In the latest production of Rimini Protokoll there are again experts. But the main actor is the audience, which guide 200 avatars through a game of life....
more
Outlook India | Le Nouvel Observateur | The Economist | La vie des idees | The Atlantic | Magyar Narancs | The Boston Globe | The Spectator | ResetDoc | The New Statesman | Polityka | The New Yorker
Outlook India 18.05.2009 (India)
Not without a flush of (more than understandable) patriotic pride, Vinod Mehta comments on the results of the Indian elections: The triumphant victory of the moderate Congress Party under Manmohan Singh is a "titanic rejection" of the extremist politics of the Hindu BJP and the Communists: "India sends an urgent message through this election. The world's largest democracy, which embraces at once slumdog and real millionaires, remains firmly committed to secular politics. Our neighbours may be flirting with religious and ethnic extremism, but we have manifestly renounced them." The magazine offers a glut of information about the elections and an interactive map showing states and constituencies
Le Nouvel Observateur 14.05.2009 (France)
The Obs dedicates its cover dossier to India. The writer Vikram Chandra explains that the greatest challenges his country faces are domestic: the fight against poverty, corruption and racketeering: "The rise of organised crime is ineluctably bound up with the country's economic growth. The mafiosi are like a corporation which wants a piece of the pie so much that it will stop at nothing to get it. I cannot see these mafia organisations disappearing, instead they will apply their methods to the circumstances. They have an enormously strong influence over all areas of life. The corruption and fear which they spread impairs development, justice, business, politics and everything else besides. And there is no panacea. It will be a long and difficult task to roll back their influence, a dirty job for citizens and state alike."
There is also an interview with the India expert Christophe Jaffrelot, in which he analyses the trump cards and weak spots of the world's largest democracy. In the books section, Philippe Sollers applies himself to the previously unpublished texts of the "absolute misanthrope" Emil Cioran, in which at the age of 22, the author reveals himself to be an ardent follower of Hitler and fascism.
The Economist 15.05.2009 (UK)
In two articles the Economist investigates the state of affairs in the newspaper and news business. While it does not deny the dangers and changes, it steadfastly refuses to break into into the morbid swansongs so popular in Germany. "The only certainty about the future of news is that it will be different from the past. It will no longer be dominated by a few big titles whose front pages determine the story of the day. Public opinion will, rather, be shaped by thousands of different voices, with as many different focuses and points of view. As a result, people will have less in common to chat about around the water-cooler. Those who are not interested in political or economic news will be less likely to come across it; but those who are will be better equipped to hold their rulers to account. Which is, after all, what society needs news for."
A second, informative article presents the new world of the news in more detail. One of the things it looks at are the impersonal aggregators such as Google News. And more personal ones which could play an important role in the future: "Some are eclectic, like the Daily Beast and the Drudge Report—the grandfather of the boutique aggregators. Others are more specific, like Perlentaucher, a German cultural website... Old-fashioned news folk increasingly complain that aggregators are 'parasites' that profit from their work. They are, in a sense; but parasites can be useful. As the quality of journalism becomes more erratic, the job of sifting stories is increasingly vital."
La vie des idees 15.05.2009 (France)
What drives some countries to export their films while others content themselves with imported goods? Monique Dagnaud's essay looks into what makes France, India and the USA the world's successful cinephile nations, with completely different artistic and economic models. As a starting point to her thoughts about how a nation creates and asserts its own identity through the image industry, she outlines three configurations: "Indian cinema cheerfully cultivates its traditions and romanticism for a passionate local audience. The success of this industry is rooted in the country's cultural history. The USA combines the culture of mass cinema with economic efficiency: using mega productions and a variety of genres, it obeys a logic of saturation in domestic and foreign markets alike, but by accumulating talent from all round the world, it furthers the values of the melting pot. France adulates cinema as its own genre of art and zealously guards distribution with state muscle."
The Atlantic 01.06.2009 (USA)
Joshua Wolf Shenk has gained exclusive access to a fascinating long-term scientific study, which has been underway since 1937. It monitors a group of male students who enrolled as undergraduates at Harvard that year. Around half of them are still alive. The study has no less ambitious goal than to find out what makes us happy? The results are more paradoxical than unambiguous, as Schenk emphasises: "But as George Vaillant, who has run the study for more than forty years, points out, longitudinal studies, like wines, improve with age. And as the Grant Study men entered middle age—they spent their 40s in the 1960s—many achieved dramatic success. Four members of the sample ran for the U.S. Senate. One served in a presidential Cabinet, and one was president [this was John F. Kennedy, but his files cannot be opened until 2040 - ed.]. There was a best-selling novelist (not, Vaillant has revealed, Norman Mailer, Harvard class of '43). But hidden amid the shimmering successes were darker hues. As early as 1948, 20 members of the group displayed severe psychiatric difficulties. By age 50, almost a third of the men had at one time or another met Vaillant's criteria for mental illness. Underneath the tweed jackets of these Harvard elites beat troubled hearts. Arlie Bock didn't get it. 'They were normal when I picked them,' he told Vaillant in the 1960s. 'It must have been the psychiatrists who screwed them up.'"
