Dead Pool 2026

[Sheilbh]

RIP Len Deighton

One of the great spy novelists - from my perspective arguably basically him and Le Carre. And also, more surprisingly, the man who introduced British men to French cooking.

[grumbler]

  I think that I read everything he wrote, bar the non-spy stuff.

[Richard Hakluyt]

They had Simon Schama on the radio giving him very warm praise. I had no idea that he was so highly regarded, though admittedly spy thrillers are not really my thing. But, since he is that good I will pick one up asap.

[Norgy]

SS-GB is a strong novel, along the lines of Roth's The Plot Against America. Deighton was first, though. Rest in peace!   

[Sheilbh]

Less regrettably, I see Paul Ehrlich has died.

[Valmy]

Less regrettably, I see Paul Ehrlich has died.

Taking real steps to prevent the population bomb.

[mongers]

Less regrettably, I see Paul Ehrlich has died.

That's an oddly uncharitable statement from you, what did he do that was So bad?

Some of the topics he worked on needed to be debated?

[grumbler]

Less regrettably, I see Paul Ehrlich has died.

Starved to death?

[Sheilbh]

He was wrong and never really accepted that or reckoned with it - and he was influential particularly through technocratic, Western dominated organisations. I think he's basically the equivalent of an unapologetic eugenicist - even if some of that work was subsequently useful in studies of genetics.

From Charles Mann (total aside but a fantastic writer - I loved 1491 and 1493) for the Smithsonian Magazine:

It is true that in the book Ehrlich exhorted readers to remember that his scenarios "are just possibilities, not predictions." But it is also true that he slipped into the language of prediction occasionally in the book, and more often in other settings. "Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born," he promised in a 1969 magazine article. "Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come," Ehrlich told CBS News a year later. "And by 'the end' I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity."

Such statements contributed to a wave of population alarm then sweeping the world. The International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council, the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund, the Hugh Moore-backed Association for Voluntary Sterilization and other organizations promoted and funded programs to reduce fertility in poor places. "The results were horrific," says Betsy Hartmann, author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, a classic 1987 exposé of the anti-population crusade. Some population-control programs pressured women to use only certain officially mandated contraceptives. In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan, health workers' salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women. In the Philippines, birth-control pills were literally pitched out of helicopters hovering over remote villages. Millions of people were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh.

In the 1970s and '80s, India, led by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, embraced policies that in many states required sterilization for men and women to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care and pay raises. Teachers could expel students from school if their parents weren't sterilized. More than eight million men and women were sterilized in 1975 alone. ("At long last," World Bank head Robert McNamara remarked, "India is moving to effectively address its population problem.") For its part, China adopted a "one-child" policy that led to huge numbers—possibly 100 million—of coerced abortions, often in poor conditions contributing to infection, sterility and even death. Millions of forced sterilizations occurred.


5w Infographics; Sources: World Peace Foundation, Tufts; Food and Agriculture Organization, U.N.

Ehrlich does not see himself as responsible for such abuses. He strongly supported population-control measures like sterilization, and argued that the United States should pressure other governments to launch vasectomy campaigns, but he did not advocate for the programs' brutality and discrimination.

Equally strongly, he disputes the criticism that none of his scenarios came true. Famines did occur in the 1970s, as Ehrlich had warned. India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, West and East Africa—all were wracked, horribly, by hunger in that decade. Nonetheless, there was no "great increase in the death rate" around the world. According to a widely accepted count by the British economist Stephen Devereux, starvation claimed four to five million lives during that decade—with most of the deaths due to warfare, rather than environmental exhaustion from overpopulation.

In fact, famine has not been increasing but has become rarer. When The Population Bomb appeared, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, something like one out of four people in the world was hungry. Today the proportion of hungry is about one out of ten. Meanwhile, the world's population has more than doubled. People are surviving because they learned how to do things differently. They developed and adopted new agricultural techniques—improved seeds, high-intensity fertilizers, drip irrigation.

And to the very end - literally within the last five years - he was still saying the same thing.