Bryan Matthews

What was shattered in both China and Europe with the eighteenth century was a biological ancient regime.  A set of constraints, barriers, structures, ratios, and numerical links that had been the rule. There is a regular drift towards a balance between patterns of births and deaths.  Under the ancient regime, the two coefficients were both around 40 per 1000.  What life added, death took away.  In the short term, credit and debit kept pace.  When one side grew, the other reacted.       Directly after a plague that halved the populace of Verona in 1637, the soldiers of the garrison, many of whom had avoided the plague, married the widows, and life gained the upper hand again.     In Germany, which had suffered from the ruins of the Thirty Years War, there was demographic renewal once the bad times were over.  This was the marvel of recompense in a country quarter or half devastated by the horrors of war.  An Italian ...

Ridgemont Equity Partners invests in Backstage.  Backstage is a total platform that enables productions, brands, marketing agencies, and businesses to find and work with creative talent. Jack Purcell of Ridgemont said: ‘ Ridgemont is focused on identifying data, information, and marketing services investments with strong growth prospects across industries. We are impressed with Backstage’s outstanding leadership team, unparalleled subscriber growth, user engagement, platform traffic, and the vibrant level of activity on each side of its marketplace as content creators of all types engage with creative talent.’ Josh Ellstein of Backstage said: ‘Backstage has been a trusted brand in the performing arts world since 1960 and we have transformed it from a beloved, traditional trade publication to a modern career platform for performing artists and content producers. Our team built the industry’s most liquid two-sided marketplace that enables our users to...

Thoma Bravo buys ConnectWise.     Thoma Bravo’s software ability, general track record, and deep capital will allow ConnectWise to pursue a plan focused on organic growth and strategic acquisitions.  After the deal is complete, ConnectWise founder and CEO Arnie Bellini will move into an advisory role.  President and COO Jason Magee will take over as CEO.      Arnie Bellini said: ‘Five years ago, we began exploring all the financial options to speed up the ConnectWise mission and our partners’ success.  Thoma Bravo was the clear and obvious choice over an Initial Public Offering (IPO) and seven other private equity firms.  Thoma Bravo is the premier investor in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology.  ConnectWise and Thoma Bravo have co-created a multi-year strategy that is aligned with our mission, vision, culture, and partners.  With this new relationship we plan to speed up our partners’ success worldwide.’    ...

Three stages of a population in historical demography. The pioneer zone is a population at its arising, in an area which has not been settled by man. In the second stage, the population runs between 15 and 20 people to a square kilometer. Lastly comes a stage of high density, over 20, which parallels demographic pressure. Jean Fourastie estimated that in France under the ancient regime, 1.5 hectares of cultivatable land were needed to support one person, allowing for crop rotation. This is close to Daniel Defoe’s estimate in 1709: 1.2 hectares of good land or 1.6 hectares of average land. Any demographic pressure meant being forced to choose between types of food, radically altering agriculture, or resorting to emigration. Near St. Petersburg , at the end of the eighteenth century, the wretched farms of the Finnish peasants were strewn over the countryside distant from each other. The houses of the German colonists were clustered together. By contrast, the Russian vi...

In temperate Western Europe, there is a negative correlation between the amount of rain from 10 July to 20 July and a positive correlation between the ratio of sunny days from 20 March to 10 May and the number of niblets on an ear of corn.  If we seek to say that grim concerns arise from a worsening of the climate, we must first prove that such deterioration arose in the farmlands of the temperate zone, the most settled and most vital for Western Europe’s food supply.  Examples of direct effects of climate on crops too often relate to marginal regions, such as corn in Sweden.      In our current patchy state of inquiry, it's awkward to generalize.  We must bear in mind our innate frailty compared to the colossal forces of nature.  Whether it favors us not, the calendar is our master.  It's marked by good, not so good, or bad harvests.  These are steady drumbeats, setting in motion price fluctuations, on which other matters depend....

