By JONATHAN NEUMANN [Commentary] – Earlier this week, the director-general of Britain’s taxpayer-funded BBC, Mark Thompson, gave an astonishing interview, revealing that the BBC consciously and deliberately treats Muslim themes more sensitively than those pertaining to Christianity. A practicing Catholic, he treats Christianity with less sensitivity because it is ‘‘pretty broad-shouldered.’’ Islam, however, is a different story. Continue reading “To the director-general of the BBC, every Muslim listener carries an AK47.” »
Sunday, February 26, 2012
By RAYMOND ZHONG [Wall Street Journal] – “People don’t see very often their death coming. . . . Look at the French Revolution: The king of France was thinking in the 1780s, ‘We’re doing rather better than my father in the 1770s.'” Few saw the end of the Soviet Union coming, either.
That’s the key, [Norman Davies] says, to coming to terms with the euro zone’s mess. He borrows a metaphor from skiing. “It’s like an avalanche, where you’ve got a huge frozen snowfield, which on the surface looks absolutely ideal. . . . All the changes in the ice field come from the sun shining on them, and the water melts underneath. But you can’t actually see it. And you equally can’t see which part of the snowfield is going to move first.” Continue reading “Among ‘Vanished Kingdoms’, whose is next?” »
Saturday, February 25, 2012
From the announcement [Royal Institute of Philosophy] – Neuromania is based on the incorrect notion that human consciousness is identical with activity in the brain, that people are their brains, and that societies are best understood as collections of brains. While the brain is a necessary condition of every aspect of human consciousness, it is not a sufficient condition – which is why neuroscience, and the materialist philosophy upon which it is based, fails to capture the human person. Since the brain is an evolved organism, Neuromania leads to Darwinitis, the assumption that, since Darwin demonstrated the biological origins of the organism Homo sapiens, we should look to evolutionary theory to understand what we are now; that our biological roots explain our cultural leaves. In fact, we belong to a community of minds that has developed over the hundreds of thousands of years since we parted company from other primates. Continue reading “Event: Raymond Tallis – The Francis Bacon Lecture, 29 February 2012.” »
Thursday, February 23, 2012
By DENNIS JOHNSON [MobyLives/Melville House] – In his later years, [Barney] Rosset’s East Village walk-up was a meeting place for lots of indie publishers, including the publishers of Melville House. He would hold court in a genial way — he was happy to tell war stories, but often enough he wanted to talk about your business with you. He wanted to talk numbers, percentages, how the distribution worked. It was a lesson — and often enough he wanted a lesson in return, as he sat on his sofa with an ever-present rum and coke. Continue reading “Barney Rossett finally quits publishing.” »
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.” »
