In 2012, the new Berlin airport Berlin-Brandenburg will be opened in Schönefeld. The city is looking for new uses for the old airports Tempelhof and Tegel. ...
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Edge.org |The Spectator | Il Foglio| Nepszabadsag | DU | The Economist | L'Express | Die Weltwoche | Folio | Le point | The New York Review of Books
Edge.org, 30.05.2006 (USA)
The best essays about the disconcerting media revolution known as the
Internet continue to come from the USA. A fortnight ago in the New York Times Magazine, Kevin Kelly (more here) set out
his euphoric vision of the Internet-based collective and the universal
book. Almost immediately, although without direct reference to Kelly, Jaron Lanier (more here) penned an acerbic counter argument, criticising the collective spirit kindled by projects such as Wikipedia which believes a collective intelligence will aggregate by itself on the net without responsible authors. Lanier talks of a "new online collectivism"
and the "resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise". "This
idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme
Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that
it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and
futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it
any less dangerous." Lanier does not believe in erasing authorship:
"The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people.
If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has
something to say, we're devaluing those people and making ourselves
into idiots."
Lanier's essay provoked many people to enter into the debate at edge.org, Kevin Kelly among them.
The Spectator, 12.06.2006 (UK)
Peter Oborne reports from Darfur: "When we visited the scene of the battle we found that bodies had been shoved hastily
into mass graves. An arm stuck out from under one bush, and the flesh
had been eaten by wild animals. A human foot obtruded from another
grave. Dried pools of blood stained the ground. The stench of human
putrefaction was heavy in the air. Bits and pieces of clothing, spent
bullets and the protective amulets used by African fighters lay
scattered on the ground. One body still lay exposed. The dead man had
evidently climbed a tree to escape his attackers, but been shot down
from his hiding place."
Il Foglio, 10.06.2006 (Italy)
The Golf GTI was, sociologically speaking at least, the forerunner of the now controversial SUV, writes Maurizio Crippa, and also the perfect symbol of the 80s. "If cars have a spirit, then it is certainly an evil one, demonic. The enemy is inside them, a man like in Stephen King's 'Christine' of 1983. Christine might have been a Plymouth Fury of 1958, but its cursed spirit uncovered the ghastly depths of the GT decade and all the souped-up, turbo-boosted and drilled-out
engines. That all came to an end in 1989, famously the year of
salvation. The Golf, in particular the GTI, the black one - and we are
not talking about the one with rabbit's foot in the back – was
aggressive, demanding, loud."
Nepszabadsag, 10.06.2006 (Hungary)
After substantial renovation, the legendary New York coffee house, one of the most important literary coffee houses of the Danube monarchy has reopened. The writer Ivan Bächer recollects:"Once
upon a time, not only the coffee house but the whole palace, even every
room, every corner every nook and cranny of the the entire block of the
surrounding houses was full of journalists, writers, publishing houses
and editorial offices." The new Italian owners have redeveloped the literary spirit to death,
Bächer states disappointedly: "On the wall is a box of reinforced glass
in which a dozen beautiful old books are hermetically sealed. A book safe.
At the opening celebrations in 1895 the playwright Ferenc Molnar threw
the keys to the coffee house into the Danube so that the splendid
institution could never be closed again. After the reopening, perhaps
someone should take the precaution of throwing the keys to the
reinforced glass box into the Danube to prevent anyone from
entertaining the idea of ever opening a book in these rooms. (Here and here photos of the coffee house in its heyday, Here, here and here after the renovation.)
DU, 1.6.06 (Switzerland)
DU magazine focusses on Germany for the World Cup and has its
correspondents report from every corner of the Bundesrepublik. As usual
only a very small selection is available online, but Albrecht Tübke's photographic portraits which accompany the pieces of writing can be viewed here.
The lengthy discursive
essays are less illuminating than the small atmospheric pieces such as
the one by Svenja Leibe on the village where she grew up. "Drive off the motorway, on and on through the scattered settlements,
none of which you will find surprising. Drive through them, but do not
hope to see anything through the panorama windows of the bungalows,
drive on down the curvy streets, past the pig farms, past the silver
bunting of the car show rooms. Follow the neon coloured invitations to
'foam parties and barn raves'. Look out for people, you won't see many
of them. Don't think the red lantern in front of the family house is a
forgotten Christmas decoration. Drive. Drive down the pretty hill, on
past the hidden building sites in the garden of the old pheasantry,
down to the 'tank resistant' bridge that stoutly spans a tiny stream.
