#simon kuper

We should be worried about immigrants – though not necessarily the ones the MAGA crazies are hysterical about.

Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Rupert Murdoch were not born in the US. Seriously, real Americans are not named "Elon". 🤨

Musk fled from South Africa when the end to white minority rule under apartheid was in sight. German-born Peter Thiel also has apartheid connections. Simon Kuper at The Financial Times (non-paywall link) wrote about their apartheid associations. Thiel apparently called apartheid "economically sound".

Murdoch was already filthy rich as an Australian press baron. He brought his own brand of reactionary tabloid media to the UK before coming to the US. He became a US citizen in order to be able to own American TV stations. That's why we now have "Fox News".

All three are very much like classic James Bond villains. In fact, the Bond film "Tomorrow Never Dies" features a Murdoch-inspired media mogul named Elliot Carver who wants to start World War III in order to boost circulation.

Thiel is the least known of this foreign trio though he is arguably the most evil.

How Dangerous Is Peter Thiel?

Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power: Excerpt (archived)

In 1990 the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo published a short essay called Paris, Capital of the 21st Century. By the end of the 20th century, he had decided that Paris was exhausted. The city of avant gardes, ideas, revolutions and class struggle, which had defined so much of European and world history, was now no more than a museum. As almost a lifelong Parisian and a lover of the place, Goytisolo desperately wanted Paris in the 21st century to retake its place as a great metropolis. But this could only happen, he argued, if Paris reinvented itself by “de-Europeanising” itself. By this, he meant it had to look towards the world beyond Europe, welcoming its sometimes dissident non-French, non-European voices to make itself a truly global city. Only in this way could Paris be brought back to life.

More than 30 years on from that essay, Simon Kuper has written a book about what it has actually been like to live in Paris during the past two decades. I have lived in the city for exactly the same period, in the working-class district of Pernety, and seen all the changes that Kuper has. The view from Pernety and the view from his hipster right bank world have not always been the same. He often underestimates, for example, the severity of racial and class tensions in Paris. To his credit, however, he is always aware of his limitations as a foreigner and as an apprentice Parisian.

The author, a journalist for the Financial Times, begins by describing his arrival in the city in the early 00s, a refugee from extortionate property prices in London. He finds in Paris an alternative economic universe, where decent city centre apartments were affordable along with a good quality of life that wasn’t dependent on a big salary.

Initially, Kuper bought into the shibboleth that Paris was a dead place – economically moribund, artistically bankrupt, something very much like Goytisolo’s museum. Over the years and decades, however, as he settled in, established a family and a way of life, Kuper began to change his mind as he navigated the unpredictable joys and vicissitudes of Parisian daily life. This involved wrangling with tough neighbours, taking kids to football matches in the banlieues (the outer suburbs, which are definitely not museum-ified), learning schoolyard slang from his kids (which contains a surprising amount of street Arabic), dealing with his wife’s cancer diagnosis, negotiating the daunting French social security system and, perhaps hardest of all, learning how to act as a proper Parisian – a performance that demands mastery of an almost infinite number of behavioural codes.

Kuper is a self-confessed “Bobo”, a member of the middle-class elites and as such most of the behaviours he has to acquire revolve around the right way to wear clothes or making the right sort of conversation. Above all, you should never appear to be provincial (an old Gaulish word, plouc, is still used by Parisians to describe out-of-towners) or from the banlieues (wearing sports clothes is a giveaway). As he learns to be a local, however, Kuper can seem a little too pleased with himself and there are moments when, as he yet again cycles down a lovely cobbled street to another designer coffee shop, you wish he’d get a puncture.

Nonetheless, Kuper is a clear-eyed observer of the history that is happening all around him. He witnesses the revolt of the gilets jaunes, which he notes are in part a protest “against Paris itself” (against people such as Kuper, in fact), sees the burning of Notre Dame, sweats through historically unprecedented heatwaves and copes with the pandemic. The most momentous – and terrifying – event that marked Kuper’s Parisian life was the night of 13 November 2015, which no Parisian who lived through it will ever forget. He was in the Stade de France when the first bombs went off, the prelude to a night of massacre that finished with 130 innocent people dead. Ever the professional reporter, Kuper keeps his feelings to himself, until a few days later he cries in front of a friend, broken by the strain of living in a city that seemed about to go mad.

Now the Olympic Games are on the horizon and Paris looks set to announce itself again to the world as a global leader, as the multicultural city imagined by Juan Goytisolo. For all of the transformations of the past two decades, however, Kuper is always alert to the city’s particularity. This is the immutable essence – to be found in the daily pleasure of the menu du jour or just the snarky, nasal banter at your local zinc (bar) – that makes Parisians love their city, and foreigners such as Kuper (and me) love it even more.

