Grandparent

• WHEN BUSINESS IS LOVE shares Jan Ryde's inspiring mission and demonstrates how Hästens operates on love.
• There is a waiting list for Hästens' luxurious, handcrafted, top-of-the-line Grand Vividus, which takes 600 hours to construct and sells for as much as USD 1,000,000.
• Once you've experienced Jan Ryde's example of business as love, you'll find yourself asking the transformative question that motivates the entire Hästens team: how good do you want to have it?
• Unleash the limitless abundance that emerges when love becomes the driving force.

• Like many Chinese shopping centers, this complex was filled with empty stores that reflected the end of China’s 30-year-long economic expansion.
• From 1990 through 2020, large, shiny shopping malls embodied China’s spectacular economic growth.
• These centers look familiar to American eyes, which isn’t surprising: U.S. architectural firms built 170 malls in China during this period.

• The COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of online shopping have devastated foot traffic, leaving the nation with a huge overhang of retail space.
• As a longtime urban policy scholar, I was fascinated by the new uses I saw for malls in China.
• In my view, these experiments could become models for new, creative uses of retail space in the U.S., where the mall was invented.

Serving a new consumer class

• Rising incomes and a massive population shift from rural areas to cities have created a growing middle class with significant purchasing power.
• Today, approximately 350 million Chinese – 25% of the total population – can be considered middle class.
• They offered consumers year-round protection from heat, humidity, cold and frost, as well as from busy streets and polluting traffic.
• Malls were safe environments where the steadily increasing numbers of more affluent Chinese families could shop and eat, stroll and meet.
• As a result, Chinese media reports abound with stories about well-known stores and venerable malls closing.
• In China, as in the U.S., what scholars once described as the “magic of the mall” has become an “allure of ruins.”

Malls with Chinese characteristics

• But the Chinese are making creative use of excess mall space.
• The Raffles City Mall in Shenzen has a rooftop pet playground, a stage, an art display area and a sun-shaded lawn.
• The Dream Time Mall in Wuhan contains an indoor snow center that offers ski lessons, ice mazes and tubing.

• What began as a cathedral of retail consumerism is becoming a place where people can connect and enjoy individual and collective experiences that aren’t available online.
• Some U.S. malls are moving in this direction, but China is doing it on a much larger scale.
• Just as former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping once asserted that his government was pursuing its own version of socialism, with “Chinese characteristics,” the U.S.-designed mall is being rewritten with Chinese characters.

John Rennie Short does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• Pierce Brosnan was equally great in GoldenEye – James Bond careening through the streets of St Petersburg astride a tank.
• These films also served as a visual reminder: the Cold War was a thing of the past.
• When Lady Ann Sercomb married George Smiley towards the end of the war she described him to her astonished Mayfair friends as breathtakingly ordinary.
• Published in 1961, this novel ushered into existence the spymaster George Smiley.
• Read more:
  Friday essay: the secret lives of Ian Fleming and John Le Carré – the spymasters shaped by a lack of parental love

Instantly hooked on an unlikely hero

• In 2011, Oldman put in a commendable shift as Smiley in the well-received film adaptation.
• In this iconic novel, Smiley hunts down a thinly fictionalised version of the infamous MI6 double agent, Kim Philby.
• I was instantly hooked: who was this man, and why describe him this way?
• This unlikely hero – part bureaucrat, part detective – always gets things done, more often than not in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
• Read more:
  'The wilderness of mirrors': 70 years since the first James Bond book, spy stories are still blurring fact and fiction

From the Cold War to Brexit

Smiley finds himself in a spot of bother at the start of Call for the Dead.

• Despite spending much of the novel in hospital, Smiley hatches a brilliant plan and unravels the truth.
• Moving from the Cold War to the self-inflicted catastrophe of Brexit, Le Carré’s nine Smiley novels paint a remarkably candid – and increasingly melancholic – portrait of a former imperial power in terminal decline.
• Time you rang down the curtain on yesterday’s cold warrior.
• Time you rang down the curtain on yesterday’s cold warrior.
• Read more:
  What's a cold war?

George Smiley is James Bond’s reality check

• However, in marked contrast to Le Carré, Fleming rails against the reality of Britain’s diminished status as a world power in the wake of the second world war.
• This, in turn, helps us understand the enduring appeal of George Smiley.
• Smiley is an Abbey, made up different periods, fashions, and even different religions, not all of them necessarily harmonious.
• Smiley is an Abbey, made up different periods, fashions, and even different religions, not all of them necessarily harmonious.
• George Smiley, who is slated to appear in a new novel to be written by Le Carré’s son, is a reminder, disguised as fiction, that still waters do indeed run deep.

Alexander Howard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• "Having Chloe on board to integrate her ideas into our business strategy and share our adventures will help shape the future of Knott's," Josh said.
• Since taking on her new role, Chloe has been involved with trade shows and special events across the country.
• "Our West Tennessee team has been instrumental in helping us grow in serving our dips, spreads and pickled products around the nation from beautiful Henry County," Josh said.
• Family-owned and operated since 1947, Knott's Foods Inc. began in the kitchen of Cedric and Mildred Knott in Paris, Tennessee.