A friend emailed me the other day wondering why there was so little happening on Davos Newbies.

Truth to tell, most of my blogging energy is going to InBerkeley these days. I try to write two or three times a day there, but the content is probably of limited interest to non-Berkeleyites. Other than that, I find I put brief, link-based items, the kind of thing that Jay Rosen calls mindcasting, on Twitter, rather than my blog.

But I’m not abandoning Davos Newbies. Here are some short takes:

• Staggering quote of the day from Nancy Birdsall: “The economy of sub-Saharan Africa—including Nigeria and South Africa—is smaller than the economy of New York City.”
• Best read so far this summer: Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes. The weeks leading up to the death of Zia ul-Haq together with the unfortunate adventures of a Pakistani air force academy cadet. Early Salman Rushdie (think Shame) meets Graham Greene.
• C-ROADS, the “decision-maker-oriented international climate simulator” is one of the most powerful things I’ve seen in a long time. I want to write more about it soon. The acronym stands for “Climate Rapid Overview and Decision-support Simulator”.