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A novelistic biography makes Machiavelli into a Renaissance Zelig. He cracks Leonardo’s code! He listens to Michelangelo kvetch!

Book Review: ‘Machiavelli’ by Joseph Markulin

A novelistic biography makes Machiavelli into a Renaissance Zelig. He cracks Leonardo’s code! He listens to Michelangelo kvetch!

DAVID POLANSKY

Nov. 11, 2013 6:50 p.m. ET

The life of a great thinker presents unique challenges to a would-be biographer. Actions and events are the stuff of biographies, yet thoughts, not deeds, are what chiefly make the thinker of interest to us. As Heidegger reportedly said of Aristotle: “He lived, he wrote, he died.” Niccolò Machiavelli is that rare exception. To paraphrase “The Princess Bride,” his story gives us fighting, torture, poison, revenge, bad men, good men, conspiracies and miracles. All of which is to say that Machiavelli is more suited than most great thinkers for the novelistic treatment he receives in Joseph Markulin’s “Machiavelli: A Renaissance Life.” That this format is less successful than Sebastian de Grazia’s similarly idiosyncratic biography, “Machiavelli in Hell” (1989), is largely due to Mr. Markulin’s inability to manifest the great man’s ideas—to which all the dramatic episodes are secondary. Read more of this post

Black gold: A hundred years after the first excavations, the asphalt pools at Rancho La Brea, in Los Angeles, are still filling in details of life in the Pleistocene

Black gold: A hundred years after the first excavations, the asphalt pools at Rancho La Brea, in Los Angeles, are still filling in details of life in the Pleistocene

Nov 9th 2013 | Los Angeles |From the print edition

TO A parched mammoth or giant sloth, they must have looked heaven-sent: mirror pools of water waiting to slake a thirst. Heaven, however, was not their progenitor, for the pools were traps. Below their siren surfaces lay not mud, but tar. For thousands of years they lured thirsty animals, and also hungry ones—carnivores attracted by the calls of those already stuck—to their doom. Read more of this post

Foreigners Share What They Find Most Surprising About America

Foreigners Share What They Find Most Surprising About America

MADELINE STONE NOV. 11, 2013, 3:12 PM 20,435 31

The U.S. has historically had a huge immigrant population. But what makes American culture different from the countries immigrants are leaving? Foreigners, as well as others who happen to know people who are new to the U.S., have been using this Quora thread to share what they think makes America unique. Their answers to the question “What facts about the United States do foreigners not believe until they come to America?” were pretty fascinating. We’ve picked out some especially interesting tidbits.  Read more of this post

Iran’s supreme leader built a real estate empire on seized property

Iran’s supreme leader built a real estate empire on seized property

By Tim Fernholz @timfernholz 6 hours ago

When we found out that Iran had secretly owned a Manhattan skyscraper for decades, we knew the country’s rulers had a talent for moving money, but a new Reuters investigation has revealed a $95 billion corporate empire controlled by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. At least some of that revenue comes from the confiscation of property from religious minorities and other presumed enemies of the state, Reuters reports, and the organization, known in Farsi as Setad Ejraiye Farmane Hazrate, provides Iran’s supreme leader with significant economic clout and independence from the elected government. Iran’s parliament even declared that it would be prohibited from exercising any oversight over the Khamenei’s business interests in 2008. Read more of this post

Pay writers or we’ll pull ads, National Library tells arts website

Pay writers or we’ll pull ads, National Library tells arts website

November 12, 2013 – 12:05PM

Ben Butler

The National Library of Australia has threatened to pull its advertising from a new arts website run by Eric Beecher’s Private Media group unless it starts paying its writers. The Daily Review, an offshoot of Private Media’s popular website Crikey, launched yesterday amid controversy over its decision not to pay for contributions. In an open letter, arts writers, many of whom already write for blogs run by Crikey, have asked others not to contribute to the new site for free. Read more of this post

