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Index: Politics & Culture

· In Zimbabwe, bishops duel in the cathedral. Plus, the government is a cargo cult.

Friday, 20 May 2011

The ruling party hardliners who coordinated the latest crackdowns, like Air Marshal Perence Shiri (“The Butcher of Matabeleland”), are also guilty of carrying out Mugabe’s massacres against minority amaNdebele people in the 1980s. They rightly fear prosecution as war criminals.

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DSK and the French conspiracy’s woman.

Monday, 16 May 2011

Denis Boyles: Strauss-Kahn’s erasure from French politics and the IMF, will have almost no effect on international finance. Its only effect will be on French domestic politics. Sakozy’s failure as a politician was to distance himself from France’s ruling élite. That’s why he was elected in 2007 – his victory was a victory over the incestuous, self-serving énarques who had driven French voters from indifference to despair. Now there are more énarques in Sarkozy’s government than there were in Chirac’s. He has become one of them.

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· Francis Fukuyama, who rode collapse to the top, now has a view of American decline.

Thursday, 12 May 2011

Fukuyama missed some things, of course. He did not see that capitalism would be a considerably more robust component of the post-cold war world than either liberalism or democracy. He was optimistic that US power could accelerate some of the positive trends he described, a view he repented a year into the Iraq war. One now reads in his writing signs of his own country in decline.

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· Building iPads in China: the workers of the future are united in silence.

Wednesday, 11 May 2011

“We are not allowed to talk while we are working,” says 19-year-old Wang Cui, whose name was changed for this story. She has prominent eyes and dark skin, and wears a blue vest with the Foxconn logo over her white plastic jacket. Her long fingernails are well cared-for. She does not work on the production line, but instead performs quality control on iPad housings.

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· Gauging the Gingrich effect on American voters.

Tuesday, 10 May 2011

The other poll, released earlier in the day, showed that a majority of Republicans, faced with choices such as those above, think there should be a none-of-the-above choice.

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· In Libya, the US military asks itself some questions.

Thursday, 5 May 2011

A hesitant president, a skeptical SecDef and a cautious Air Force chief of staff made a curious trio of warmongers in the days leading up to the United Nations Security Council resolution that authorized “all necessary measures” to protect civilians in Libya, paving the way for a coalition force to start airstrikes March 19.

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On bin Laden: celebrating the shooting of an unarmed bad-man.

Wednesday, 4 May 2011

Bin Laden brought his end upon himself. Putting him on trial would have been – well – a headache. But it is – or should be – the enemies of civilisation who exalt at the grave action of killing in cold blood.

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· Britain’s AV vote: bending the rules to give first place to the second-best.

Tuesday, 3 May 2011

AV would be proportional in name only: it tends to hurt the Tories badly when they are down and to help Labour when it is up, and it always boosts the Liberal Democrats, Britain’s third party.

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· Osama bin Laden and the next least-desirable outcome.

Monday, 2 May 2011

The death of Osama Bin Laden is undoubtedly a welcome event, even if it was perhaps an unlawful one. There is a sense that it was a just outcome, even if there had not been any due process…

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The Wedding: Good, old-fashioned Royal Family (production) values.

Sunday, 1 May 2011

Michelene Wandor: On Friday, April 29, 2011, our couple are friends. They have lived together – as one royal biographer said, without mentioning the word ‘sex’: ‘This is a woman who knows exactly what to do.’ And yet, a guest agony aunt on TV, asked for her advice to the bride said: ‘Have a son quickly, and don’t take any lovers.’ Plus ca change?

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· If there were an election, crown would trounce president.

Saturday, 30 April 2011

Five years ago 19 per cent wanted neither Charles nor William to become king: they wanted the monarchy scrapped. That number has declined by one third.

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· From the Windsor family archives: the near-queen and the silly prince.

Friday, 29 April 2011

It is well attested that Wallis tried to stop Edward from abdicating. She wasn’t in love with him, didn’t want to be queen and was horrified when she realised how much he was giving up.

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· The pleasures of theories conspiratorial denied.

Wednesday, 27 April 2011

That’s how far things have gone. In addition to anxiety caused by the border tension, Thais are being told that everything is not what they think it is. Last week’s satellite malfunction that resulted in blank TV screens nationwide was purportedly not a technical error, but a well-executed warning to the Thai military that if they plot a coup, they won’t have any channel to broadcast it on.

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· The codex, in your hand, perfect-bound, in four minutes. Next?

Monday, 18 April 2011

Many of us worry about a decline in deep, reflective, cover-to-cover reading. We deplore the shift to blogs, snippets, and tweets. In the case of research, we might concede that word searches have advantages, but we refuse to believe that they can lead to the kind of understanding that comes with the continuous study of an entire book. Is it true, however, that deep reading has declined, or even that it always prevailed?

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· Karl Marx and the eternal sunshine of the communist mind.

Monday, 11 April 2011

Seventy years after Marx’s death, for better or for worse, one third of humanity lived under political regimes inspired by his thought. Well over 20 per cent still do. Socialism has been described as the greatest reform movement in human history.

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