There is hardly a theatrical profession that has recently been so fostered, celebrated, loaded with prizes and grants as young dramatists....
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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
In Prospect, Tim Berners-Lee invites the world to play with the British government's data. England, not Nigeria belongs on the terrorist list, literary Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka informs The Daily Beast. In Rue 89, Beppe Grillo explains why Sarkozy is more dangerous than Berlusconi. In Tygodnik Powszechny, Stefan Chwin mourns for the Polish idealist. Polityka reveals where a Pole turns to when he's not allowed to marry. Olga Tokarczuk walks her Polish tangle around Amsterdam for Salon. And the Guardian thinks about Armenian women rubbing their soft breasts on a stone.
In Wired, Chris Anderson celebrates the next industrial revolution - taking place in garages near you. The Boston Globe serenades the camel - Nabati style. In El Pais Semenal, the sociologist Edgar Morin complains about European lethargy. Outlook India asks why the Australians hate the Indians. Odra and Tygodnik are still debating the impact of freedom on literature. In OpenDemocracy, Salome Zourabichvili mourns for the wilted petals of the rose revolution. In Prospect, Martin Amis divides the literary sheep from the goats, according to the pleasure principle. The NYT profiles a dyed-in-the-wool jihadist from Alabama.
Das Magazin reports on the dramatic increase in the number of pupils who have threatened to gun down their classmates. The Spectator warns City bankers about gun-wielding dominatrices in Switzerland. In Sinn und Form, Marc Fumaroli remembers the man whose name shall not be mentioned: Mario Praz. In the New Humanist, Laurie Taylor remembers the holy men who sexually abused him as a child. The Guardian asks why Theo von Doesburg slipped into avant garde oblivion. And in the NYRB, Garry Kasparov asks why computer chess programmers are so uninspired?
OpenDemocracy explains why a novel called "Paranoia" suddenly disappeared from Belarussian bookshops. Prospect fears that a ban on Islam4UK could undermine British democracy. The Gazeta Wyborcza explores Polish-Jewish relations. Le Monde diplomatique watches the carving up of Africa. In El Pais Semanal, maths whizz Marcus du Sautoy explains the sex appeal of suduko. And Gerhard Richter manages to surprise the Nation.
The New Yorker buries itself in the Arab novel. In Le Monde, Bernard-Henri Levy heaps scorn on the state-run caricature of a debate. Qantara points to the person responsible for all the misery in the Arab world: Daddy. In L'Espresso, Umberto Eco takes a pin to the overblown daily paper. The Nation has earmarked 30 billion dollars to save journalism. In Tygodnik Powszechny, the writer Wojciech Albinski explains what makes Poland exotic. And the Spectator waves a tear-stained old hanky as shabby chic fades into the past.
In Merkur, art historian Wolfgang Ullrich defines a new type of artist: the contractor. In Nepszabadsag, writer Peter Nadas considers the crisis in Hungary and how it might end. In NouvelObs, Francis Ford Coppola explains why DVDs should be free. Eurozine introduces Lithuanian literature. In the New York Review of Books, Wyatt Manson asks why Pleiade is omitting Celine's anti-Semitic trilogy from the collected works. In Express, Philippe Gavi reminds us that Mohammed was not a crazed killer. A Californian marvels in NZZ Folio, at the reincarnation of an Indian factory worker. And confronted with the recent proliferation of literary cuddling, the New York Times yearns for a bit of Philip Roth.
Wired tracks James Cameron's 32-year quest to out-Lucas Lucas. In Nouvel Obs, Alain Finkielkraut and Alain Badiou tear each other apart over immigration and national identity. Tygodnik Powszechny introduces the pioneering artist Miroslaw Balka. Andras Bozoki asks why Hungarians are undermining democracy. In The New Statesman, Leo McKinstry explains why the bombing of Coventry was an inspiration to the British Air Staff.
Vanity Fair goes in search of a superpartner. Elet es Irodalom reads a new collection of essays by Imre Keresz. Outlook India complains about journalistic corruption. The New Yorker reads a new Koestler biography. Nepszabadsag foresees the next French revolution. Rue89 wonders about the provenance of prawns. And in the New Republic, Moshe Halberthal celebrates the sublime humility of Amartya Sen.
In Wilson Quarterly, the economist Tyler Cowen sings an ode to multitasking. Prospect has seen the monsters of the left. The Boston Globe follows James C. Scott to the new Shangri-La in the mountains of Tibet. Weltwoche is up in arms about the criticism of Switzerland's anti-minaret vote. In the Novel Obs, Pierre Nora applies his mind to the bestseller. New Criterion knows why the Pop art bubble won't pop. NZZ Folio examines the chicken nugget. Al Ahram asks what political Islam wants. The Walrus mourns for the first victim of the C-58. In Resetdoc, Joseph Massad explains why Arab homosexuals are an invention of the West.
Slovenian poet Ales Debeljak argues for a fusion of cultures in Eurozine. Umberto Eco agrees in Le Monde. The Nation portrays the Salvadorian author Horacio Castellanos Moya, who himself explains in Babelia why 200 years after independence there's nothing to celebrate in a number of Latin American countries. Polityka lies Poland down on the couch. La vie des idees reads a book on Jews and the resistance in France. Americans read more than Europeans, writes historian Peter Baldwin in Merkur. And in The New York Review of Books Robert Darnton makes two bold proposals for a new Book Settlement.
The New Yorker searches for the ultimate difference between male and female. Elet es Irodalom comments on the Imre Kertesz interview in die Welt. Prospect assesses the development of Swedish crime writing. Walrus finds out from the conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin why it's sometimes necessary to get a little rough with the score. In Polityka, the historian Jerzy W.Borejsza remembers the assimilators, accommodators and collaborators in Poland's history. In the Guardian, Zadie Smith defends the novel against the essay.
In OpenDemocracy, the Moscow poet Tatiana Sherbina tears her hair out over Russia's obsession with Stalin. Polityka celebrates a film where it's okay not to be heroic. The London Review of Books cements its friendship with Roland Barthes. In Espresso, Umberto Eco suggests removing Christ from classroom crucifixes. In the New York Review of Books, Timothy Garton Ash talks velvet and guillotines. Magyar Narancs talks candidly about the Roma. The New Yorker eats in secret with a Michelin inspector. In Letras Libras, writer Cesar Aira explains why people shouldn't be forced to read. And Newsweek sings a swansong to America, the land of innovation.
In Open Democracy, Neal Ascherson wishes that the 1989 had had more French revolutionary zeal. Tygodnik remembers that Polish dissidents wanted German unity as far back as 1954. In Newsweek, Niall Ferguson argues that 1989 was not a patch on 1979. Laszlo Borhi hurls a rotten egg at Austrian's Social Democrats in Eurozine. Outlook India travels to Arunachal. Wired visits the Henry Ford of the information age. The New Republic embarks on a Peter Zumthor pilgrimage.
OpenDemocracy tells of the Russian waves which are doing away with the Iranian sparrows. The London Review reads new books on honour killings. The Nation goes in search of the last Yugoslav, Dusan Makavejev. The Walrus weeps for the printed book. The Guardian navigates its way through Michael Haneke's oeuvre. Polityka tells the Poles that you can have ethics without Catholicism, or even God. In Dawn, Arundhati Roy defends the Maoist guerillas in India. In Frontline, the Maoist guerilla leader, Koteswa Rao, chats about revolutionary executions. In Le Monde, Vaclav Havel is still fascinated by his critics. And HVG explains why the Hungarians think capitalism comes from the communists.
When Karadzic goes on trial in The Hague, the Hungarian plague will be tried alongside him, says the Magyar Narancs. The New Yorker explains why robots are better than husbands. In the New Republic, Enrique Krauze asks why Gabriel Garcia Marquez had such a thing for dictators. Europe has a sure footing in Turkey, Orhan Pamuk assures the Nouvel Obs. History is no recipe for how to live our lives today, the historian Karol Modzelewski tells Tygodnik Powszechny. N+1 tracks the rise of the neuronovel, and the TLS reads new Trotsky biographies.