Kevin Keller

Punching, Slamming, Screaming: A Chef’s Past Abuse Haunts Noma, the World’s Top-Rated Restaurant

Makes me fee better about academia

"When Mr. Redzepi wanted to discipline them but there were customers in the dining room, several employees said, he would crouch under the counters in the open kitchen and jab them in the legs with his fingers or a nearby utensil, like a barbecue fork."

What motivated foreign policy in Nigeria in the 1960s? And what can this tell us about post-colonial African history? Very interesting new piece by @chloemayoux.bsky.social !

The Profligate Colonial by Lisandro E. Claudio | Hardcover | Cornell University Press In The Profligate Colonial, Lisandro E. Claudio reveals how austerity, long before it became a buzzword of modern technocracy, was a tool of US empire.Austerity is often praised as prudence in hard...

Also, reminds of this great, recent book by Lisandro Claudio about the history of austerity in the Philippines. We can't heap all the blame on the IMF!

Terrific piece. Must add the latest book from @seanvanatta.bsky.social and @petercontibrown.bsky.social to my reading list.

(And, as scare quotes suggest, we should be careful about saying what "worked." There are a lot of rickety stories out there. We must listen to historians and their revisionist takes! 😤)

I especially agree on the need to reject two premises that prop up a lot of research and programming: (i) that societies behave like machines, and (ii) that approaches that "worked" in the US or Europe should be applied elsewhere.

Polytunity - The Ideas Letter “Polycrisis” has become a ubiquitous descriptor for the multisector, intersecting problems afflicting the world—but the term masks the systemic nature of these crises and overwhelmingly reflects Euroc...

Fascinating piece by Yuen Yuen Ang -- that our current moment is not a "polycrisis," but a "polytunity."

Child’s homemade do not disturb sign

Tempted to steal my daughter’s sign for my office door…

The Misuses of the University - Public Books Have the funds that might have trained the next generation of scholars at the nation’s first research university have been blown on ostentatious new buildings?

Johns Hopkins only has 84 classrooms?

Read more here! (My author page; the paper page is not working 😎) papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/...

This is obviously one piece of a very large puzzle. But it's an interesting piece. It improves our understanding of how the global economy worked during the era of "neoliberalism," and it suggests new reasons for the current global turn to state capitalism.

I describe how the World Bank in the 1980s and 1990s helped Chinese leaders reform and strengthen state-owned enterprises. This is interesting because across much of the rest of the Global South, the World Bank (together with the IMF) pushed strongly for privatization.

How did Chinese state-owned enterprises become some of the world's largest corporations? My latest paper (finally posted on SSRN!) tackles the question.