It seems like Mohammad al-Fayed (of Harrod’s fame – and obviously many other ventures) was also in the port business. In 1964, he entered a deal with Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti, whereby he invested $5 million in the harbours, established pilotage and ports, and in return was to receive the income from the […]
The world’s top three shipping lines are, in order, Maersk (Denmark’s second largest company after Lego), MSC (a privately-held Italian firm), and CMA CGM (a French firm). Some time ago, they decided that they were going to start up an alliance, P3, that would have allowed them to share vessels, thus streamlining which ports they would […]
Derek Gregory has a post that weaves together Deb Cowen’s new book (which I await anxiously) and Charmaine Chua’s post, and loads of important links to Derek’s own work on military logistics.
Charmaine Chua writes on the politics of logistical chokepoints: Sped along by transport deregulation and an associated wave of firm competition and consolidation, the containerization of bulk goods now allows a single dockworker to do what it took an army to accomplish in the past. Innovations in production technologies, such as flexible production, demand-driven manufacturing, […]
Francisco Goldman and Jean-Claude Izzo speak to each other through their respective novels, The Ordinary Seaman and The Lost Sailors. Both are stories about waiting in the docks, literally, in a floating metal tub full of holes. Both tell stories within stories within stories – which is what you do when you are waiting. And waiting. When […]
I think I read the Rime of the Ancient Mariner some years ago when i was young, but like a great many great works of literature, it is a poem that is wasted on the youth. Its sense of regret, loss, of cussedness, of deadened lives and of an anxiety so overwhelming that cannot be overcome […]
In an extraordinary essay titled “The Smell of Infrastructure,” Bruce Robbins argues that the scaffolding of our lives, the infrastructure that carries shit and coal and lobsters and water and electricity is often made invisible. He has a rousing call to arms: Infrastructure needs to be made visible, of course, in order to see how our […]
John McPhee has taught David Remnick and Richard Stengel and a few other famous journalists to write, and apparently he is a fixture of The New Yorker, but his work is so much more interesting that those of his proteges, and I don’t ever remember having read his pieces in the New Yorker. I would have remembered […]
There is a lot to chew on here, but this sentence really struck me: “As for finance, there’s been no tendency for its executives’ pay to outpace that of nonfinancial executives. On the contrary: even during the bubble years of the 2000s, top 0.1% finance executives in public companies saw their pay rise by 52%, while nonfinancial […]
