A year for taking liberties with American police, financial analysts and Bowie’s books
What will 2018 bring? For The Washington Pos t’s Radley Balko, the traditional end-of-year column was not just a long list but a chance to make a few points about civil liberties:
Police responding to a protest will mistakenly arrest one of their own undercover cops. They will then claim that their colleague had it coming because he was resisting. A cop will unjustly shoot an unarmed man, then suffer a panic attack. The unarmed man will then be arrested on the theory that by getting shot, he induced the cop’s panic attack. A state legislature will vote to allow guns into a government building, but will ban signs held by protesters, declaring them a “serious safety hazard”.
The Times’ Ian King forecast that global GDP will surprise:
The new year will be a world of fewer research analysts since “unbundling” means brokers must start charging for their research: But it also means that those analysts who survive will have to come up with punchier insights and recommendations to justify charging for their work ... The onmarch of artificial intelligence will eventually create more jobs than it destroys but that will not happen next year. The oil price won’t change much, the US Federal Reserve will raise interest rates three times, the Bank of England will make a single raise of a quarter point, record numbers of Chinese will holiday in Europe and Canada and there will be a significant new player in financial services.
CNN offers an optimistic list of things we can look forward to in 2018, including the Winter Olympics:
Once every four years, the global powers of the world band together in an ongoing diplomatic effort to decide what, exactly, curling is and how it ever became a thing people did. 2018’s festivities will take over the city of PyeongChang, South Korea, for two weeks in February. One extremely chill story to look out for: The women’s Nigerian bobsleigh team will compete, marking the first-ever time the African nation is represented at the Winter Games.
Rolling Stone on the book club you can be part of without leaving your house. This might just catch on in 2018:
David Bowie’s son Duncan Jones has launched an online book club dedicated to his late father’s favourite literary works. In 2013, Bowie’s website revealed his personal list of “Top 100 Books” with the music icon choosing works ranging from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Don DeLillo’s White Noise to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, which Jones picked as the first tome for the impromptu book club. “My dad was a beast of a reader. One of his true loves was Peter Ackroyd’s sojourns into the history of Britain & its cities. I’ve been feeling a building sense of duty to go on the same literary marathon in tribute to dad. Time allowing,” Jones tweeted before confirming his plans. “All right gang! Anyone who wants to join along, we are reading Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, as an amuse cerveau before we get into the heavy stuff.” Jones added that book club members have until February 1 to finish reading the novel before the next pick is revealed.
The Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne next month was to feature Salmon Rushdie and feminist Clementine Ford (“Dear God, it’s hard to be an atheist sometimes”):
We regret to advise that the 2018 Global Atheist Convention, Reason to Hope, has been cancelled. If you are a ticket holder, you are entitled to a refund ... processed in the week of December 4, 2017.