Highway Driving the N1 is a baptism by fumes:Total immersion in the smoky viscera of internal combustion, their invasion of your nostrils turns your snot black and gritty as last week’s left-over ash. It was midday on a Friday in December, and the traffic was thick as turning yoghurt left out on a summer’s afternoon.My fingers gripped the steering wheel so tightly the bruised leather of its contours stuck to the skin, adhered to my knuckle wrinkles...

Of late, I have become more and more aware of how many people are misguided about how poverty works. I don’t mean this in the arbitrary sense of choosing poverty lines and such (re: relative vs. absolute poverty measures), but rather a nuanced understanding of what poverty is, what it does, and how we can respond to it. Much of what I write here will come from the recent book Poverty Traps edited by Bowles, Durlauf and Hoff (2006). It is all based on freely available...

David Brooks of the New York times wrote two columns in December last year to give out his Sidney Awards (named for Sidney Hook) – his selection of the top magazine articles in 2006. They are meant to represent good writing, interesting subject matter and as a result also be representative of the underlying zeitgeist. Here, I’ll take some time to extemporize on their nomination and their relevance to us here in South Africa. The articles span topics from the heinousness...