Managing Complexity Is the Epic Battle Between Emergence and Entropy

Managing Complexity Is the Epic Battle Between Emergence and Entropy

by Julian Birkinshaw  |   11:00 AM November 11, 2013

The business news continues to be full of stories of large companies getting into trouble in part because of their complexity. JP Morgan has been getting most of the headlines, but other banks are also investigation. And many companies from other sectors, from Siemens to GSK to Sony, are under fire. It goes without saying that big companies are complex. And it is also pretty obvious that their complexity is a double-edged sword. Companies are complex by design because it allows them to do difficult things. IBM has a multi-dimensional matrix structure so that it can provide coordinated services to its clients. Airbus has a complex process for managing the thousands of suppliers who contribute to the manufacturing of the A380. Read more of this post

Myanmar princess lives ordinary life

Myanmar princess lives ordinary life

Tuesday, November 12, 2013 – 03:00

The New Paper

MYANMAR – In a modest Yangon apartment, the granddaughter of Myanmar’s last king lives simply and unrecognised by her neighbours. Princess Hteik Su Phaya Gyi (above), 90, said the childhood days when her family retained some of its royal status were now a distant memory. The British colonial regime dethroned her grandfather, King Thibaw in 1885. The military junta, which ruled the country for decades, kept the family out of the public eye. Read more of this post

Goodbye to ‘Delhi belly’ with safe street food zone

Goodbye to ‘Delhi belly’ with safe street food zone

Tuesday, November 12, 2013 – 08:15

Nirmala Ganapathy

The Sunday Times

India is known for its many beautiful tourist attractions, from Mughal-era tombs to colonial buildings and national parks. It is also known for a not-so- beautiful condition named “Delhi belly”, the tummy upset that has often befallen the unsuspecting traveller. Drinking only bottled water and avoiding street food are some tips that travellers are given to avoid getting sick. Read more of this post

Honesty That Benefits All

NOVEMBER 11, 2013, 10:55 AM

Honesty That Benefits All

By DOUG STEINER

It seems that headlines too often highlight the bad deeds of players in financial markets. There are insider trading scandals. Traders collude on interest rate manipulation. Executives backdate options. We often hear the excuse, “Everyone else was doing it, so I didn’t think it was wrong.” So if jail won’t keep people from committing illegal acts, what will? Economists of a newer breed say they believe they have some answers. Read more of this post

What’s Behind the Green Juice Fad? Carrying a bottle of vegetable juice has become a status symbol

What’s Behind the Green Juice Fad?

Carrying a bottle of vegetable juice has become a status symbol

Suja’s Annie Lawless, co-founder, and Jeff Church, CEO, at the cold-pressed juice company’s San Diego operation Sandy Huffaker for The Wall Street Journal

KATHERINE ROSMAN

Nov. 11, 2013 7:23 p.m. ET

The price of vegetable, fruit and superfood juice is beginning to approach that of expensive liquor. Katie Rosman joins Lunch Break with a look at the growing market for premium juice, and whether the health claims hold up. Photo: BluePrint.

How much will consumers pay for healthy-in-a-bottle? As much as $10 and sometimes more. At least that’s the belief of high-end grocers likeWhole Foods Market WFM -1.28% and a spurt of small juice companies trying to move the cold-pressed-juice craze from small-batch to mass-produced. A 16-ounce bottle of BluePrint Red, containing beets, carrots and ginger, among other ingredients, goes for $10 at some retailers. And Whole Foods customers are paying $9 for a bottle of celery-based Twelve Essentials vegetable juice, one of the top-sellers from Suja, an 18-month-old juice brand based in San Diego. Suja co-founder Annie Lawless says customers understand the high cost of what goes into the bottle, including organic produce that is cold pressed and then preserved using a process that leaves most of the nutrients intact. “When you buy a bottle, you’re getting all the goodness without any of the effort,” says Ms. Lawless, a 26-year-old former law student and yoga instructor. The company says it generated $20 million in revenue in its first year. Read more of this post