It’s been a while since I did one of these, which leaves with plenty of material for your enjoyment. The Land Trap, by Mike Bird, a journalist working for the Economist, is my most recent non-fiction reads—or listen via Audible—and I enjoyed it. Mike’s book puts pen to paper on an idea that has rattled around in my head for a while. If we were to reinvent capitalism today—with our knowledge about the past few hundred years—we would likely treat land and real estate very differently from a financial and economic perspective. More specifically, we wouldn’t allow the speculation, securitisation and ultimately ownership concentration of land and housing that is a core feature of capitalist societies today.
Read MoreMy wife gave birth to our daughter, Veera, at the start of December, and it’s been a wild ride so far. Your job in the first few weeks and months, I now realise, is basically to keep your baby alive, which involves submitting yourself, and (in)famously your sleep patterns, to the needs of a lizard brain in a human suit that it has no control over. She feeds, sleeps, pees and poos, and screams in between all of these. More recently, she’s been doing mostly screaming.
Trying to look beyond this very intense period—and the miracle that my daughter is—can be difficult. People with children will tell budding parents that their life is about to permanently change, which is true, but in what way? It depends, I guess. Parenthood—in this case, fatherhood—is a strange initial feeling for me, best described as low-key dread and fear that something will go wrong and I won’t be able to help my daughter, mixed with a profound sense of responsibility. Cometh the hour, cometh the new father, I hope.
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