Tuesday, February 21, 2012
THE SECOND ROUND of fund-raising for Greece, announced this morning, is intended to lower the pressure for a political solution to chronic government overspending and inefficiency. Alas, the Greeks have a reputation for agreeing to demands for fiscal responsibility, then shrugging them off at the first sign of a street-corner crowd.
The solution finance ministers unveiled today is to back up the riot police in Athens with “an enhanced and permanent presence on the ground” of EU bureaucrats. The civilising mission of the colonial power is thus clear: teach the natives how to properly govern themselves.
By MATTHEW DALTON, STEPHEN FIDLER and COSTAS PARIS [Wall Street Journal] – Greece ended months of uncertainty by finally securing a new bailout and debt-restructuring agreement with euro-zone finance ministers, but doubts remain over whether Greece will be able to meet the ambitious terms of the accord.
The finance ministers agreed on the long-awaited €130 billion ($171.9 billion) deal after haggling into the early hours of Tuesday morning to settle the final details. Continue reading “The colonization of Greece.” »
Friday, February 17, 2012
By PETER OSNOS [The Atlantic] – The New York Times dailies and Sunday Book Review are still the standard for mass media, although five precious pages of the Sunday section are now devoted to slicing and dicing of bestseller lists by format–print books, e-books, and combinations thereof. On the Internet, with a minimum of effort, readers can find ample reviews, by linking to a variety of online critics and websites devoted to books. Social media–Twitter and Facebook, among others–comprise a bustling community of like-minded readers numbering in the millions. Public radio–particularly Fresh Air and other major shows–have strong commitments to books as mainstays for their programming. So, all in all, the presumption that book reviews are being sidelined in the digital age is exaggerated. Continue reading “Of the mainstream American book reviews, which one gets the rave?” »
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Leading article [Wall Street Journal – The fires in Athens are the result of the combustible mix of a desiccated welfare state and the burning embers of Keynes’s cigarette. Don’t expect those fires to be put out by this latest round of austerity. In theory, Athens has agreed to carve €3.3 billion out of this year’s budget (including €300 million out of pensions), slash the minimum wage by 22%, and eliminate 150,000 government jobs by 2015. Continue reading “Greek fire and the crowds in Athens.” »
Friday, February 10, 2012
THE VARIOUS newspaper accounts of the Greek euro crisis reveal less about what is happening in Athens, and more about what is happening in newsrooms.
Cheerful denial from RACHEL DONADIO at The New York Times – ‘Global financial markets received a reprieve on Thursday after Greek political leaders agreed to sweeping new austerity measures that should unlock the financing Greece needs to avert a potentially damaging default in March.’ Continue reading “The many ways newspapers say ‘Greek crisis’.” »
Friday, February 10, 2012
From a review by ANDREW ROBERTS of Ghosts of Empire [Wall Street Journal] – Overall, was the British Empire a good or a bad thing? Taken in the round over its half-millennium history—between John Cabot landing in Newfoundland in 1497 and the hand-over of Hong Kong in 1997—did the British Empire contribute or detract from the sum of human happiness? The standing of the empire is the most contentious historiographical battleground in British public discourse, and Kwasi Kwarteng has tossed a grenade into the struggle with “Ghosts of Empire.” He describes the book as “a post-racial account of empire, insofar as it does not regard the fact that the administrators were white, while the subject people were from other races, as the key determinant in understanding empire. There is clearly more to understanding the British Empire than racial politics, important though that was.” Continue reading “How bad was colonialism? Pretty good! Racial politics aside.” »
THE CURRENT London Lecture Series on ‘Philosophy and Sport’, sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy, makes little mention of the Super Bowl, American football’s annual championship contest. That may be because the focus on the game is a distraction from the phenomenon staged in the middle of the contest. The sequence is game-show-game. But even outnumbered two-to-one, it’s the show that matters most. After all, which detail is most remembered from, say, Super Bowl XXXVIII? The show of Janet Jackson’s nipple? Or the final score of the game?