The road runs directly into the heart of the village and to a little
house behind a metre-long curve sign where it turns very sharply to the
left. Don't look out of the window with too much interest here, you
will only make them suspicious. There is nothing to buy any more. Leave
them in peace. Let them file away at their gardens, take that seriously."
The Economist, 09.06.2006 (UK)
Inspired by Isaac Asimov's futuristic vision "I, Robot", The Economist asks in its Technology Quarterly how secure our future will be among robots. Do Asimov's three laws
for the protection of humans hold today? "Regulating the behaviour of
robots is going to become more difficult in the future, since they will
increasingly have self-learning mechanisms built into them, says Gianmarco Veruggio,
a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in
Genoa, Italy. As a result, their behaviour will become impossible to
predict fully, he says, since they will not be behaving in predefined
ways but will learn new behaviour as they go."
Other articles dealing with new fuel cells, artificial neural networks in car motors and the victory march of Bluetooth (wireless personal area networks) are unfortunately not online. Not in the magazine but also topical here is Robocup, the world robot football championships taking place this week in Bremen.
L'Express, 09.06.2006 (France)
Does globalisation make Karl Marx a "pioneer of modern thinking"? The question is tossed around in this issue by two indiviuals who are convinced the answer is yes: English historian Eric Hobsbawm and Jacques Attali, economist and former advisor to Francois Mitterand, whose book "Karl Marx ou l'esprit du monde"
was published last year. Hobsbawm finds a renewed interest in Marx
entirely natural: "Today we are seeing the globalised economy that Marx anticipated.
Still, he didn't foresee all of its repercussions. For example, the
Marxist prophesy whereby an increasingly numerous proletariat topples capitalism
in the industrial countries did not come about." Attali comments: "The
Socialist International was a remarkable attempt on Marx's part to
think the world in its entirety. Marx is an extraordinarily modern
thinker, because rather than sketching the outlines of a socialist
state, his writings describe the capitalism of the future."
Die Weltwoche, 08.06.2006 (Switzerland)
Daniel Binswanger portrays Segolene Royal, the promising presidential candidate whose conservative views are pushing French socialists into an identity crisis. "Re-education camps for criminal youths controlled by the army,
state paternalism of parents with authority problems, cutbacks in
funding for people with delinquent children: for the last week people
in France have been discussing a whole catalogue of measures aimed at
coming to grips with youth violence in the banlieues. But for once the
debate has not been set off by the hyperactive Minister of the Interior
Nicolas Sarkozy. The French are rubbing their eyes in disbelief: as if
in a political mirage, the discourse on law-and-order has changed camps."
Folio, 06.06.2006 (Switzerland)
What's become of lunch? A sandwich gulped down while you're walking. Folio presents this rule and exceptions to it.
Stephan Israel visits Michel Addons,
cook for the Italian EU Commission: "Today there's lobster tails on
spring rolls with ginger and oyster sauce. For the main course there's veal sweetbreads
with new potatoes and green asparagus from Provence. For desert there's
strawberries on creme brulee. Today is the yearly visit of the
much-feared auditors from Luxembourg."
Italian author Andrea Camilleri commiserates with those who have to swallow down a hamburger on the street, reminiscing about how his grandmother used to cook at noon. "As primo there was mostly pasta, as a gratin or with meat sauce, sometimes there was also melanzane alla parmigiana. As secondo there was poultry, lamb or fish, then cheese and sausages. Of course a lunch like that took its time. No one went back to work before four in the afternoon."
In his "Duftnote" column on fragrances, Luca Turin voices his amazement at a new summer perfume: "This is so wretched that it almost sets new standards in the matter." (Here the English version.)
Le point, 12.06.2006 (France)
Bernard-Henri Levy is up in arms that no one in France has said a word about Simone de Beauvoir, who died 20 years ago. In his "notebook"
column, he pays homage to seven women, all of whom are "proof of the
timelessness of de Beauvoir's tremendous work": Hillary Clinton,
Condoleezza Rice, Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, French
politician Segolene Royal, women's rights activist Fadela Amara,
Burmese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and – German chancellor Angela Merkel. Levy writes: "Angela Merkel, 'that woman' as Gerhard Schröder,
Putinist and world record holder in matters of corruption under a
democracy, called her; that 'girl' who peeved him no end at the time of
his election defeat... She, the specialist in quantum physics
(elementary particles are not Michel Houellebecq's terrain, but hers),
enjoys a popularity that has her predecessor, and all of
Europe's heads of government, green with envy. And on top of that she's
rehabilitating the finances of an economy that thanks to her is once
more becoming what it always has been and should definitely be once
more: the moving force in the European equation."
