"After the summit, the Pangoal Institution, a Beijing think tank, published an analysis of the Trump Administration, describing it as a den of warring "cliques," the most influential of which was the "Trump family clan." The Trump clan appears to "directly influence final decisions" on business and diplomacy in a way that "has rarely been seen in the political history of the United States," the analyst wrote. He summed it up using an obscure phrase from feudal China: jiatianxia--"to treat the state as your own possession.""
-- Estonia, the Digital Republic - Nathan Heller, The New Yorker, Dec. 18 & 25, 2018
"The putative grandfather of Estonia's digital platform is Tarvi Martens, an enigmatic systems architect who today oversees the country's digital-voting program from a stone building in the center of Tallinn's Old Town. I went to visit him one morning, and was shown into a stateroom with a long conference table and French windows that looked out on the trees. Martens was standing at one window, with his back to me, commander style. For a few moments, he stayed that way; then he whirled around and addressed a timid greeting to the buttons of my shirt."
-- My Father's Body, at Rest and in Motion - Siddhartha Mukherjee, The New Yorker, Jan. 8, 2018
"But for a while my experience of my father's dying was not his breaking up into cometary bits. It was the opposite: his being held together by an infinitude of minute forces. He knew that he was losing the cosmic bargain, but the onion seller, at least, would still cut him a good deal."
