In the coming months, an audacious initiative will emerge on the doorstep of the mighty US Treasury. A collection of (mostly) business donors are remodelling three historic buildings to create a museum that will champion the “American dream”. To populate this, the Milken Institute is recording interviews with 10,000 people about their experiences of that dream. In the words of one key donor, it is intended to provide a “beacon of hope”.
I’m not a gamer, but I perked up to the news recently that millions of people around the world are obsessed by a virtual role-playing extravaganza based on a 16th-century Chinese novel about a trickster monkey, a naive monk, a laconic hermit and a libidinous pig.
On a sleepy Saturday morning in 2002, I sat down in a classroom, in a school I didn’t attend, to take a test I didn’t know would fundamentally alter the course of my life.
When studying literature in secondary school, one of the books that my classmates and I read intensely was Things Fall Apart, written in 1958 by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe.
On a sleepy Saturday morning in 2002, I sat down in a classroom, in a school I didn’t attend, to take a test I didn’t know would fundamentally alter the course of my life.