The New York Review of Books, 22.06.2006 (USA)
Five years after the American victory over the Taliban, Ahmed Rashid sees Afghanistan
once more on the verge of collapse: "A revived Taliban movement has
made a third of the country ungovernable. Together with al-Qaeda,
Taliban leaders are trying to carve out new bases on the
Afghanistan–Pakistan border. They are aided by Afghanistan's resurgent opium industry,
which has contributed to widespread corruption and lawlessness,
particularly in the south. The country's huge crop of poppies is
processed into opium and refined into heroin for export, now accounting
for close to 90 percent of the global market."
Further articles: Alan Ryan presents three books in which renowned philosophers – Kwame Anthony Appiah, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum – address concepts of cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism. Freeman J. Dyson reviews Daniel C. Dennet's philosophical treatise on religion, "Breaking the Spell",
in which Dennett pinpoints the real problem as "belief in belief": "He
finds evidence that large numbers of people who identify themselves as
religious believers do not in fact believe the doctrines of their
religions but only believe in belief as a desirable goal."
RSS
The Hungarian magazines are thrilled to be able to read Herta Müller's "Everything I Own I Carry With Me". In the Blätter, Jürgen Habermas calls for an extension of human rights into the social sphere. In La regle du jeu, big name European intellectuals defend their Croatian colleague Predrag Matvejevitch, who faces imprisonment for describing an ultra-nationalist Croatian poet as the "Catholic Taliban". Slate wants to know whether Nabokov's poem "Pale Fire" was meant seriously or not. The TLS meets radical feminists with fabulous names - like the anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre. Przekroj looks at the two types of Turkish cinema. And in the NYT, Jay Rosen explains why the Internet is eroding America's most beautiful ideal.
Mediapart decries the connivances of French politics and media. In the Nation, Colin Robinson picks a fight with Amazon. Osteuropa rolls out the red carpet for the composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg. The London Review remembers the media feeding frenzy around Tolstoy's deathbed. In Opendemocracy, the poet Tatiana Shcherbina feels the evil creeping back into Russia.
The Swiss Magazin looks at the lawyers and doctors who are producing stewardesses and farmers. Caffe Europa shares Ulrich Beck's optimism about the religious mix of the future. The Boston Globe looks at the powerlessness of facts in the face of false convictions. In Le Monde, Michel Onfray trembles before the language of empire. The New Statesmen evaluates the new young supertaskers. The TLS reads a book about 19th anarchists. Outlook India and the NYT tackle terror in India, Pakistan and Yemen.
The New Yorker wonders which is better equipped to determine the authenticity of a Leonardo da Vinci: the connoisseur or the forensic scientist. Polityka picks through the remains of the Fourth Republic. In The Observer, Claire Denis talks about shame and humiliation. In La regle du jeu, Roberto Saviano does not like what he sees in the eyes of his admirers. MicroMega has witnessed the birth of a political monster: illiberal democracy. The London Review of Books is looking for aliens to take care of our nuclear waste.
The New Yorker profiles Saad Mohseni, Afghanistan's first media mogul. La vie des idees and the Guardian recommend Gilbert Achcar's book "The Arabs and the Holocaust". The children in Hungary are eating their revolution, fears Elet es Irodalom. Magyar Narancs and Rue89 fear for independence of the press. In Open Democracy, Lisbet Rausing worries about the future of the library. In the NYRB, Tim Parks warns non-English writing authors against liberal international readers.
The Walrus strolls through Johannesburg with the flaneurs. In Telerama, Olivier Bomsel defines the digital as script.The London Review is peeved that Christopher Hitchens is having so much fun. In Osteuropa, Hungarian writers and nihilists weave away at the deadly void. The New Statesman reads Vasili Grossman's "Everything Flows" and meets the great man's daughter. Al Ahram warns European Muslims about the perils of Salafism. Salon asks why Adrian Lamo turned in the alleged whistle-blower Bradley Manning and what Wired's Kevin Poulsen had to do with it.
The big stories of our time are being told in reportage rather than fiction, says novelist Geoff Dyer in the Guardian. Lettre International meets the marginalised in Rome and Rotterdam. In Espresso, Umberto Eco fantasises about 6 billion encyclopaedias. The Nation finds many ways to erase Israel from the map without being anti-Semitic. The Spectator speculates about the counter-cultural concentration camp that Glastonbury has become. The Atlantic waves farewell to men.
Prospect chucks contemporary art into the dustbin of history. Where it will join Polish book culture, if Res Publica Nowa is to be believed. And iTunes to boot, according to the New Yorker. In El Pais Semanal, the physicist Michio Kaku sees the internet everywhere. Young people however, claims the LRB, are proving remarkably resilient to its influences. In the NYRB, Timothy Snyder reviews Christopher R. Browning's new book "Remembering Survival" about the ghetto in Wierzbnik. Le Monde puts three Chinese dissidents on a pedestal.
The New Yorker escorts us into the extraordinary paranoid world of Wikileak founder Julian Assange. In Merkur, Udo di Fabio praises the egalitarian properties of money. The Economist discusses the latest mass import in Africa: homophobia. In Micromega, Paolo Flores d'Arcais cannot understand why Saviano needs defrocking. Paris is partying in celebration of the collapse of the Anglo-American system, das Magazin reports. n+1 delves into the Berlin Roman. The New York Times charts the success of Dutch politician Job Cohen.
The NYRB takes on the privatisation of the net by Steven P. Jobs. The NYT is already bored of life in the suburban Applecrest Estates. In Eurozine, Sven Egil Omdal delivers a comprehensive report on the crisis in the Norwegian newspaper industry. The Walrus learns how to become an expert from the unrepentant whore Jamie Lee Hamilton. In Elet and Irodalom, we learn how Hungarian nationalism foments Slovak nationalism, And Umberto Eco explains in Espresso, why he would never boycott Gianni Vattimo.
The Nation reads Jonathan Israel's history of radical Enlightenment. In Elet es Irodalom, György Konrad tells the Hungarians to stand up for freedom or kiss it goodbye. English is a Dalit goddess, standing on a computer, Tehelka says, and there's nothing you can do about it. In the Atlantic, Google's Eric Schmidt loses himself in his creepily colourful vision of the future. In Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg gives publishers the answer one would have expected from Google. Slate asks why Paul Berman is not being discussed by Arab intellectuals. Tygodnik Powszechny thinks about Polish-Russian reconcilation. Prospect explains why, in the future, you will be arrested for over-frequent visits to the toilet when flying.
The NYRB solves the Cuba dilemma. In Eurozine, Martina Simecka and Laszlo Rajk talk about their fathers, prominent communists who were persecuted by communists. Julian Barnes reads Eugene Delacroix's diary for the TLS. Odra asks why Bogdan Wojdowski has been forgotten. In Le point, BHL explains why he supports JCall's "Call for Reason". The New Yorker portrays Andrei Ternowski, the 17-year-old Chatroulette inventor. Wired calls on programmers to create a new Facebook, where privacy is respected.
The New York Times dives into the data streams of the self-trackers. N+1 assesses "The Intellectual Situation". In the Onfray vs. Freud debate, BHL defends the psychoanalyst against fatuous platitudes. Peter Nadas tells Magyar Narancs that capitalism will be to blame if Hungary goes to the dogs. For Tony Judt, re-education is the only way to combat authoritarianism. And in Salon, Miroslav Kusy explains that, in Slovakia, "the people" have been replaced by "human beings", but "citizens" have yet to be invited into the political arena.
In Eurozine, Kenan Malik asks what makes a real Muslim. For Osteuropa, Serhij Zadan travels though Ukraine's death valley. Wired visits old hackers. The most pig-headed of them, Richard Stallman, explains in the Boston Review, why cloud computing means thinking like a sucker. Frontline crosses the digital divide to where linux has transformed the lives of children in rural Bengal. The NYRB looks at why, after receiving 26 billion dollars in aid, Ethiopians are still hungry. In Magazin, the psychoanalyst Jürg Atlin warns about over-enthusiasm for cleansing in the wake of the paedophile scandals. Magyar Naracs observes a sacralisation of the state in Poland.