The fledgling federal government used the audacious promise of building a rail line across the empty western prairies to entice the faraway province of British Columbia to enter confederation in 1871.
Alstom, ABB, Siemens and other conglomerates are erecting high-voltage DC grids to carry gigawatts of electricity from wind farms in remote places like western China and the North Sea to faraway cities.
Who needs to visit China, she reasoned, when Western life teems with impressions of this faraway place?
Freight cars fueled a boy's imagination with faraway names emblazoned on their sides, names like Norfolk and Western, Rock Island Line, Union Pacific, and, my favorite, the Route of the Phoebe Snow.
Between 2,000 and 3,000 people, most of them female garment workers, are believed to have been in the complex when it suddenly came down.The catastrophe is the latest manifestation of a flourishing and corrupt system of workplace practices that has the effect of keeping prices low on Western high streets at the cost of putting faraway lives at risk.
Many of the flabbergasting practices in faraway places become more intelligible when you recognize that the same moralizing impulse that Western elites channel toward violations of harm and fairness (our moral obsessions) is channeled elsewhere to violations in the other spheres.
In "The Bin Ladens," Steve Coll writes that he "mocked his Western adversaries for misunderstanding him as a premodern fanatic, a bearded loner in a faraway cave; he saw himself, instead, as a master of global technology and change").
Just as in China, where hundreds of thousands toil hand-making electronic products that they themselves would never be able to afford to buy, so an international trade agreement has facilitated cheap products for western consumers at the cost of workers' rights and health and environmental damage in a faraway country.
"Lamb," director Yared Zeleke's debut feature film about a young boy named Ephraïm, who must live with faraway family members after the death of his mother, paints a nuanced portrait of a place that Western media often reduce to headlines about famine and conflict.
To hedge their positions, then, an increasingly sophisticated generation of largely Western-educated leaders in the Middle East are seizing on green business opportunities, by seeding research in faraway nations.
