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Via Kevin Drum, this vignette from Johann Hari about his experience taking Provigil, which (we’re told) college students describe as “viagra for the brain”:
I picked up a book about quantum physics and super-string theory I have been meaning to read for ages, for a column I’m thinking of writing. It had been hanging over me, [...]

How much should people in Britain worry about food security?  Here’s a starter for ten, taken from a recent Guardian article by Harriet Green:
For three years, my husband has talked about taking to the hills. About buying a smallholding on Exmoor where, with our four-year-old daughter, we can safely survive the coming storm - famine, pestilence [...]

Just back from ten gorgeous days on holiday in Cornwall - hence radio silence on the blogging front, and a much-needed break from frenetic activity on the food prices research front. 
(As I found, Cornwall is actually about the best place you could go to get some fresh perspective on food.  The Lost Gardens of Heligan have the [...]

I’m over in Geneva, where I’ve just been presenting to the IASC, which is composed of the heads of the world’s largest humanitarian agencies (including UN agencies like WFP, UNICEF, UNHCR, UNDP and the WHO; NGOs like Oxfam; and the Red Cross / Red Crescent movement).  Here’s my presentation, which uses food prices as a springboard from which [...]

Sam Coates at The Times reports from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in DC last week (”where the President and Washington press corps show Hollywood what self-congratulation is all about”).  Along with “Ben Affleck, Colin Powell, Pamela Anderson, Henry Kissinger, Marcia Cross, Jenny McCarthy and other A-listers”, the guest list also included British Government Chief Whip Geoff Hoon and [...]

David Miliband writes:
My visit this week to Pakistan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iraq was punctuated with people describing their links to Britain. One conversation particularly sticks in the memory.
I was told by someone that they had great affection for British education. “I studied at Eton, Oxford, Nottingham and London universities”. I congratulated him and said [...]

For English policy wonks walking along Massachusetts Avenue in Washington DC, the experience is invariably bittersweet.  On one hand, they are (they must admit) slightly awed by the concentration of great engines of think tankery within a stone’s throw of where they stand: Brookings, the Carnegie Endowment, SAIS, CFR and plenty more besides.
But then their [...]

A diplomat who shall remain nameless offers three rules of thumb:

Don’t mistake activity for action
Don’t mistake access for influence
Don’t mistake experience for expertise

A civil servant friend told me yesterday that the Cabinet Office has just issued guidance that all senior civil servants (that’s deputy directors and upwards) are now allowed to blog, publicly, in their own names, about the issues that they work on. 
Fascinating if so - but not surprising, given the approach being signalled by Tom [...]

Here’s a CNN interview I did at an unholy hour this morning on rising food prices.  Some of the cutaway footage they’ve spliced in is truly random.  One shot shows someone (in Africa, as far as we can tell) looking with concern at a crack in the wall of his hut.  Er…

On the front of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, via John Robb - a sign of things to come, perhaps:

BOULDER, Colo. — When suburbanites look out their front doors, a lot of them want to see a lush green lawn. Kipp Nash wants to see vegetables, and not all of his neighbors are thrilled. “I’d rather see [...]

Amidst the general swooning over Kevin Rudd (to which even we at Global Dashboard are not immune), the latest convert is David Miliband, who last week penned a blog post that ran thus:
…his travels are now being put to good use as he showed in his speech in London last week, arguing for “creative middle [...]

I’ve just published a new Chatham House paper on why food prices are rising and what it means for development: download it here.
One of the paper’s main arguments is that we need to make sure that the urgent doesn’t crowd out the essential in discussions of global food strategies: immediate action on humanitarian assistance needs to [...]

From Gizmodo, a terrible tale of technology, misunderstanding and revenge.  Our story begins in Turkey, where Emine and Ramazan are in the process of separating.  After deciding to split, they continue to hurl barbs at each other by text message - including one from Ramazan in which he accuses his wife thus:
You change the topic [...]

Barney Rubin has an excellent post updating on latest developments in Pakistan’s federally administered tribal areas.  Start, he says, from a clear recognition of one thing at least: the US has no plan.  Here’s a graph from the US Government’s General Accountability Office which proves the point:

Note especially the amount being allocated to political reform, [...]

Interesting times for the peak oil debate.  Last week came the news that Russian oil had peaked: its Q1 oil production in 2008 fell, for the first time in a decade.  Later in the week, oil touched a new all-time high of $117 after Nigerian insurgents attacked a Shell pipeline there.
And today, the news emerges [...]

So far, most of the consensus on what to do about food prices is (as you might expect) strongly focused on the short term: measures like spending more cash on humanitarian aid, or building up social protection systems for the poorest and most at risk.  But one medium term measure also seems to command widespread [...]

Via Joshua Keating at ForeignPolicy.com, the news that German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel has issued a statement strongly criticising President Bush’s new climate change “policy” under the glorious headline,
Gabriel criticises Bush’s Neanderthal speech. Losership, not Leadership.
As Joshua so rightly comments, “With a title like that, why even bother with a statement?”

And now for the latest instalment of “how not to do public diplomacy”.  Last time, readers will recall, we observed with interest as Chinese government sources called the Dalai Lama a terrorist and implied that he might be a Nazi.  Later, of course, it transpired that these comments were merely a prelude, a limbering up [...]

A propos of David’s post, here’s what’s scaring me witless this weekend:
The Ug99 strain of the killer wheat fungus (stem rust), which recently infected wheat farms in western Iran, is a serious threat to global food security, agricultural scientists have warned. They have said the fungus may affect additional wheat-producing countries.
Mahmoud Solh, director-general of the [...]

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