Cornelia Funke tells stories of fairies and mud monsters, of adventurous girls, a gang of children in Venice ? and her stories somewhere between fantasy and adventure are Germany?s most successful literary export at the moment....
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The New York Review of Books | Mediapart | Gazeta Wyborcza | Caffe Europa | Vanity Fair | The Economist | L'Espresso | Expert Sibir | The New York Times
The New York Review of Books 20.03.2008 (USA)
Novelist Nicholson Baker is so taken with the charms of Wikipedia that his hymn of praise even extends to the vandals who wreak destruction on the more erudite entries. "It's a game. Wikipedians see vandalism as a problem, and it certainly can be, but a Diogenes-minded observer would submit that Wikipedia would never have been the prodigious success it has been without its demons.This is a reference book that can suddenly go nasty on you. Who knows whether, when you look up Harvard's one-time warrior-president, James Bryant Conant, you're going to get a bland, evenhanded article about him, or whether the whole page will read (as it did for seventeen minutes on April 26, 2006): "HES A BIG STUPID HEAD." James Conant was, after all, in some important ways, a big stupid head. He was studiously anti-Semitic, a strong believer in wonder-weapons—a man who was quite as happy figuring out new ways to kill people as he was administering a great university. Without the kooks and the insulters and the spray-can taggers, Wikipedia would just be the most useful encyclopedia ever made. Instead it's a fast-paced game of paintball."
Further articles cover Alan Greenspan's memoirs "The Age of Turbulence" and Peter Carey's little book "His Illegal Self" ("little," writes Cathleen Schine "only in the way that raspberries or bees or nuggets of uranium are little").
Mediapart 10.03.2008 (France)
March 16 sees the launch of the new online daily newspaper Mediapart. Under the aegis of the former editor in chief of Le Monde, Edwy Plenel, this is a project that will be financed solely by online subscriptions of its readers. Only time will tell if the concept will work. On the current "projet" page, Plenel provides a brief overview of the background, personnel and plans, and explains why they agreed on this particular form of financing. "Let's make one thing clear: Mediapart is a journalist paper whose capital is controlled by its founding team, which itself consists overwhelmingly of journalists. Without wanting to point any fingers, we would simply like to emphasise that in the current landscape of daily newspapers, this sort of structural economic independence is exceedingly rare."
Gazeta Wyborcza 08.03.2008 (Poland)
Last weekend Poland was talking about nothing but the 40th anniversary of the Warsaw student protests, their suppression by the communist regime and the brutal anti-Semitic and anti-intellectual campaign that followed. Adam Michnik, editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza and at the time one of the driving forces behind the demonstrations, tells Jacek Zakowski in an interview how this "March experience" affected him. "I never wanted to be a politician but the historic constellation forced me into it. And all it all happened because I wanted to live in a free, democratic Poland, among honest people and friends, and fight together with them for values close to my heart. In March 1968 I saw that this wasn't going to happen without politics. So I did what I had to do and as well as I could. Nothing more. That March influenced the next 40 years of my life."
Caffe Europa 09.03.2008 (Italy)
From 1909 to 1926 the monthly magazine Lucciola ("little glow worm" or "street girl") was a shining beacon of early feminism in what was then a strongly rural and Catholic Italy, as Francesco Roat reports. "Each edition, printed in a stylish font, put together almost entirely by women (although men did contribute) all writing under pseudonyms, was a 300-page magazine, filled with drawings, photographs, prints, sketches, maps and even embroidery. Lucciola also offered a comprehensive literary and cultural section. There was reportage and a section called "Referendum" which featured debates about fashion, socio-cultural values and politics – or another titled 'Street Girl Book Recommendations' which naturally not only dealt with romantic novels."
Vanity Fair 01.04.2008 (USA)
In a thoroughly researched report David Rose describes how the U.S. government's arms dealings with Fatah-friendly brigades in Gaza turned into a "yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs". "Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America's behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)"
The Economist 08.03.2008 (UK)
The cover title asks "What's holding India back?" and provides the answer in the leading and one further article: its bloated civil service. "Indeed, all India's administration is inefficient. According to the Congress-led government's own estimate, most development spending fails to reach its intended recipients. Instead it is sponged up, or siphoned off, by a vast, tumorous bureaucracy. That is why, despite India's commitment to universal health care, water and education, only five countries have a lower portion of health spending in the public sector; over half of urban children are educated privately; and nearly all investment in irrigation is private."
Further articles: A technology supplement deals primarily with the bitter conflict over the future of Wikipedia between "inclusionists", who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors' enthusiasm for the project, and "deletionists" who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries. Another article outlines research into maximising online readership which could rationalise normally instinctive editorial choices about the placement of articles on websites. The reviews cover an exhibition of late Titian paintings in Venice, Michael Burleigh's "disappointing" book "Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism" and Michio Kaku's popular science study on the "Physics of the Impossible" which informs us that aside from perpetual-motion machines and clairvoyance, nothing is beyond the realm of possibility.
L'Espresso 07.03.2008 (Italy)
Umberto Eco remembers cultural historian Piero Camporesi, a colleague of his at the University of Bologna who died ten years ago. Camporesi published widely on sensuousness and food in the Middle Ages. Eco quotes from one of his essays about cheese, which clearly had a stinking reputation in the Middle Ages. "For centuries popular opinion had it that the badness living inside the cheese, its "diabolicalness" was manifested in and announced by its smell, a smell which most people felt was disgusting and vile. After all it was made of dying matter, it was in a state of decay, shrivelled and rotten, a putrefying substance, harmful to health and bodily fluids. Won from the part of the milk that was separated off, the harmful scoriae, curdled from the worst part, the sludgy and earthy part of the white liquid. The unification of the most base substances, the opposite of butter which comes from the better, purer part of the milk. Cheese is nothing but a 'res foeda, graveolens, immunda, putridaque'. Food for the poor. Nothing for the better off and worthy citizen. Nutrition, in a nutshell, for tramps and vagrants who live off dirt."
Expert Sibir 03.03.2008 (Russia)
"In the early nineties, the Siberian art market was one of the most lively in Russia. But this all changed with the [Rouble] crash in 1998," writes journalist Sofia Goldberg. In her article "Unsaleable art" Goldberg talks to several Siberian gallerists about the situation of the art market in one of Russia's wealthiest regions. Despite the enormous potential, the art scene here, several thousand kilometres outside Moscow, is extremely underdeveloped. "To secure the survival of the galleries, gallerists are either dependent on patrons or income from other non-art-related jobs. In their work the galleries follow the principles of the traditional salon." The reasons for the art market slump in Siberia, Goldberg writes, "are not only the lack of capital or interest in contemporary art; the gallerists, who see their mission as bearers of culture, are unaware that works of art can be profitable."
The New York Times 10.03.2008 (USA)
The New York Times magazine has an interesting dossier on the new philanthropy. James Taub's opening article focusses on the charitable activities of greater and lesser American celebrities, around whom an entire industry has sprouted up. "Just as stars have philanthropic managers to help them with causes, corporations with a cause can turn to celebrity recruiters to find just the right star. Thus Rita Tateel, who describes her occupation as recruiting and coordinating celebrities for 'cause-related marketing and public relations,' recently hooked up Purina, which wanted to support 'small animal-rescue organizations,' with Emily Procter, a star of 'CSI Miami,' who, Tateel says, 'lives and breathes animal rescue.'"
Elsewhere in the dossier, Joe Nocera portrays the billionaire couple Herb and Marion Sandler who commissioned Washington Post journalist Paul Steiger to found ProPublica, a non-profit-organisation for funding investigative journalism.
RSS
In Eurozine the 69-year-old Catalan philosopher Xavier Rubert de Ventos admits to his growing radicality. In Nepszabadsag the 75-year-old writer György Konrad declares: remembering is rebellion. In Artforum the 84-year-old philosopher Artur C. Danto thinks about art and revolution. In The New Republic Anne Applebaum takes a hammer to Nicholson Baker's pacifist polemic "Human Smoke". In Folio Christian Demand sends out a distress signal for art criticism. And the Spectator portrays the Anglican Church's only openly gay Bishop.
In the TLS, tenor Ian Bostridge writes about music under totalitarianism. The New Yorker introduces the millionaire-nerd-led group "Intellectual Ventures". Caffe Europe describes Aldo Moro's attempt to reconcile Church and communism. Nepszabadsag and Elet es Irodalom analyse the frequently misundertood concept of "competition" in Hungary. The London Review of Books explains Thabo Mbeki's motivations for backing Mugabe. And in the Weltwoche, violinist Julia Fischer demonstrates how to put up a wall.
Literaturen searches in the giant haystack of literature on '68 for a book on equal rights. The TLS rediscovers the man who sexed the English language. In Outlook India, political scientist Kishore Mahbubani closes the lid on Western cultural dominance. The New York Review of Books looks at the dominance of the national conservatives in Putin's Russia. Le Monde des livres reports on a clash of historians over the role of Islam in the Middle Ages. The Economist fears for freedom of the press in Eastern Europe. And the New York Times portrays Egyptian author Alaa Al Aswan.
In the Weltwoche, Tom Ford makes the case for full, natural pubic hair. Vanity Fair blames Bill Keller for the diminishing Timesness of the New York Times. In Espresso, Umberto Eco mourns the diminishing importance of the newpapers all together. The Times waves its fork about over the English breakfast. In L'Express, über ad-man Maurice Levy wants to give the industry a complete rehaul. The LRB experiences the joy of French painting, the TLS the joy of German Romanticism, the Economist the joy of Japanese "infantile capitalism and Al Ahram, the joy of Russian photography. The New Yorker conquers English with Li Yang.
Elet es Irodolam knows that 'minor literature' doesn't have to be political to be political. World Affairs defends Hirsi Ali, Bruckner and Berman against Buruma, Garton Ash und Ramadan. Rue 89 works through a black book of censorship. In the TLS professor of geriatric medicine, Raymond Tallis, argues that too much brain is the death of literary criticism. Hector Abad speaks out against literary protectionism in Semana. Outlook India is thoroughly put out: revolution is simply not cricket. And Vanity Fair plunges into icy water with the Russians. 
The New Left Review introduces China's most influential intellectual magazine, Dushu. Outlook India would be embarrassed to be embarrassed by the Dalai Lama. "Generation 1,000 Euro" has made into Italian cinemas, Caffe Europa reports. In Nepszabadsag, philosopher Gaspar Miklos Tama declares an end to the days of anti-Semitic journalism. Folio is bowled over by the musical compositions of electronic engineer William Sethares. The New York Times is transported back to the founding of Liberia. And Vanity Fair picks apart Monsanto.
In the Blätter Jürgen Habermas joins the debate launched by signandsight.com and Perlentaucher about Islam in Europe. Merkur reveals how Adorno pinned his hopes on the Nazis and had them dashed. In La vie des idees philospher Philippe Lacour celebrates the true DJ of digital knowledge. In Literaturen Micha Brumlik reviews the new Carl Schmitt biography by Christian Lindner. Nepszabadsag takes the pulse of the unconscious body of Hungary. In Edge.org evolutionary biologist Iain Couzin explains the importance of one mormon cricket wanting to bite another in the rear. And New Republic puts its favourite Democrat on the cover.
Le debat explains why the press is on its way out. The New York Times is starting to look like the next victim of a hostile takeover by Murdoch, fears Howell Raines in Portfolio. The New Yorker sees the end in sight for the entire American newspaper industry. ResetDoc examines the role of immigrants in the Italian election campaign. In Europa, Leszek Kolakowski philosophises on success. Aharon Applefeld tells Rue89 what he will be writing about when he turns 268. And Die Weltwoche asks whether anyone in German literature is still taking risks.
The London Review of Books is concerned about second-hand journalism in Britain. Prospect fills us in on the Chinese intellectual scene. Al Ahram explains why Egyptians prefer their flags made in China. Caffe Europa asks: where was Tariq Ramadan when Milan Kundera's book was banned at the Cairo Book Fair. And Gazeta Wyborcza examines the self-confidence of the Polish worker.
A healthy selection this week! Nigerian women should be punished, because they've only got oil on the brain, The Atlantic discovers. Nepszabadsag is amazed: Jan T. Gross has avoided offending the Turkishness of the Poles by the skin of his teeth. Columbian Hector Abad Faciolince sees the human face of Swiss conservatism. The precariat is today's working class, Telerama announces. Al Ahram introduces the first beauty salon for veiled women. And Denis Johnson discovers Paul Wolfowitz's wet dream in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The New York Review of Books sees the future of America in a Harlem hairdressers. In the Gazeta Wyborcza, Serbian historian Slavenko Terzic declares Kosovo's independence illegal. The London Review of Books considers the links between Modernism and liberalism, or the lack thereof. In the Novel Obs, Edgar Morin explains how he became a radical anti-Stalinist. Zanan is dead, long live Zanan! cries Al Ahram. The New York Times portrays the Turkish-Kurdish politician Abdullah Demirbas who wanted to ease the pressure on the Kurds and Armenians to assimilate in Turkey.
Why do Germans like Nicolas Gomez Davila, asks Semana. Le Monde diplomatique goes on a cruise with some Park Avenue ladies. The Spectator buries Venice. Nepszabadsag looks for real Hungarian liberal democrats. In Edge.org, Kevin Kelly looks to the future of the culture industry in the internet. And Portfolio has seen the nemesis of the culture industry in the internet.
The Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik warns about Google the monster snoop. Merkur has a transcendental experience with Gerhard Richter and Swarovski. Prospect worries about traditional book reviewing. In Nepszabadsag, historian Dusan Kovac looks into the likelihood of Hungarian-Slovakian reconciliation. And the New Statesman searches for the mild Anglican God.