faulker031

In this world of ongoing financial turmoil and unrest against the current form of capitalism it is interesting to see how the search for intellectual resources to fuel our thinking about a changed world is taking us to new shores. This week, as part of the Holocaust Education Week , an exhibition about the philosopher Hannah Arendt started in Toronto. In many ways, this could not have been a timelier moment to have her heritage reinvigorated. Arendt is a staple in many discussions over 20 th century history and philosophy. Of Jewish origin, born in Germany in 1906, she emigrated to the US during the Nazi regime and became a vocal analyst on how oppression, totalitarianism and violence affects the individual and what the conditions and options of resistance are. Now much of this seems to be a far cry from the life of many of us in the 21 st century. But it gets much more colorful if we add Arendt’s voice audible in later phases of her work: most notably, her book on the trial of Ado...

This weekend, the Occupy Wall Street protest will go global. Protests, marches and occupations are planned across the world, with almost a thousand events across every continent scheduled to go ahead on October 15th. Here in Toronto, the financial district around Bay Street is preparing for an occupation that has so far garnered more than 9000 followers on Facebook . In London, social media sites have registered more than 15000 followers for the planned occupation of the London Stock Exchange . Similar smaller scale events are in the offing from everywhere from Alaska to Auckland. Whatever the success of these protests, it is remarkable the speed at which a local event in New York which was hardly reported on two weeks ago, has now been turned into a global movement. Although the range of issues and demands of the Occupy Wall Street campaign and its various international incarnations are many and diverse, they share a strong single point of focus. The financial sector is very...

Let me confess this right upfront: I have never been an avid user of Apple’s products. I briefly owned an iPod in the mid 2000s but when it fell into my toilet (true!) one day I didn't really miss it. So writing about Steve Jobs this week feels a little like an atheist writing an obituary for the pope. This said though, the remarkable expressions of sympathy for Steve Jobs’ untimely death wasn’t lost on me. They are extraordinary in number ( 2.5m tweets in the first 13 hours), source (e.g. Obama) and nature . It all reminds me a little of what happened when Princess Diana or JFK died, I guess. The question here of course is: what is it that causes millions of people to respond so emotionally and affectionately to the death of this business tycoon? It is obvious that most of the usual features of these icons of popular culture do not really apply to Jobs. He was hardly a charismatic business leader with big PR value such as Richard Branson (Virgin) or Jack Welch (GE). In fact,...