John Lennon and Sir Paul McCartney at 20 Forthlin Road (Mike McCartney/PA)

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Simon Kuper: If you put together Anna Funder’s recent book on George Orwell with Jennifer Burns’ biography of Milton Friedman, an oddly similar story emerges. Both men, especially Friedman, co-created their most famous works with their wives. In Friedman’s case, with several other women besides. Orwell’s marriage to Eileen O’Shaughnessy seems to have prompted his best writing. She had written a dystopian poem about 1984 and helped convince him to turn his anti-Stalinism into a fable, Animal Farm. A little later, Friedman had the advantage over sexist male peers in realising that there were brilliant female economists who possessed few career options beyond working for him. To quote his wife Rose: “You can’t tell who wrote what, the style is the same throughout the books. I always tell people we work as one; we are one.” Funder and Burns have given forgotten women their place in history. But their findings also point to a truth that’s becoming evident about writing: often it’s collective rather than singular. The myth of the Great Writer creating in solitude is only sometimes true.

People have long understood that most acts of creation are collaborative: pop music, sport, films, inventing the atomic bomb. Only for books, especially fiction, does the presumption of the lone genius hang on. That might have surprised Shakespeare, who co-wrote some of his plays and adapted many from other writers’ work. But at some point, literature grew snooty about collaboration. Writers who did do it, like the two cousins who co-wrote detective stories under the name Ellery Queen, often pretended there was a single author. The author Malcolm Gladwell told Vanity Fair: “Writers . . . have this false ethic of originality. Whereas musicians are like, ‘Yeah, totally — we took this little bit from that song. And it’s inspired by this.’ I love how open they are about the fact that creativity is a collective enterprise. I want writers to be able to talk that way.”

Look at what happened when two musicians, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, co-wrote. They took collaboration for granted. Their biographer Hunter Davies, who had the unfathomable privilege of sitting in Paul’s house in Cavendish Avenue, St John’s Wood, watching them write “With a Little Help from my Friends”, recounts their method. They would sit there for hours, John playing the guitar and Paul “banging on the piano”, and when one of them thought up a line, they would edit it together. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” tried John, but there weren’t enough syllables for the melody. Paul added “a” in front of love, then John changed the opening to “Would you believe . . . ” While they were writing, visitors often dropped by — one friend sat reading a horoscope magazine — and John and Paul asked them for suggestions. The two would collaborate with anyone. Davies says that their assistant roadie Mal Evans, who wasn’t even a big Beatles fan, supposedly came up with the name “Sergeant Pepper”. Lennon and McCartney, equal parts inspiration and irritation, were better together, perhaps like Orwell and O’Shaughnessy.

This kind of literary collaboration made a comeback in our century. During the “golden age of streaming”, now ending, some great novelists co-wrote television series in writers’ rooms. Dramatists in Shakespeare’s time had worked in much the same way. In my brief glimpses of writers’ rooms, I saw the potential. One day, working on a fictional series that went nowhere, our team included an Italian woman who had been flown in for her expertise in writing female characters. Every writer has weaknesses and blind spots. A good writers’ room has fewer. No wonder that one of the most admired novelists of our time, Elena Ferrante, may in fact be a writers’ room. Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym. There is a whole genre of literary sleuthing devoted to uncovering who she is. In 2018, Rachel Donadio wrote an essay in The Atlantic magazine that possibly solved the mystery. Donadio suggested that Ferrante is at least two people: Anita Raja and her husband Domenico Starnone. Other writers and editors may have chipped in, too. After all, both Raja, as a literary translator, and Starnone, a successful screenwriter, had backgrounds in collaborative writing. Donadio also unearthed Starnone’s novel Autobiografia Erotica di Aristide Gambía, never published in English, which riffs on the mystery of Ferrante’s identity and laments a male author’s inability to create female characters. Perhaps Milton Friedman was also a writers’ room and (to a much lesser degree) Orwell. They should have just said so.

It seems that soccer tournaments create those relationships: people gathered together in pubs and living rooms, a whole country suddenly caring about the same event. A World Cup is the sort of common project that otherwise barely exists in modern societies.

- Simon Kuper, Soccernomics

One of the best books I’ve ever read on the economics and sociology of football to explain how the beautiful game has gripped nations across the globe unlike any other.

Football Book Recs | The Football Men by Simon Kuper A collection of essays profiling various football personalities.

from @planetmoney's #TheIndicator: The 28-Hour Work Week https://n.pr/2FnIyzT

A couple of weeks ago the biggest labor union in Germany negotiated a big new deal with hundreds of German companies. Workers didn't just get a raise, they also won the option of working just 28 hours a week for up to two years without losing ground in their careers.