for the court of Versailles. Bernard Arnault might be his heir.
Cases of Westvleteren 12, on sale at €39 ($53) at the Trappist Abbey of
St Sixtus of Westvleteren, turn up on online beer-sellers for as much
as $800. (Ina rare easing of the rules, in November the monks released
abatch of 93,000 six-packs for the Belgian market, to pay for repairs to
the abbey. Next year 70,000 six-packs will go on sale worldwide.) Beer is
to Belgium as wine is to France.
Johnnie Walker’s labels make it abundantly clear how much
acustomer has spent. Red Label is the cheapest. Black is pricier,
followed by Green, Gold and Blue. Beyond Blue is King George V,
which sells for more than $500 a bottle. Criminals in South Africa
62
Food, wine, fun, joy, pleasure, luck, beauty, happiness
buy it to prove they are successful criminals. The ruling class in
Angola is another promising market.
How in God’s name can Itell the difference between Scotch and Bourbon? They are all bottles, aren’t they?
No one likes to think about who was in their hotel room before them, let
alone what they got up to. The best to hope for is that your lodgings are
clean and hygienic. But are they? The TV remote control and the bedsidelamp switch are among the most contaminated.
When in a party mood, who trusts the Party?
If you are going to use GPS to take you to a location, sonar to identify the
fi sh and a lure which refl ects light that humans can’t even see, you may
as well just go to McDonald’s and order a fi sh sandwich.
The conversation of the French salons and dinner tables became
as stylised as a ballet. The basic skills brought to the table were
expected to include politesse (sincere good manners), esprit (wit),
galanterie (gallantry), complaisance (obligingness), enjouement
(cheerfulness) and fl atterie. More specifi c techniques would be
required as the conversation took fl ight. A comic mood would require displays of raillerie (playful teasing), plaisanterie (joking),
bons mots (epigrams), traits and pointes (rhetorical fi gures involving “subtle, unexpected wit”, according to Benedetta Craveri,
a historian of the period), and, later, persifl age (mocking under
the guise of praising). Even silences had to be fi nely judged. The
Duc de La Rochefoucauld distinguished between an “eloquent” silence, a “mocking” silence and a “respectful” silence. The mastery
of such “airs and tones”, he said, was “granted to few”.
The results, to be published in Evolution and Human Behaviour, show
that the men and women collected on average about the same weight
of mushrooms. But the men travelled farther, climbed higher and used
alot more energy-70% more than the women. The men did not move any
faster, but they searched for spots with lots of mushrooms.
Greenland sharks cannot help but capture the imagination. These
primeval inhabitants of the deep, icy waters of the North Atlantic
and Arctic oceans can live to 400, possibly even 500 years old,
are cigar shaped, and often have worm-like parasites on their luminous eyes that are said to hypnotise their prey. Their bodies
63
Часть I
are covered with razor-like “skin teeth” and their meat contains
a toxin; people who eat it start to hallucinate, become incoherent
and stagger around, becoming “shark drunk”.
The economists of his day took their cue from Jeremy Bentham and his
“utilitarian” philosophy. They calculated happiness, or utility, as the sum
of good feelings minus bad, and argued that the pursuit of pleasure and
the avoidance of pain were the sole springs of human action. One even
looked forward to the invention of a hedonimeter, a “psychophysical machine” that would record the ups and downs of a man’s feelings just as
a thermo meter might plot his temperature. Such people, Carlyle complained, fancied that man was a “dead Iron-Balance for weighing Pains
and Pleasures on”.
Botox was used 336,834 times by American men in 2010, up 9%
from 2009, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
But women are still 15 times more likely than men to have their
faces frozen.
I’m on a seafood diet— Isee food and Ieat it.
As anyone who has been to Japan knows, there are strict rules
about bathing in onsen, or hot springs. Bodies must be scrubbed
beforehand, swimming trunks are banned and tattoos are taboo.
He is a pescatarian, i. e. a vegetarian who eats fi sh.
More voters come to believe that Fidesz and its friends, just like
their Socialist predecessors, have carved up Hungary among
themselves as if it were a giant salami.
In ancient China suspected liars were sometimes required to hold rice
in their mouths while their alleged misdemeanours were read out. A dry
mouth was thought to be a symptom of a guilty conscience, so subsequent
examination of the rice offered an easy indication as to innocence or guilt.
The idea that lying produces physical symptoms found its modern expression in America in the early 20th century, with the invention of the polygraph, the “lie detector” so beloved of spy fi lms and pulp detective novels.
Demand for lobsters, for example, has evolved in a curious way.
The armour-plated delicacy used to be super-abundant and dirt
cheap, he says— so cheap that it was fed to inmates in prison and
children in orphanages. Farmers even fertilised their fi elds with
64
Food, wine, fun, joy, pleasure, luck, beauty, happiness
it, and servants would bargain with their employers to be given it
no more than twice or thrice a week.
