Bequia: the Caribbean island with all the greatest stories

Bequia: the Caribbean island with all the greatest stories by ANTONIA QUIRKE (CN Traveller)

Friendship Bay is my favourite. The water on this southern side is more theatrical, and the view is of distant Mustique. Fewer boats moor here because of the swell and the sound is of clapping masts and of occasional sailors chucking themselves into the brine and coming up snorting. It rains. Real rain. Hibiscus buds and little lizards spin down guttering until everybody walks for cover and waits… until the rain dies as quickly and astoundingly as it rose.

I collapse back on my towel, eating a handful of fried plantain from Bequia Beach Hotel’s epic breakfast bar. The soft, hot sand is eternally hospitable, the optimism in the rain-sun routine a powerful characteristic of the island. That, and the intensity of its history. I take a drive in the afternoon up into the hills with thirty-something Garvin Ollivierre whose family have been boat builders and whalers since the 1800s – humpbacks are still occasionally caught here. We stop at the cricket pitch, where he plays with the local team, to find it covered in lambs and yellow-green butterflies blowing about like unfolding wads of tissue paper. He talks to me about the names of his teammates, one Cosmos Hackshaw (a moniker straight from Moby-Dick) and a Max Kydd. African, Scottish, Carib, French. Everybody is somebody’s third cousin of a cousin going back centuries. There’s a Napoleon Ollivierre and a Leonora Kydd in the old graveyard near the airport.

Trader Joe's (JosephsBrau) Radler

I am in drinking Radler by Trader Joe's (JosephsBrau), a Micro Brewery in San Jose. Radler is an Shandy / Radler, with an ABV of 4 and IBU of 9. I gave this beer a 3.75 on Untappd’s 5 point rating system.

BREWER’S NOTES

Radler is a refreshing and crisp combination of beer and lemon juice and natural flavors. The beer is brewed with hallertau hops, 90% pilsner malt, 5% Munich malt and 5% carahell. Additional ingredients: sugar, lemon juice from concentrate. Stats: 4% alcohol by volume and 9 bittering units.

Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism

Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism by Nicholas Carr

Silicon Valley’s Phoenix-like resurrection is a story of ingenuity and initiative. It is also a story of callousness, predation, and deceit. Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise — what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.

Zuboff’s fierce indictment of the big internet firms goes beyond the usual condemnations of privacy violations and monopolistic practices. To her, such criticisms are sideshows, distractions that blind us to a graver danger: By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are perverting capitalism in a way that undermines personal freedom and corrodes democracy.