 Rojak is a colloquial Malay word for “eclectic mix,” and is the name for a Javanese dish that typically combines sliced fruit and vegetables with a spicy dressing. Leveling the playing field Iran doesn’t get enough respect in the soccer world. Consider Mehdi Taremi, an Iranian striker for Inter Milan and one of the best in the game, who has never placed higher than second in the Asian Football Confederation’s top international player award; Son Heung-min, the South Korean captain of Tottenham Hotspur, has won it four of the last seven years. “In international forums, they don’t give points to Iranians, and this is a lack of recognition. We ourselves know that we are one of the best and we do our best for our country,” Taremi told local media last week. Iran is often underappreciated, John Duerden argued in his newsletter How Football Explains Asia, because it’s simply harder to cover soccer in the increasingly isolated nation, and its teams are less accessible than others when they go overseas. When they do talk to the press, most of the questions are about politics, not sport. The country’s domestic league has also fallen behind because of “political interference, incompetence and mismanagement.” The lap of luxury “Big Luxury” needs to be smaller to be successful. Luxury brands work best when they carry cultural cachet, Ana Andjelic wrote in The Sociology of Business. But the rise of so-called “Big Luxury,” an increasingly corporate, algorithm-driven sector that thinks creating more products is the way to boost sales, ignores what makes upscale items desirable in the first place — brand cachet and exclusivity — and leads companies to forget “what they stand for, and the role they play in culture.” But some brands like Hermès and Prada are bucking the trend by remaining smaller and family-owned. Perhaps because of this, their sales have grown. “In this domain, desirability is powered by identity,” Andjelic wrote. “Here, brands know that who they are and the ideas they bring to the world are the most powerful thing about them.” Silence is golden Listen: The sound is rarely silence. Our world is increasingly inhabited by canned music, “constantly running inside supermarkets, restaurants, public restrooms, colonoscopy exam rooms,” Sean Dietrich writes in his newsletter Sean of the South, which muses on life in the American South. Americans are exposed to an average of 76 minutes of “unchosen” music in public spaces per day; even on planes, loud, angsty music that plays before and after takeout has “made us passengers deeply fantasize about using the emergency exits,” Dietrich wrote. Ultimately, he writes, the daily noise we hear everywhere only separates us, and while silence may be uncomfortable, it could also serve to bring us together. |