Oxfam, an aid agency, warns of a humanitarian disaster, with more than
1m children facing severe malnutrition. Villagers in Chad already dig up
ant hills to gather grain the ants have stored.
All that glisters is not gadolinium.
Champagne socialism.
The euphemism now lies buried beneath the rubble of reality.
Starbucks provides a comfortable environment, at considerable expense, so that people will buy overpriced coffee.
The main factor s1eparating success and failure of great strategies is luck.
The food was good, but not the mood.
This combination of challenges and opportunities is producing a
fi zzing cocktail of creativity.
The British have embraced the Liberal Democrats, lampooned not so
long ago as gently eccentric granola-eaters and sandal-wearers.
Sparkling wines does not appear to work in stouts.
Useless as a chocolate teapot.
In the world of wine (regarded as an art form by at least some
connoisseurs), being told the price of a bottle affects a drinker’s
appreciation of the liquid in the glass in ways that can be detected
by a brain scanner.
Surely you know what a blue-plate is, man? They shove the whole meat
at you under your nose, already dished up on your plate— roast turkey, cranberry sauce, sausages and carrots and Grench fried. Ican’t bear
French fried, but there’s no pick and choose with a blue-plate.
But one constant would remain through all of this fuss about
whether Marmite is vegetarian, or baked beans kosher or halal.
65
Часть I
Charles de Gaulle once said that the graveyards are full of indispensable
men. The same can be said of the bars of Los Angeles and Paris.
in 1795 Napoleon offered a prize to preserve food for his army,
which led to the canned food of today.
Indeed, there are enough sour grapes in these pages to fi ll an entire vineyard.
If you use a public toilet and it’s dirty, clean it, otherwise those
who come after you will think you dirtied it.
It takes roughly 3,000 litres of water to grow enough food for one person
for one day, or about one litre for each calorie. Don’t paint a snake with
legs, the Chinese will say, when someone is in danger of spoiling something by overdoing it.
But the last word on Steve Irwin seemed to belong to Africa’s
greatest crocodile-hunter, Khalid Hassen, bagger of 17,000 crocs
the easy way, with a rifl e, who said it simply didn’t seem right that
a fi sh should have killed him.
“We say it is higher than the mountains, deeper than the oceans, stronger
than steel, dearer than eyesight, sweeter than honey, and so on.”
Even where there is enough food, people do not seem healthier.
On top of 1 billion without enough calories, another 1 billion are
malnourished in the sense that they lack micro-nutrients (this
is often called “hidden hunger”). And a further 1 billion are malnourished in the sense that they eat too much and are obese. It is
a damning record: out of the world population of 7 billion, 3billion eat too little, too unhealthily, or too much.
The connection between humour and Jews is so strong as to be almost
axiomatic and it as similar to “French cuisine” or “Turkish baths”.
George Bernard Shaw once wrote: “There is no love sincerer than
the love of food.”
In his “Autobiography” John Stuart Mill argued that the best way to attain happiness is not to make happiness your “direct end”, but to fi x your
mind on something else. Happiness is the incidental by-product of pursuing some other worthy goal.
66
Government, politics, democracy, society
Around 15,400 tonnes a year, a whopping 80% of all antibiotics
sold, go to farmers. Chicken farmers use even more than those
who raise cattle or pigs. Only a small percentage of the drugs are
used to cure illnesses.
Women aged 25–44 spend almost as much time shopping as they do eating and drinking.
You never expected Nelson Mandela or Gandhi to dress smartly.
Government, politics, democracy,
society
“
If politicians were recyclable, they’d be worth less than cardboard.
Many moons ago Lyndon Johnson was widely quoted as justifying his unwillingness to sack J. Edgar Hoover as the head of the
FBI, on the ground that “it’s probably better to have him inside the
tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in”.
“If you look into the crystal ball,” says an experienced pollster, “you’ve
got to be ready to eat ground glass.” Some put Hillary Clinton’s chance
of victory against Mr Trump above 99%.
One quick question: do you know what a mugwump is?
Was the American Revolution not a civil war within the British empire?
The fi rst rule of politics: don’t kick your most faithful voters in the
teeth for no reason.
Nobody reads party manifestos.
A fi gure of between 100 and 200 acquaintances is similar to the
number of people with whom a human being can maintain a
meaningful social relationship — a value known as Dunbar’s
number, after Robin Dunbar, the psychologist who proposed it.
Dunbar’s number for people is about 150.
67
Часть I
This has encouraged a notion that the nominees are as bad as each
other— Hillary and Trump are Coke and Pepsi, both bad for you.
The proportion of Britons telling pollsters that they almost never trust
the government has risen from one in ten in 1986 to one in three today.
A more open, accessible imperial family has transformed the
monarchy’s appeal after the aloofness of Hirohito— even if it will
be a while yet before the royals bicycle to the supermarket like
Scandinavian ones.