By SASHA FRERE-JONES [The New Yorker] – Masses of gladiators enter, dragging a winged thing that Zhang Yimou didn’t use in the 2008 Olympics. Madonna emerges in a gold lame shower curtain as “Vogue” starts playing. She moves from a golden throne to a pan-heliocentric dominatrix outfit while “Vogue,” the song, is retro-branded to involve Vogue, the magazine. Madonna is dancing lightly and slowly, but who cares? America is looking at pure camp, and Frankensteined “Project Runway” castoffs. Who needs more? Continue reading “At the Super Bowl, a demonstration of the philosophy of half-time.” »
Saturday, February 4, 2012
By OLINE EATON [New Books in Biography] – The heiress to a newspaper fortune, the young Cissy Patterson slinked through Gilded Age society, famous for her inimitable gait. Following the trend of Americans making socially advantageous marriages to European aristocrats, Patterson wed a Russian count who abused her and kidnapped their only child. It’s an incredible story given new life through [Amanda] Smith’s research, which uncovered sources that reveal how – through the intervention of Patterson’s family, President Taft and the Russian Czar – Patterson’s three-year-old daughter was finally returned home. Continue reading “Cissy Patterson: an American journalist’s three-drink claws.” »
Saturday, January 28, 2012
By KOSTAS KOUTSOURELIS [in an interview by SJFowler in Poetica.net] – My verse tends towards classical forms. This is my intention, an intention –I should confess– not always conscious, but, as it comes out in the end, a permanent and consistent one. In other words, concerning poetic expression, discipline is the counterbalance of the poet’s freedom. Without freedom, the speech comes out dry and stereotypical, whereas without discipline it is being split up and spread towards something meaningless and redundant. Continue reading “‘Poetry is not fashion; it does not need to reinvent itself every five or ten years’.” »
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
In Memoriam.
By Anthony Howell.
THE WORLD OF ARGENTINE tango has lost one of its brightest proponents. Andrea Missé, who reintroduced traditional close-embrace tango to the world, was known for her fluidity, her beautiful adornments and her perfectly musical technique.
Slim, trim, impeccably groomed, with the neatest footwork in the business, Andrea was a member of a veritable clan of tango dancers – with her siblings Sebastian, Gabriel and Stella Missé – all professional dancers, well known on the international festival circuit. Continue reading “Tango star Andrea Missé, 1976-2012.” »
Thursday, January 19, 2012
By TIM CARMODY [Wired] – Education publishers dwarf trade presses. Only the top trade press, Random House (itself owned by Bertelsmann) is bigger than Cengage, the little-known education publishing division that Thomson spun off in 2008 before merging with Reuters.
Education publishers are also much bigger than other media companies that attract much more attention. Pearson is far bigger than AOL or The New York Times Company (and much more profitable). In order to find publishers with greater revenue or profits, you have to go up the ladder to companies like News Corp that include global television markets, or retail entities, like Amazon. This makes companies like Pearson too big to ignore, especially when they’re willing to partner up. Continue reading “Schoolbook battles: Education publishers and their little-read books triumph.” »
Saturday, January 14, 2012
By CARRIE FIGDOR [an introduction to an audio interview at New Books in Philosophy] – It might be a surprise to non-metaphysicians to discover the extent to which it is questionable whether the familiar objects we see and interact with – the dogs, trees, iPods, and so on – really exist. And yet, these familiar objects are actually very strange. For example, we take for granted that very same object can change all of its properties, and all of its matter, and yet somehow remain the same object. but how can that be? By analogy, if I swap all the ingredients in a recipe with a bunch of other ingredients, and then change all the steps, would it make sense to say that I’ve followed the recipe? But if it doesn’t make sense, then what should we say about the nature of ordinary objects? Continue reading “Finally, a word in opposition to a belief in trout-turkeys.” »
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
By RACHEL SHTEIR [Chronicle of Higher Education] – I’m all for expanding the idea of beauty, so long as it means that I can read fewer sentences that begin with the words “according to sociological studies” and more Chekhov. For while Freud wrote compellingly of the pleasure people take in looking at beauty, there is no modern writer who untangles its comic and disastrous effects better than the playwright. His Uncle Vanya revolves around the beautiful, idle, unhappy Yelena, who transfixes all the characters, including Vanya, whose dacha she is visiting. At the end of the drama, Sonya, the unattractive daughter of a rich old bore, an academic in fact, who is married to Yelena, longs for a beautiful afterlife. The unbeautiful girl dreams of beauty, while the beautiful girl seems to mourn her inability to feel. Continue reading “‘Expanding the idea of beauty’ without going all the way to BBW.” »
By ROBERT BARRO [Wall Street Journal] – The EU specifies with great detail how candidate countries can qualify for euro membership, but it offers no recipe for exit or expulsion. A natural possibility would be to start by throwing out the least qualified members, based on lack of fiscal discipline or other economic criteria. Greece is an obvious candidate—it has been increasingly out of control fiscally since the 1970s. But instead of expulsion, the EU reaction has been to provide a sufficient bailout to deter the country from leaving. Continue reading “A new sign above the eurozone: ‘This way out’.” »