Magyar Narancs 14.05.2009 (Hungary)
The 8th of May seems to have passed unnoticed in Hungary. Does this date means nothing to Hungarians? Don't they know how to celebrate or what they should be celebrating? Obviously Hungary was not on the winning side, but the Germans can and want to celebrate this date. "Does this make them traitors and us Hungarians the guardians of the flame? What is that divide opening up under our feet?" the weekly paper Magyar Narancs asks anxiously. "Behind this profound, ominous silence, in which the only thing you hear is the lack of national consensus about fascism and Hungary's fascist past; behind this paravent of embarrassing silence, the events of the past weeks and months are beginning to emerge: incidents of racist violence, black uniforms on the streets of Hungarian villages, hate speeches which are becoming part of our daily lives; and the powerlessness of the law. But this is not all. The silence is also an affront to Europe. Because it is this antifascist consensus that holds together this community: the fundamental and irrefutable knowledge that fascism, National Socialism and everything this leads to - like the Second World War – represents the darkest chapter in the history of mankind. And the end of WWII, the day of the German surrender, is the greatest day in this community."
The Boston Globe 18.05.2009 (USA)
Richard Thompson Ford, professor of law, human rights activist, and one of America's leading black intellectuals, assesses the current state of racial discrimination in the US under the new black president. Discrimination is no longer the key problem, Ford argues; but racial segregation - the legacy of past racism - is. "The biggest racial problem facing the country isn't discrimination, but rather the deep inequality that has created almost two different Americas, one black and poor and the other a more prosperous, multi-racial mainstream. Many poor inner-city blacks have no contact with the mainstream of American society or with the conventional job market. Fathers who are unable to support their families walk away from them; young single mothers, overwhelmed with the challenges of parenthood, abandon education and any hope for upward mobility. In isolation, ghetto residents develop distinctive speech patterns and affectations that can be off-putting to potential employers, exacerbating the lack of economic opportunity. Deprived of legitimate job opportunities, many hustle in the quasi-legal gray market; others turn to full-fledged crime."
The Spectator 16.05.2009 (UK) 
Only a medievalist can understand the present, declares Dan Jones, and draws a number of parallels between the 14th and the 21st centuries."It's time for the world to recognise that the problems with which we now wrestle were experienced and dealt with in spooky parallel by our ancestors some 700 years ago. Where Geoffrey Chaucer and his fellows had the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt, the Hundred Years War and the Mediaeval Warm Period, so we have Swine Flu, the G20 riots, Afghanistan and Al Gore. The names have changed, but the horsemen ain't. Take the G20 riots in London. Many of the protestors no doubt felt very modern, as they used their mobile phones, Facebook etc to arrange their meeting, marching, camping, hollering and bottle-chucking. To the mediaevalist it was all old hat. In fact, the G20 protest was organised, fomented, executed and eventually dispelled in much the same way as Wat Tyler's rebellion in 1381. There was no camp on Blackheath or battle at Smithfield, but much else was there intact."
ResetDoc 16.05.2009 (Italy)
The infamous new marital laws for Shiites in Afghanistan break with the Qur'an, writes the liberal Islamic thinker Nasr Abu-Zayd in the intercultural magazine ResetDoc.org. "The Qur'an changed the long practised Arabian tradition of making the eldest son the only heir of the deceased father's wealth and distributes it among all the sons, the daughters and the wife. Ironically, in the context of inheritance, the Qur'an speaks only about one wife, no mention is made of wives of the deceased. Women were thus included to take their share. Marriage is presented in the Qur'an in terms of tranquillity and mutual love; the husband is his wife's own dress and she is his. They contain each other. Compared with the definition of marriage in Shari'a where the marriage contract consists of buying and selling, the woman is the merchandise, while the Qur'an provides marriage with a high status."
The New Statesman 14.05.2009 (UK)
The New Statesman features a number of articles on Saudi Arabia – a land torn between fundamentalist Islam and oil-fuelled modernity. David Gardner outlines the effects of totalitarian Wahhabism on everyday life: ""The state created by Ibn Saud has remained essentially static, while its subjects have been dragged into a modernity that rests on the shakiest foundations, imported like the air-conditioners that cool the gleaming malls and gated residential compounds. Within loudspeaker distance of a fire-and-brimstone mosque in Riyadh, close to the hotels where I have stayed many times, a shimmering mall houses a Harvey Nichols emporium with an outlet for La Senza, the lingerie chain. It is identical, in all respects except the gaudier range, to a similar shop anywhere else. But there is one fundamental difference. Because women may not mix with men outside their family and are kept in a mixture of seclusion and segregation, it follows that they cannot work in a lingerie boutique – which is therefore staffed entirely by men."
Further articles: Sophie Elmhirst portrays Abdul Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism. The jazz critic Sholto Byrnes remembers his childhood in Saudi Arabia.
Polityka 13.05.2009 (Poland)
Jazz, once so alive and kicking in Poland, is fading into the background in the country's bars. Polityka features an article (here in German) by Dorota Szwarcman, who attended a conference in Kattowitz about the history of jazz in Poland. She cites the critic Tomasz Szachowski: "They play mainstream or Hard Bop, in the style of Adderley, say, because Charlie Parker would be too difficult for them. Free Jazz no longer gets a look in. There are only stylisations, wonderful stylisations, but old-fashioned. It would be fantastic if young musicians would still surprise us with their own visions. But this is not happening."
The New Yorker 25.05.2009 (USA)
On the seventieth anniversary of "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz" and the publication of two good books, David Denby remembers the almost forgotten man behind these two Hollwood classics, director Victor Fleming. "On the 'Gone with the Wind' set, Fleming teased and cajoled Leigh; at times, they battled as much as Rhett and Scarlett. Walking off after a bad day, he said, 'Miss Leigh, you can stick this script up your royal British ass,' a not particularly elegant variant of 'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.' But their dislike for each other may have kept the movie dramatically alive. In one of the scenes in which Rhett moves in on Scarlett, Fleming instructed her, 'Resist but don't resist too much.' Yet, as Gable reached for her, she slapped him. This particular blow, one imagines, may have been a retaliatory act aimed as much at Fleming as at Rhett. In any case, Fleming was very pleased with the scene ('That's swell!'), and it stayed in the movie."
Other articles: Jeffrey Toobin portrays the Supreme Court's "stealth hardliner", John Roberts. Paul Goldberger congratulates the Guggenheim on its 50th birthday. And David Denby also watched "Angels and Demons" by Ron Howard and "Summer Hours" ("L'heure d'ete") by Olivier Assayas. There is also a short story "Ava's Apartment" by Jonathan Lethem and poems by Robert Gibb and Philip Levine.
RSS
The New York Times investigates the new hunger for reality. In Salon, Andrzej Stasiuk sees only individual realities. In the Gazeta Wyborcza, the ethnologist Tomasz Rakowski describes the reality of the Polish poor mines. Sometimes you can turn reality on its head, El Pais reads in the Financial Times. Le Monde diplomatique gives the low-down on the ACTA talks. And the New Yorker dreams of less polish and a bit more grit.
In Magyar Narancs Agnes Heller demands more civil courage of the Hungarians. Mohammed Ali Atassi explains in Qantara, why conservatives in Egypt see women as candy: either wrapped or covered in flies. Oliver Roy outlines in Resetdoc, why's there not so much as a hair's breadth between the Christian right and the secular left. In Magazin, the philosopher Ludwig Haslar tells the Swiss that if they want mediocrity today, they cannot expect the superman tomorrow. Jonathan Safran Foer tells Prospect why he neither wants a chicken in his bed nor on his plate. The NYT embarks on a human-flesh search and finds a kitten killer.
The New Yorker tells the story of how corrupt podiatrists almost brought down the US health system. In Polityka, the Kapuscinski biographer Artur Domoslawski explains how he thinks the legendary reporter should be read. In Tygodnik, Zygmunt Bauman calls for more understanding for Kapuscinski. Magyar Narancs celebrates the ban on Holocaust denial in Hungary. In Le Point, Jorge Semprun asks whether Claude Lanzmann is the only person who's allowed to talk about the Holocaust. Wired describes how Google learned how to tell the difference between a hot dog and a poached pooch.
In Eurozine, the Transylvanian-Hungarian-Armenian writer Kinga Kali tells the story of a "virgjinesha". Prospect celebrates the next art superstar, Argentinian painter Guillermo Kuitca. The Gazeta Wyborcza explains how young people use the web. The New Yorker sends out a message to the depressed: stay away from psychiatric literature. Outlook Indian learns to play Carnatic music online. The London Review swims with the salmon sages.
The Atlantic finds out why the Chinese are not enemy number one in cyberspace. Elet es Irodalom asks why no one in Hungary is interested in former informers. In New Statesman, Tariq Ramadan can't tell us what a moderate Muslim is. The Guardian hearkens to the ticking bomb in Emily Dickinson's bosom and links it to the shards of crockery on the floor. And if it can't smoke, El Pais Semanal wants everything painted black.
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.