Snuffles

In The Noughties, I argued that the real beginning and end of the decade occurred within a few blocks of each other, in New York. As the Dubai economy stumbles, could we be seeing the beginning of the next decade, when it’s what happens in Asia and the Middle East – rather than the tired old West – that really grabs our attention? When Dubai sneezes, how many of us are going to catch a cold?

PS: Charlie Brooker addresses the essential preposterousness of the whole thing.

Depression drama

In Chapter 10 of The Noughties I discuss the global economic meltdown that formed one bookend to the decade – the other, of course, being 9/11. Edmund Conway of the Telegraph ponders how long we’ll have to wait until the crisis is successfully presented on stage or screen:

Part of the role of literature is to express the general through the particular. This was George Eliot’s dictum – to express the drama of the human condition by describing the lives of ordinary people. And there are so many personal experiences throughout this crisis which could have helped illustrate the bigger picture: the greed of investors, the delusion of the bankers, the drama people felt when they realised the ideas they had pinned their future on had simply been wrong.

Quids in (or out)

The economic shift that has led to great swathes of the media spending the Noughties in a sort of panicky inertia: online advertising spend in the UK finally outstrips TV.