Few personalities in world history have had a more compelling personal story or a greater impact on the world than Temüjin, who rose from destitute circumstances to be crowned as Chinggis Khan in 1206 and became the founder of the world's greatest contiguous land empire. Today, eight and a half centuries after his birth, Chinggis Khan remains an object of personal and collective fascination, and his image and life story are appropriated for the purposes of constructing national identity and commercial profit.

On September 5, Nishioka Tsutomu, a former professor at Tokyo Christian University, took the stand for the first time at Tokyo District Court. Former Asahi reporter Uemura Takashi had filed a libel lawsuit against Nishioka and Bungei Shunjū in January 2015.

When Minobe Ryōkichi declared war against garbage in September 1971, he thrust waste into the public's attention and rendered it visible. The governor of Tokyo was not just encouraging the construction of incinerators and landfills to deal with the rapid proliferation of rubbish then facing the metropolis, but was also provoking discussions about the inescapable costs of high economic growth and mass consumption. The Garbage War (gomi sensō), described below in an excerpt from Waste, ultimately proved to be pivotal in changing conceptions of waste in postwar Japan. Coupled with the Oil Shock of 1973, it revealed how deeply waste had insinuated itself into the values and practices of everyday life, and how a society of mass production and mass consumption was also one of mass waste. Shaped too by ideas of environmental protection, the waste of things, resources, and energy came to be seen as tightly interwoven problems that threatened the security and longevity of middle-class lifestyles.

It has long been a goal of the Chinese leadership to see the national currency, the yuan, play a greater role in international finance. The internationalization of the yuan has been pursued through many initiatives and strategies, most recently in relation to the IMF and the inclusion of the yuan in a “basket” of currencies underpinning Special Drawing Rights. Internationalization has doubtless been delayed by relative non-convertibility and China's state-run financial system, amongst other factors. As matters are liberalized on the financial front, so it becomes more credible for the yuan to play the global role that would be expected of the currency of the world's largest trading nation, the world's largest manufacturing nation, and the world's second largest economy. But the year 2018 has seen a dramatic break with this SDR-focused strategy, and its replacement by a strategy that targets the oil market – the world's largest commodity market, where trading in US dollars has been near-universal for decades.

In the decade after the end of the Cold War, triumphalist U.S. public intellectuals, liberal and conservative alike, were trying on the mantle of ‘empire’ for size. For many at the time, while ‘US imperialism’ denoted kneejerk leftism, ‘the American empire’ might just be an appropriate acknowledgement of achievement on a global scale, an accolade about reality rather than a matter of opprobrium.