I recently watched John Cena’s Peacemaker S2. To my mind, DC’s best recent work, Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker notwithstanding. It aired around the same time as John Cena’s WWE retirement tour, and I couldn’t help but notice the overlap of Cena’s WWE persona and the character – flawed, often clueless, but fundamentally good-hearted. Not everyone saw it that way though. A minority commented on his past politics in WWE, how he’d used his power to hold others back. Fair, I thought. But incomplete.
Just so we are clear, the scope of this book is only the US, the rest of the world will have to figure its own way to abundance, though we might learn a few tricks from this. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wonder why, for all its enormous wealth and technological capability, the US cannot address the fundamental human problems of hunger, homelessness, life-threatening diseases, and fuel an equitable world with clean energy.
Indeed, the introductory chapter ‘Beyond scarcity’ does imagine an utopian world really well. And it’s clear that it isn’t technology that is stopping us. Sigh.
Kannur was only a vague plan for some other time, until Theyyam became a bucket list item for D. Then we got hold of a schedule and a guide and landed in Kannur. Well, actually our Kannur flight got canceled, and we landed in Calicut, but that was a minor inconvenience. Passing by many places we only knew by name was a nice experience too.
Where to stay in Kannur
We had originally booked a place called Anansa Boutique Hotel but they canceled us a couple of months before the trip. Ah well. That got us to Sunfun. Our room was on the top floor, and only just ok, but the rooms on the first floor looked a lot better.
As someone who has worked with founders in the startup space for over a decade and a half, the megalomania, the lack of empathy, and the moral bankruptcy in Careless People all seemed familiar. But Sarah Wynn-Williams’s first person account is about arguably the biggest phenomenon that has hit culture in the last decade and a half – social media, and specifically, the biggest player in it – Meta (then Facebook). She worked at Facebook from 2011 until her termination in 2017, the time when Facebook went from infancy to a full-blown global power base.
Andrea’s Brasserie happened because sometime in August we figured that Bangalore was done with the rains and we could safely visit Phoenix Mall of Asia without carrying swimming trunks. There are quite a few other options there, but many of them were also present in our suburb Phoenix, and we weren’t in the mood for Asian. (though my nieces had Bubble Tea and Korean snacks to prepare their appetites!)
The place is fairly compact, but I liked what they did with it – the peppiness of the decor and the comfortable seating made it seem more expansive than it was. We chose a cosy, corner.