Africa had a hardy populace in the middle of the seventeenth century.  It withstood the cumulative strain begun in the middle of the sixteenth century by the slave trade to America, while the earlier drain to Islamic countries did not end until the twentieth century.  It can only have done so by benefit of some sort of biological vigor.  Its defiance of European diffusion offers further proof of health.  Africa, unlike Brazil, did not open to the Portuguese in the sixteenth century without protecting itself.  Travelers’ tales give glimpses of close-knit peasant communities living in pleasant harmonious villages, later ruined by the nineteenth-century European onslaught.   Europeans may have persevered in their efforts to seize lands in Africa if they had not been stopped at the coasts by disease.  Recurrent or constant fevers, dysentery, phthisis, and dropsy, as well as parasites, all took their toll.  They were as great an obstacle to advance as...

It almost never happens a grizzly bear kills more than one human.  If they do, it’s generally at the same time.  A mother bear runs amok protecting cubs or, as in the horrific ending of Werner Herzog’s film Grizzly Man , a ferocious and indifferent attack on a couple in a camp.  Natural history books are not stuffed with serial grizzly man-eaters.       There was Old Two Toes, who killed and partly ate at least three men in Montana, and was maybe accountable for two more deaths, but that was in 1898.  In Alaska, in 1995, a pissed-off grizzly attacked and killed a woman and her son, but as a response to being surprised on a moose carcass.  Occasions of deliberate, habitual, serial assaults are rare.  Human beings persist as the most vicious animal on earth.      Grizzly bears, like most predators, are smart enough to know that messing with humans in any way is a bad idea.  Tough to suppose one bear had killed and van...

The slog becomes no simpler with practice and when we stop it's a burden of extra time.  We find we have not prepared ourselves to see how to deal with it.     This individual was not famous or brilliant.  He was one who needed to persevere anyhow.  He had nothing better to do with his freedom than to keep working.  Routinely he replied to people who asked if he was at work on anything new: Of course - I have nothing better to do.  They supposed his answer was a characteristic joke.  He had no choice.       Like others with the same elevated calling, there was not much else he fancied in the way of physical pastime or diversion.  Hunting seemed brutish, fishing was silly – you could buy fish.  Tennis, golf, skiing, sailing, although reliably time-consuming, did not strike him as activities suitably decorous for a thoughtful person.  Hiking maybe, but he detested rambling and was in fear of bodily distress. ...

They parted on the best of terms.     They also parted friends, even though he felt a sense of injury and hostility toward her.  Who the hell did they think they were?     Refreshing to see her so happy for him.     He was comfortable right where he was in his chair.     He could wait.     Their paths crossed again in the kitchen as he was starting away to his studio to sort his mail and consider what to work on next.     His passion spent, he was at once exhausted.     Sleep was fitful, his morale frayed.  He recalled his conversations in the village that day and questioned his future.  He felt small, humbled, and spoiled.  Dozing off, he had another thought, and this thought was still in his mind when he awoke.     Someone must have been telling lies about him.  Without having done anything wrong, Jasper awoke from an uneasy sleep to find himself tran...

Baring Vostok defends employees detained in Russia.   Authorities in Moscow detained four employees.  Baring Vostok accredits these charges to an ongoing commercial dispute related to Orient Express, a Baring Vostok Fund portfolio company.  They do not relate to Baring Vostok as a whole, or any other Baring Vostok Fund portfolio companies.  Baring Vostok and all the Funds’ portfolio companies, including Vostochny Express Bank, continue normal operations.  Baring Vostok will finance the Vostochny Express Bank capital increase as approved by the Central Bank.      Baring Vostok accredits the detention of its employees and the charges brought to a conflict with shareholders of Vostochny Bank.  They are certain of the legality of their employees' actions and will vigorously defend their rights.  Baring Vostok's activities in the Russian Federation are fully compliant with all applicable laws.    Michael Calvey of Baring ...