1. The disappearing virtual library Chris Kelty on the shutdown of Library.nu (as my friend @sepoy said on Twitter, “This is like the destruction of the library of Alexandria.” Couldn’t agree more.)

2. “It takes a lot of armour to drain an oil-soaked swamp” – The Economist’s less than critical piece on Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s  “co-ordinating minister for the economy and the minister of finance” (really, that is her full title). By the way, she is said to be a strong contender for the headship of the World Bank when Robert Zoellick’s term expires.

3. What happens at Davos? – Nick Paumgarten on the World Economic Forum. Hint: “Davos is, fundamentally, an exercise in corporate speed-dating”

4. Nice Brits wouldn’t lock up children who ask for help, would they? Stephanie Donald on child asylum seekers.

5. The Tuareg: Between Armed Uprising And Drought – by Baz Lecocq And Nadia Belalimat.

6. From Galactic’s new album Carnivale Electricos. Enjoy! 

2. What’s your flavour? Italian or Spanish? – BBC Business Editor

3. Black France - Africa is a country

4. The dangerous cocktail of global money and local politics – Moisés Naím

5. On Nigeria’s Petroleum Industries Bill – Mallam Nasir El-rufai

Werner Herzog, whose movie Nosferatu the Vampyre I saw over a long train ride a couple of weeks ago, talks at length about film-making, his new movie Into the Abyss, his hatred of capital punishment (one of the reasons he doesn’t want to apply for American citizenship), and how movies don’t change anything (he says that his movies tell stories, not make arguments; and ideologies and arguments belong in the political space, media, etc., not in movies).

It is hard not to be amused and even impressed by his idiosyncracies – he once ate his shoes after losing a bet, and he claims that the first thing he does when he walks into a room is to size everybody up and assess who of them could milk a cow. According to him, he could tell that Woody Allen couldn’t handle udders.

Well, check out the video above. Worth all the 25 minutes it takes to watch it.

H/T Open Culture

World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement,

In one kind of measuring, we find how big or small a thing is using a scale, beginning point and unit. Something is x feet long, weighs y pounds or takes z seconds. We can call this “ontic” measuring, after the word philosophers apply to existing objects or properties.

But there’s another way of measuring that does not involve placing something alongside a stick or on a scale. This is the kind of measurement that Plato described as “fitting.” This involves less an act than an experience: we sense that things don’t “measure up” to what they could be. This is the kind of measuring that good examples invite. Aristotle, for instance, called the truly moral person a “measure,” because our encounters with such a person show us our shortcomings. We might call this “ontological” measuring, after the word philosophers use to describe how something exists.

The distinction between the two ways of measuring is often overlooked, sometimes with disastrous results. In his book “The Mismeasure of Man,” Stephen Jay Gould recounted the costs, both to society and to human knowledge, of the misguided attempt to measure human intelligence with a single quantity like I.Q. or brain size. Intelligence is fundamentally misapprehended when seen as an isolatable entity rather than a complex ideal. So too is teaching ability when measured solely by student test scores.

Here.

Both Stewart and Mortenson illustrate one particular configuration of the relationship between knowledge and the American empire – the “non-expert” insider who can traverse that unknown terrain and, hence, become an “expert”.

Even a cursory examination of the archive dealing with the American efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan demonstrates that there has been no related growth in specific scholarly knowledge about those sites of conflict. The knowledge of Arabic, Urdu or Pashto remains at extremely low levels in official corridors. There is, one can surmise simply from reading the back and forth sway of military and political policy in Afghanistan, very little advancement in understanding of either the text or context of that nation.

In America’s imperial theatre, Stewart and Mortenson exemplify a singular notion of “expert”. We can build, based on the profiles of other specimens – Robert D Kaplan, Fareed Zakaria, Robert Kagan – a picture of what the ideal type looks like from the official point of view. Such an “expert” is usually one who has not studied the region, and especially not in any academic capacity. As a result, they do not possess any significant knowledge of its languages, histories or cultures. They are often vetted by the market, having produced a bestselling book or secured a job as a journalist with a major newspaper. They are not necessarily tied to the “official” narratives or understandings, and can even be portrayed as being “a critic” of the official policy. In other words, this profile fits one who doesn’t know enough.

At the same time there are greater claims, and greater efforts, towards satellite cameras and listening devices; drones which can hover for days; databases which can track all good Taliban and all bad Taliban. Yet who can decipher this data? When one considers the rise of “experts” such as Stewart or Mortenson against the growth of digitised data which remains elusive and overwhelming, one is left with a rather stark observation – that the American war effort prefers its human knowledge circumspect or circumscribed and its technical knowledge crudely totalised.

Continue reading here.

Manan Ahmed’s blog, Chapati Mystery, comes highly recommended.

2. Threat to bomb 3rd Mainland Bridge in Lagos? Yes, it has something to do with Boko Haram.

3. Why Nigeria recognised Libya transition council – Minister for foreign affairs explains

4. On Libyan revolutionaries and racism. See also Jina Moore on the same topic

5. On the failure of African Union to help the continent’s starving people

2. Why is China afraid of Lady Gaga?

3. Senegal under Wade

4. What the Harvard English department is frequently asked

5. NaijaLeaks: A sad decade of an ineffective anti-corruption crusade

2. Is Africa leaving Europe behind?

3. What do the sale figures of the $80 android smartphone in Kenya tell us about the future of the smartphone market?

4. Does marijuana make you stupid?

5. Who doesn’t want one of these?

2. The number of attempted suicides is five times as high among young Turkish-German women than their ethnic German counterparts – Der Spiegel

3. Dissent in China (on Chinese citizens’ response to the train crash in Wenzhou) – The Economist

4. Pakinstan’s “Buena Vista Social Club” tops charts with an interpretation of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five – The Guardian

5. On the reissue of Heinrich Böll’s novels by Melville House – LA Review of Books

2. Can stocks be safer than bonds (strange times, right?)

3. Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, formerly of World Bank, then of Nigeria’s finance ministry, then of World Bank, returns to take charge of Nigeria’s economy

4.  Commentary on Islamic finance in Nigeria

5. Robert Skidelsky’ – Life after Capitalism (Let me just quote Mark Twain: The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated).