All the members of the European Union espouse the common value of fair and efficient cooperation, which in turn involves smooth communication on as equal a footing as possible in business, politics, the arts and the EU institutions. The large linguistic communities, whose languages are often learned as foreign languages, also have particular interests....
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Tygodnik Powszechny | The Economist | The Atlantic | Outlook India | Letras Libres | L'Espresso | The Times Literary Supplement | Rue89 | Portfolio | The New York Times | L'Express
Tygodnik Powszechny 17.08.2008 (Poland)
Writer Marek Nowakowski talks in an interview about his childhood in the Warsaw suburbs of Wlochy where he was happiest among petty criminals, about his dislike of elite literati circles and his strategy for accommodating communism. "You can find your niche in every society, not just in the totalitarian ones. I never considered emigration – and I wasn't bothered in the least when they wouldn't let me travel, I went off walking in the Carpathians instead. (...) I never thought about publication bans in apocalptic dimensions. And I never had the feeling that I was suffering for humanity. I took responsibility for everything I did, writing was my enclave of freedom. For better or for worse – in this area I was in control."
In another article Jussi Jalonen remembers Kaarlo Kurko, a Finish anti-Bolshevist who volunteered for the Polish army in 1920 to fight the Red Army, which was camped outside Warsaw at the time. Agnieszka Sabor praises an exhibition in Krakow of photographs taken in 1934 by the Polish Jew Wilhelm Ze'ev Aleksandrowicz during a journey through Japan. "The value of these pictures is not so much artistic – these are black and white snap shots that are both static and grainy. But they grasp this special, if familiar, fascinating and unbearable experience of the unbridgeable border to another culture, a border which forces us to separate "them" and "us".
The Economist 15.08.2008 (UK)
The Economist sees the sucess of a new TV satellite channel as symptomatic of a small economic boom in sub-Saharan Africa. "The region's economy is doing better than it has in decades, and many countries have a small emerging middle-class eager to spend their new wealth. That, at least, is the calculation of GTV, a satellite-television company created just over a year ago. So far it has signed up more than 100,000 customers in 20 countries—which, it reckons, translates into 1.25m regular viewers." Football has the highest viewing figures, particularly British Premier League games. "Besides sport, GTV also offers popular soaps, series and films from Hollywood, Nollywood (Nigeria's version of tinseltown) and other parts of Africa. It has added international news, religion and children's programmes to the mix."
Further articles cover the US poetry slam championship and, under the headline "The Germans are Coming", the triumphal procession of German discount stores in countries like France and Britain where supermarkets have long succeeded in keeping prices high. The reviews cover a book about the 2000-year history of the Jewish communitiy in Indian Kerala, and Ophelia Field's study of the "Kit-Cat Club", whose illustrious members include 18th century artists and intellectuals such as William Congreve or Spectator-founder Sir Richard Steele.
The Atlantic 01.09.2008 (USA)
The magazine features a dossier of fascinating insights into Hillary Clinton's failed run for presidency, which includes several internal documents that were provided with unusual openness by her campaign team. After reading through them Joshua Green gives a chronological breakdown of a completely unexpected defeat. He sums up: "Two things struck me right away. The first was that, outward appearances notwithstanding, the campaign prepared a clear strategy and did considerable planning. It sweated the large themes. ... The second was the thought: Wow, it was even worse than I'd imagined! The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men."
No less fascinating is Lisa Margonelli's deep probe into the stomach of a termite – or more priecisely its third gut. This is the habitat of otherwise unknown microbe forms which can do things that humans need vast resources to achieve: they can transform wood into hydrogen. "Offer a termite this page, and its microbial helpers will break it down into two liters of hydrogen, enough to drive more than six miles in a fuel-cell car. If we could turn wood waste into fuel with even a fraction of the termite's efficiency, we could run our economy on sawdust, lawn clippings, and old magazines."
Further articles: With the help of four American experts Robert D. Kaplan describes the situation in Burma, and Christopher Hitchens reviews a volume of Norman Mailer's political reportage from 1968.
Outlook India 25.08.2008 (India)
"Singh is Kinng" the new film starring Akshay Kumar has just got off to a box-office busting weekend. It is time, writes Namrata Joshi, to start taking this star seriously, for although he is adored by the masses he is still ridiculed by the critics. The unusual thing about him is not just his success, his actual journey to stardom in what is otherwise a dynastically-controlled Bollywood is nothing short of spectacular. "He was born and brought up in Delhi ... went to Bangkok to learn martial arts and worked as a cook to support himself. He came back to become an instructor. A modelling assignment came to him out of the blue and he realised there was much more money in showbiz than in karate chops. The makeup artiste at the shoot forwarded his pictures to producer Pramod Chakravarty and he soon landed a role in the forgettable 'Saugandh'. From then on, it has been a slow but steady rise. He began as an action star, turned to comedies in the middle and now his films are a pastiche of stunts, jokes and romance. More than a hundred films later, at 40, he is easily the most bankable star in the industry."
In an interview Kumar vents his spleen about intellectual critics but is generally in high spirits. (Get a first impression of the man at YouTube.)
Letras Libres 17.08.2008 (Spain / Mexico)
Five years after the death of Chilean writer Roberto Bolano, Rafael Gumucio finds Latin American literature sadly lacking in combative voices: "Perhaps we should distrust all the sympathy and mutual back-patting among young Latin American writers. They might come from different countries and ethnicities but they are all of the same social class, they go to the same schools and post-graduate courses and they have the same fathers and friends. The critical mass of monsters needed to push literature forward will certainly not emerge from within their ranks. Nothing suggests that better books are born of peaceful times when critics cosset their writers. The history of literature tells another story: fierce differences between authors and between authors and critics are never just unpleasant episodes which reveal how awful people really are; they form the fertile ground which breeds good writing."
L'Espresso 14.08.2008 (Italy)
Umberto Eco is miserable in an Italy he feels has regressed to the dark ages of the forties: "I cannot claim that everything is like it used to be, certainly not one hundred percent. But it is slowly beginning to smell that way. First of all there are fascists in the government. Ok, they might not be full-blooded fascists, but Marx was right that history is tragedy the first time round and farce the second. In the forties, there were posters on the walls which showed a black American, repulsive (and drunk) who was stretching out his crooked hand towards a white Venus de Milo. Today TV shows the threatening faces of starving black people who are flooding our country in their thousands. As I see it, people today are even more frightened than they were back then."
The Times Literary Supplement 15.08.2008 (UK)
Charles King's story of the Caucasus, "The Ghost of Freedom", has come out at just the right time. Donald Rayfield can throughly recommend it, although he pinpoints one key chapter he feels is missing: "In a book dealing with 'the ghost of freedom' one would expect a more thorough exploration of the Caucasus's 'little Kosovos', where ethnic groups such as the Abkhaz and South Ossetians try to break away from a newly independent Georgia only to find themselves international pariahs, whose only refuge is a return to the Russian embrace. Here Putin's salami tactics for reincorporating lost Soviet territory meet with no adequate or even intelligent response by the principal victims, for instance the Georgians, or from the European Union and United States who have already tied themselves into knots over the former Yugoslavia, and can only wring their hands as they see Russia, with the help of its heavily armed 'peacekeepers', turning Abkhazia back into its own private recreation zone."
Toby Barnard was overjoyed to read "The Oxford Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland" which clearly shows what writers owe to places and how places are changed by literature. "Towns sometimes undeservedly become the focus of writers' revenge. Yet Slough was not without fault when Betjeman singled it out for bombing. "
Rue89 17.08.2008 (France)
Have the French become more racist in general or are they increasingly leaning towards political correctness? The annual census of the "Commission nationale consultative des droits de l'homme" (CNCDH) revealed that 48 percent of the populaion believe there are "too many immigrants in France", while a good 30 percent outrightly describe themselves as "racists". And racism no longer comes exclusively from the Right, but also from left-wing anti-colonialists and Islamic circles. Sociologist and anti-Semitism expert Michel Wieviorka warns: "Beware: you can bet that not all racists will out themselves in surveys like this. Which means that 30 percent is a low estimate. Just look at the polling results for the Front National. It is a crime these days to call yourself a racist, but it is not illegal to vote for the FN. Furthermore it is legitimate to vote for the far Right. In this respect, the Front National has achieved democratic legitimacy."
Portfolio 01.09.2008 (USA)
In a long article on the future of TV, Mark Harris writes a coroner's report for the three biggest TV stations, ABC, CBS and NBC. Cause of death: hard living and bad planning. "The evening newscasts have been mowed down by cable's heat, spin, and round-the-clock immediacy. In prime time, nobody watches reruns anymore - and reruns, along with syndication, used to be the only way comedy and drama series, the heart of a network's prime-time business, made money. Speaking of old-school, half-hour sitcoms: Once, 50 of them were on the air at a time. Today, they're all but gone. Suddenly, people just stopped liking them. Prime-time newsmagazines? Barely holding on. 'Protected' time slots? Viewers accustomed to Web surfing and channel flipping at hyperspeed aren't going to watch a new show just because they're too lazy to change the channel after 'The Biggest Loser'. The audience for daytime soaps, a profitable staple since TV's infancy, has shrunk so dramatically that the form may vanish within a few years. This is all very bad news for a medium that hasn't come up with a fresh format since 2000, when CBS launched the gold rush in reality-TV competitions with 'Survivor'."
The New York Times 17.08.2008 (USA)
Edward Lewine was in Saint Emilion in Bordeaux for the Sunday Magazine to find out more about the bitter row which has erupted over wine classification. In 2006 when the authorities changed the regulations, a number of chateaus lost the Grand Cru and promtly sued. Now everything is up in the air: "The controversy over the St.Emilion classification is a classic village squabble, but it is a village squabble with global implications. It is a fight over who has the authority to declare quality in the wine world, a clash between 19th-century agrarian tradition and 21st-century administrative law and a sign of the growing rift between the handful of superelite vineyards in Bordeaux and the less prestigious vineyards just beneath them. It may also signal the demise of Bordeaux's 150-year-old tradition of classification."
L'Express 13.08.2008 (France)
In a long interview, writer and former president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, speaks about the Prague Spring, Europe and his favourite for the American presidential election. He also has clear words for Putin's Russia. "Putin has revealed himself as a new breed of dictator, a highly refined version. This is no longer about communism, or even pure nationalism. We must talk openly about it. We can no longer close our eyes. This completely private regime is tied, not surprisingly, to a specific economic boom. The collapse of the Soviet Union was traumatising, and Putin is out to reconstruct this ensemble, perhaps in a new form. He finds it very difficult to palate the shrinking sphere of influence of the old USSR. As a result, the system he has constructed is reliant on a form of political and economic fraternity. It is a closed system, in which the first person to break the rules of the game is packed off to Siberia."
RSS
The Internet is changing our brains, philosopher Joaquin Rodriguez Lopez explains in the French magazine, Books. David Hockney shows his new iPhone drawings to the Spectator. In the New York Review of Books, historian Timothy Snyder calls for a new understanding of the Holocaust, that begins not in Auschwitz, but deep in the forests of Eastern Europe. In Literaturen, Aleksandar Hemon remembers an empty reading that turned out to be a success. Dawn introduces Michael Jackson as internalised by the Pakistanis. In the Weltwoche, pedagogy professor Georg Feuser calls for a ban on Ritalin for kids. The NYT witnesses the end of the black middle class in Detroit.
The Economist is impressed the by the hybrid of old and new media in the coverage of events in Iran. Outlook India looks at racism at home. In Le Point, Bernard-Henri Levy rallies support for the Iranian opposition. In Salon.eu.sk, Zygmunt Bauman continues his thoughts on the effects of totalitarianism in Poland. In the Guardian, Wallace Shawn explains why sex is still shocking. Al Ahram sings the praises of the Pakistanis who chased the Taliban out of their villages. In Nepszabadsag, Lajos Parti Nagy explains why he doesn't want to be Hungarian. And the TLS holds its nose in Versailles.
MicroMega wants nothing to do with the ritual of 1000 women – especially if it involves Gaddafi. Outlook India explains how Berthold Brecht put the fun into Hindu theatre. Polish author Pawel Huelle savours his vote while riding his bike. The Guardian learns from Abbas Kiarostami where to find the beauty in art. In Nouvel Obs Breyten Breytenbach wonders what went wrong in South Africa. Elet es Irodalom is irked by intellectuals who won't go to the theatre. The NYRB reads books about Darfur, the Nation reads books about Cuba. And the New York Times is very excited indeed about the new Grand Paris.
Al Ahram asks what the Arabs can do for Obama. Outlook India says the US president should have talked to non-Arab Muslims instead. Charlie Kaufman's film "Synecdoche, New York" plunged the London Review into a thick fog of existential questions. Polityka discovers a republic of soloists in Poland. The Economist loses itself in the life of an American dreamer who is pinned down by a 483,000 dollar debt. In Clarin, Beatriz Sarlo asks: What does Buenos Aires want to be? In Elet es Irodalom, Ignac Romsics describes the difference between the Western and Eastern European right. NZZ Folio travels the coast of the Black Sea. And in the Guardian, sculptor Alexander Stoddart reaches for his pistol. 
Al Ahram witnesses Tunisians hitting the roof at the Arab Theatre Festival in Cairo. Alaa Al Aswany assures the Observer that democracy is coming to Egypt soon. Polityka complains about the grumblers who have rained on the June 4 parade. The New Statesman, Prospect and The Nation discuss China. In Nouvel Obs, Michel Pastoureau describes the fine line between man and pig. In Salon.eu.sk Zygmunt Bauman criticises Slavoj Zizek for not looking "beyond the barbed wire". Bookforum is excited by the boom in African literature.
Wired explains what Google really is: an auction house. The New York Review of Books sees Pakistan near the brink of anarchy. Elet es Irodalom introduces a new Hungarian magazine about culture on the periphery. The Nation turns to the Kundera Affair. In Literaturen, novelist Barbara Vinken compares sex stories by children. The LRB is impressed by a wiki. In El Espectador, Hector Abad describes the potentially fatal consequences of reading. Espresso portrays the fascists of the third millennium.
What makes us happy?, the Atlantic asks. Outlook India celebrates the victory of secular politics in India. The Spectactor finds itself in the hour of the medievalist. The Economist explains why Perlentaucher is essential reading. Magyar Narancs asks what happened to May 8th in Hungary. In ResetDoc, Nasr Abu-Zayd explains why Afghan marriage laws have nothing to do with the Qur'an. And jazz is fading into the background in Poland.
The Nouvel Obs features an interview with Imre Kertesz about survival after survival. The New York Review of Books celebrates the affluent and brilliant Madame de Stael. Tygodnik Powszechny welcomes the first film of a Stasiuk book. In the Guardian, Elaine Showalter asks why America's women writers are so notoriously underrated. Le Point profiles Dieudonne, who has declared his anti-Semitism as art. Rue89 asks whether it's left-wing to block Internet access. And in the New Republic, John Banville reads Samuel Beckett's letters.
The Nation portrays Bulgarian mafioso and author Georgi Stoev, who met the same death as many a victim in his books. In Nepszabadsag, poet Akos Szilagyi explains why outlawing Holocaust denial would not restrict freedom of speech. The New Yorker wants to see more command responsibility. In the Gazeta Wyborcza, Roza Thun wants to see more Polish passion for the EU. Andrew Orlowski in the New Statesman has lost his belief in Long Tails on the Net. And in the New Yorker, Russell Shorto explains the difference between the Dutch and the Americans.
In Merkur Ralf Dahrendorf speaks out for the stakeholder. In the Guardian, Kazua Ishiguro warns writers not to "fart about" in their thirties. In Literaturen, Peter Sloterkijk tells it like it is: you have to put in at least 10,000 hours of practice to become even a passable craftsman or musician. The London Review explains the appeal of sharia-compliant banks. In Le Monde, philosopher and theologian Mezri Haddad talks about the vampirisation of Islam. The NYT fathoms the sub culture of drug smuggling.
In Espresso, Suketu Mehta calls upon his fellow writers to save the world from the banksters! In the Guardian, Julian Barnes reads the only poem Arthur Hugh Clough ever received a penny for. The Polish language does nothing but express distrust, Tygodnik Powszechny complains. In Commonweal, Terry Eagleton describes the clash of culture and civilization. Observator Cultural throws a spotlight on Norman Manea. And Google's clairvoyant, the Economist discovers.
In Eurozine, Serbian artists refuse to be reminded of their past. La vie des idees shows how the skirt has become a symbol of emancipation in France. In the Boston Review, Evgeny Morozov tells cyber-utopians that bloggers can be as anti-democratic as anyone else. The Spectator wants a "muscular Christianity" on its side. In Beszelö, the poet Akos Györffy sees a new Golem approaching. Paper money is confetti, Dr. Doom tells the NZZ Folio. And Douglas Adams cries on his bed in the Guardian.
Google Street View provides the London Review with the key to understanding, finally, Stendhal's description of realism. Le Figaro reads Cioran's juvenilia. Outlook India salivates over food blogs. Babelia observes the divorcees in the Teatro Colon. Vanity Fair gloats over the promiscuous micturition in the Bohemian Club.
In the Spectator, John Cleese tells a critic what a critic is. In Tygodnik Powszechny, philosopher Jean-Luc Marion has no problem proving the existence of God. In Prospect, Hanif Kureishi wishes authors had more balls. In the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh outlines the sort of sophisticated diplomacy that the Obama team needs. Espresso watches the Calabrian mafia using PTT. Wired visits a prison to hear the tale of the world's biggest diamond heist. n+1 is glad that the weirdness has been put back into German sex. The Gazeta Wyborcza drowned in the earnestness of a Berlin production of Dorota Maslowska's new play. And in the NYT, Freeman Dyson heats up the climate.
Lettre International prints Bela Hamvas' 1960 essay on direct morality and bad conscience. The Nation demands state subsidies for old media. In El Pais Semanal, Javier Cercas waits for a novel about Hitler's moustache hair. In the Guardian, Mary Beard dispels all hopes for a good death. In Novel Obs, Alain Finkielkraut does not mention the Kundera Affair. In the New York Review of Books, John Gray learns all about debt from Margaret Atwood. Elet es Irodalom dwells on otherness. The TLS celebrates Josef Skvorecky. Umberto Eco eyes up the bodies of Mussolini and Berlusconi for L'Espresso. And Carlos Fernando Chamorro sheepishly tells the New York Times how he opposed his mother.