This week Bronwyn Williams draws parallels between an 18th century novella and the perils of brand woke washing...
Welcome back to the future as our favourite bibliophile Bronwyn William's #PulpNonFiction column unpacks how a knowledge of mostly vintage sci-fi literature can be relevant to current socio-economic scenarios...
Bronwyn Williams 11 Jan 2021
This week Bronwyn Williams reviews Pepe Marais' new book, 20 Habits that Break Habits and shows some correlations between it and Train Naked, a book her good friend Pierre DuPlessis published a few months ago...
Bronwyn Williams 7 Dec 2020
This week Bronwyn Williams (finally) finished reading Hilary Mantel's "epic" Wolf Hall Trilogy...
Bronwyn Williams 30 Nov 2020
This week, Bronwyn Williams has been reading Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Nobel Prize winner, Robert J. Shiller...
Bronwyn Williams 23 Nov 2020
This week, Bronwyn Williams has been wading through Robert Greene's The Laws of Human Nature. The book explores the psychology and sociology around what makes us do the things we do and make the choices we make...
Bronwyn Williams 16 Nov 2020
This week, Bronwyn Williams reads The Odditorium by David Bramwell and Jo Keeling and explores the idea of Francis Galton's "attraction gauge" and that it reminds her of two things...
Bronwyn Williams 9 Nov 2020
This week, Bronwyn Williams goes back in time to read Tim Berners-Lee's Weaving the Web: The Past Present and Future of the World Wide Web by its Inventor...
Bronwyn Williams 2 Nov 2020
This week Bronwyn Williams reviews two (very different) just-released books by South African authors John Sanei and Iraj Abedian, and Simon de la Rouviere...
Bronwyn Williams 26 Oct 2020
What struck Bronwyn Williams in Henry Kissinger's World Order was the absence of Africa in the grand narrative of human strategy and struggle...
Bronwyn Williams 19 Oct 2020
This week Bronwyn Williams unpacks Stealing Water by Tim Ecott and The Upside of Down by Bruce Whitfield, in getting to grips with South Africa and her place in it...
Bronwyn Williams 12 Oct 2020
Bronwyn Williams explores twin phenomena social cooling and preference falsification and Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment, a story in which it is slowly revealed that all the main characters are lying to each other, all pretending to be someone they are not in order to fit in with a group standard that doesn't even exist...
Bronwyn Williams 5 Oct 2020
Bronwyn Williams tells us that Philip K. Dick's science fiction classic, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? got her thinking about how much of our own economies are propped up by "ridiculous" status symbols and the conspicuous consumption of intrinsically worthless, but socially essential goods and services...
Bronwyn Williams 28 Sep 2020
Bronwyn Williams has observed the ways businesses and brands have responded to the crisis, the one being cynical crisis capitalism and the other, authentic brand empathy...
Bronwyn Williams 21 Sep 2020