6 long reads to understand the world better

Heartfelt stories from China, US, Cambodia and Vietnam

Hello. I’ve lately drowned in the managerial tasks for a festival we are holding in our hometown in Nepal. As it is a festival of ideas, it will feature extensively here at THG posts in coming days. For now, though, to avoid a long break I am recirculating 6 recommended long reads from the second ever post at THG when subscribers could be counted in the fingers of one hand.

I hope the insights in these timeless pieces will be useful for all of you to understand the (mostly recent) history of the world upon which a model of today’s world can be imagined.

So here they go in no particular order:

The Gradual Extinction of Softness by Chantha Nguon with Kim Green, Hippocampus Magazine.

This sublime 2021 piece encapsulates the horrors of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia better than anything else I have read on the subject. Anything more that I tell you here will be redundant or mundane once you read the mesmerizing piece full of empathy and humility.

How This All Happended by Morgan Housel, The Collaborative Fund (2021). The comprehensive yet lucid story behind how the consumption-driven economy took over the USA. And eventually the world. This is the finest financial history essay I have ever read.

The Vietnam Wars bu Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Rolling Stone (1980). Super long but super informative and nuanced. Put together, Nguon’s article on Cambodia and this rather sympathetic account of Vietnamese Communist Party’s evolution after the US withdrawal make a nuanced read of the legacy of red revolutions in Asia.

Human Impulses Run Riot: China's Shocking Pace of Change by Ya Hua, The Guardian (2018). Also available as podcast with same title. While talking about the race between consumerist capitalism and communism, this article addresses the elephant in the room: China. Focused on the apparently endless cycles or revenge and retribution in post-revolution China, this piece delicately examines the emotional toll of the rapid changes in China’s political system.

The Really Big One by Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker (2015). Breath-taking details of how a part of human civilization will be decimated by an inevitable earthquake. Even though this deals only with inevitable mega-earthquake in one geographical area in the Americas, the way the US west coast is (not or badly) preparing itself to it is pretty illustrative of the larger attitude of human beings towards climate crisis.

Small Change: Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted by Malcolm Gladwell. The New Yorker (2010). Apparently, though, revolution could be bought by the richest man in the world through late Twitter. This piece, though, brilliantly explores how actual revoultions used to be get done before the dawn of social media.

Bonus for Nepali Speakers: My review of Victor E. Frankl’s masterpiece Man’s Search for Meaning: