Drawing didn't seem particularly original, but there were some nice comic touches, like cancer cells stuck in a traffic jam and so on.

It's definitely aimed at the chick-lit market though, so I'm probably not the best judge. Not really recommended if you don't care about shoes.

Listening
Latest TTC course was Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age by Jeremy McInerney. (24 lectures) Very good course, informative and well-presented. Liked it better than his previous course on Periclean Athens, since this one has material that is much less familiar.

This one deals briskly with Alexander in the first couple of lectures, then moves on to the Hellenistic kingdoms that sprung up as his empire collapsed, divided up and fought over by his generals.

One interesting thing is that there was relatively little cross-cultural contact. The colonists and garrisons set themselves up either as separate cities or a Hellenic ruling class, speaking Greek, maintaining Greek culture, and having little to do with the natives beyond taxing them.

For instance, the pastoral poetry of the era, celebrating the songs, poems and loves of Arcadian shepherds, was largely written in the sophisticated urban courts of Alexandria. Not only were they not in the countryside themselves, if you did take a stroll you'd find a load of Egyptian peasants (presumably working shadufs), without a Greek shepherd in sight.

McInerney describes the Hellenistic age as like classical Greece on steroids: bigger statues, bigger ships, bigger kingdoms. Artistically it was more emotional than the austere classical period: sculptures showing anguish or ecstasy rather than calm, poems and novels full of tragic loves rather than the inexorable workings of the fates.

Historically, it's interesting in several ways. Without any particularly great technological or economic changes, over a handful of years the Hellenic world went from a loose network of independent, democratic or oligarchic city-states to an imperial one with great kings dominating large empires. I think the period is a good counter-example to Whiggish ideas like the inevitability of democracy.

There are two lectures on the Maccabean Revolt, where the Jews achieved independence from the Seleucid empire. McInerney disagrees with the conventional account which I was dimly aware of, that the emperor Antiochus tried to forcibly Hellenize the Jews, which they resisted. Instead he casts this as largely a conflict between a self-Hellenized urban Jewish population and a conservative countryside.

The course finishes up with a couple of lectures on the rise of Rome and its gobbling up of the Hellenistic kingdoms. McInerney portrays this as a reaction to events, with Rome drawn in by conflicts amongst its allies, rather than a systematic plan of conquest. Another interesting phenomenon was rulers leaving their kingdoms to Rome in their wills (Pergamum, Cyrenaica and Bithynia), seeing which way the wind was blowing.

Overall, an excellent course: well worth doing if you like audiobooks and ancient history.

Next up: Biological Anthropology: An Evolutionary Perspective by Barbara J. King.

Web
Saw a couple of interesting economics articles, The Myth of Economic Recovery suggests "Poor countries may be poor not because their growth rates during healthy periods are lower, but because they have more and deeper disruptions."

Big governments and globalisation are complementary

... According to a famous paper by Dani Rodrik, this explains why more open economies have bigger governments; far from being substitutes for each other, governments and markets are in fact complementary, with appropriate government programmes being essential in shoring up political support for trade.

Indeed, economic history provides considerable evidence in favour of this view, since it was precisely during the heyday of the first great globalisation, in the decades running up to the First World War, that the foundations of the modern welfare state were laid. Across Europe, socialist parties then supported liberal free trade policies, in return for the introduction of a range of social insurance programmes, such as old age pensions, accident insurance or unemployment insurance. These reforms tended to be most advanced in those countries which were most open to the world economy of the day. Far from globalisation leading to a race to the bottom, this was a period in which free trade and social progress went hand in hand in Europe, and recent historical research suggests that this is precisely why governments were able to maintain a consensus in favour of free trade.

Harlan Ellison explains the writers' strike.