Watching the dizzying descent of Sri Lanka into pure and utter chaos has been a sobering experience. I remember visiting Colombo a few years ago and being impressed by the relaxed and welcoming vibe the city gave off. It is remarkable how just a few economic and political blows were enough to bring an entire country down to its knees.
What’s even more remarkable is the complete lack of coverage that the country seems to be getting in international prestige media publications. I am sure we will see writers over at NYT, Washington Post, Guardian etc grafting their own culture war positions onto the fall of Sri Lanka pretty soon. In the meantime, today’s NIV features a brilliant write-up on how organic farming devastated Sri Lanka’s economy.
Links of the Week
Geopolitics - How organic farming went catastrophically wrong in Sri Lanka. (Link)
The numbers are shocking. One-third of Sri Lanka’s farm lands were dormant in 2021 due to the fertilizer ban. Over 90% of Sri Lanka’s farmers had used chemical fertilizers before they were banned. After they were banned, an astonishing 85% experienced crop losses. After the fertilizer ban, rice production fell 20% and prices skyrocketed 50 percent in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice despite having been self-sufficient in the grain just months earlier. The price of carrots and tomatoes rose five-fold.
Noah Smith also has a great explainer of the currency crisis that actually underpinned the economic collapse in Sri Lanka.
Investing - On the meteoric rise and the equally steep fall of Cathie Wood’s ARK fund. Berkshire Hathaway remains undefeated. (Link)
In an industry loath to make guarantees about the future, Wood’s brand was like price-prediction porn: To hear her talk was to feel your mind liquefy in a clickbait-like flood of dopamine-inducing buzzwords — her portfolio a cornucopia of self-driving cars, crypto, genomic cancer cures, AI, streaming, and gaming. She told risk-drunk investors exactly what they wanted to hear. In her view, it seemed, tech stocks only went up and to the right.
Startups - A profile of the defense-tech startup Anduril and its idiosyncratic founder Palmer Luckey, who is deeply underrated in my opinion. (Link)
“Smart people, especially engineers, want to be around Palmer because he’s electric,” says Stephens, who’s chairman of the company. Luckey’s creativity is chaotic, he adds, but his fellow founders are there as bumper guards. “He is, when channeled appropriately, unstoppable.”
Interview - Tyler Cowen and Marc Andreesen are two of the smartest people I have read. So when Tyler interviews Marc, you know it’s going to be good. As Tyler would say, self-recommending. (Link)
Empires — fun historical fact: The Roman Empire was not run out of offices. They ran the world, yet there was no office. There was no office building. The Roman aristocrats worked out of their homes, and then they went to the Senate, and then [laughs] they went to their country house. There was no office building for administering the Roman Empire. I don’t know about the British Empire. I’m guessing they probably didn’t have a lot of offices. They maybe had a couple of offices in London, but they probably didn’t have a lot of offices either.
History - On the secrets being uncovered from the Antikythera shipwreck. Fascinating throughout. Also a sobering check on how confident we should feel about ancient history in general. (Link)
Since then, the Antikythera site has yielded items that have provided insight into ancient Roman history, economics, technology and art. Researchers speculate that a device that was previously discovered there, which was named after the island, may have been used for navigation and astronomy; it has even been called “the first computer” by some researchers.
Food - How sattu is emerging as the next big street food craze. As a Bihari, I just want to say: about time. (Link)
The health-conscious across Indian metros such as Delhi and Bangalore are also discovering the delights of sattu in high-end restaurants, where chefs are adding contemporary spins to the rustic recipes by incorporating grated cheese to the dough or lending a tangy twist with pickles. The trend has caught on in gourmet stores too, where sattu is offered in fancy packaging starting from Rs 190 (about £2) per kg, which is about 2.5 times costlier than the time-tested varieties used in the street stalls.
Movies - A delightful review of the movie Margin Call. I love reviews where the sheer love the reviewer has for the movie in question comes through in every word of the article. (Link)
This, to me, is the main attraction of Margin Call. It’s a movie that takes work — office work, people sitting at desks typing stuff into laptops — seriously, as an activity with moral significance. And what sets it apart from other films, even some other halogencore films, is that the moral questions it asks are about the work itself, not some extreme violation outside that work’s code of ethics.
Happy reading!