Imagine an American election in which two-thirds of the senators and
three-quarters of the state governors up for re-election are defeated.
Itwould be a landside to end all landslides.
The whole purpose of having a drawbridge is that one can raise
or lower it as necessary depending upon the situation at hand.
Aproper castle requires a sensible fellow at the controls.
Donald Rumsfeld, a former American defence secretary, once delighted policy wonks everywhere by distinguishing between “known unknowns” — things we know we don’t know— and “unknown unknowns”.
China’s political system is a known unknown.
“When the end of the world is nigh,” Otto von Bismarck allegedly
said, “Iwill move to Mecklenburg, because everything happens
50 years later there.” Even locals agree that the north-eastern
state of Mecklenburg — West Pomerania will always be a backwater. But backwaters can also be bellwethers.
It feels as if Britain has been visited by a battalion of sorrows.
When Richard Nixon got cross with Gough Whitlam, the independent-minded Australian prime minister at the time, he put
Australia on his “shit list”.
There is a saying in Japan that a monkey that falls from a tree is still
amonkey, but a member of parliament who falls is a nobody.
Some legal scholars have, rather valiantly, cited as precedent
Benjamin Franklin’s seeking Congress’s approval before accepting a jewel-encrusted snuffbox from the king of France as a retirement gift.
68
Government, politics, democracy, society
America already spends $19bn a year on immigration enforcement,
more than on the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Drug Enforcement
Agency and Secret Service combined.
The farther you live from a railway station, the more you are likely to vote FN (National Front).
Governments that were digitally blind when the internet fi rst took off in
the mid-1990s now have both a telescope and a microscope.
Multiplying parties can allow politicians to hide the fact that
what matters is patronage. Voters may be bewildered when confronted with the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s
Front— or with National Liberals, Democratic Liberals and Liberal Reformists, as they were in Romania in 2014.
The US prison system that, after decades of relentless growth, holds over
20% of the world’s prisoners, though America is home to less than 5%
of the global population. Every year, 600,000 people are released from
American prisons. More than half of all prisoners have mental health
problems, while about two-thirds did not complete high school. Once
out, ex-cons join about 70m Americans with criminal records, a status
which in several states will deny them public housing and the right to
vote, and legally bar them from occupations which require a licence,
such as hair-cutting or plumbing.
During the 20th century, a ghastly illness was almost a presidential
prerequisite. Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke in his second term
that his doctors concealed; Franklin Roosevelt’s heart problems
killed him while in offi ce; John F. Kennedy’s ailments could have
fi lled an entire medical textbook, had they been disclosed. Richard
Nixon’s anguish during Watergate placed a large nuclear arsenal
in the hands of a president who may temporarily have been of unsound mind. For the combination of sheer agony and high secrecy,
though, it is hard to beat the unfortunate Grover Cleveland. For four
days at the beginning of his second term, notes Robert Dallek of
Stanford University’s outpost in Washington, DC, he disappeared
to a yacht, where six surgeons cut out a portion of his cancerous
upper jaw. The offending bits were removed through his mouth
so as not to damage his moustache, which might alert the public.
Frederick the Great of Prussia declared: “No woman should ever be allowed to govern anything.”
69
Часть I
As Queen Elizabeth nears 90 after 64 years as its titular head,
some wonder if the Commonwealth club will survive when she
goes. Few knew much about it; a quarter of Jamaicans thought its
head was Barack Obama.
Roughly one adult Chinese in every 13 is a member of the Communist
Party, yet identifying such people can be diffi cult.
Mobutu Sese Seko, the late dictator of Zaire, used to reshuffl e
his cabinet every six months or so to show ministers who was
boss. To reinforce the point, he sometimes also slept with their
wives.
Excuse me, Mr. President, but you are an asshole.
Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, has
aname that is about as Scottish as a Dorset cream tea.
No Congress has ever moved to dislodge a president of the same party
as its majority tribe.
The Israeli government recently raised an interesting question
for advertisers: whom can you safely insult?
Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant, advised Republicans to use words
like “liberal”, “sick”, “corrupt” and “traitors” together, to tarnish the Democrats.
In London you’ve always had the Africans at the bottom of the
pile along with the West Indians. Then you get some Afghans.
Then the eastern Europeans coming up. Then you get the Asians.
Then you get the Irish. Then you get the whites. And at the very
top you get the rich. Where there is no race.
Bill de Blasio, New York’s mayor, was asked whether transgender women were allowed to swim during female-only hours. He had no quick
answer. That, he said, is under review.
Parliamentary committees are normally sleepy affairs.
Queens, the researchers found, were more likely to gain new territory.
After overthrowing her husband, Catherine the Great expanded her empire by some 200,000 square miles (518,000 sq km), which is a lot of terri-
70
Соседние файлы в предмете [НЕСОРТИРОВАННОЕ]