July 2010
4 posts
The Guardian
Berlusconi’s ‘gag law’ sparks media strike in Italy: There will be no news in Italy today; or, at least, hardly any. That is not a prediction, but fact: none of the main newspapers are appearing because their reporters and editors are on a 24-hour strike. Today they are due to be joined by radio, TV and some internet journalists. The action is over a parliamentary bill...
Business Week
Tyler Brulé, Media Maverick: In part, Brûlé discovered his philosophy while dosed up with morphine in a hospital bed in Afghanistan in 1994. He was 25, a freelance reporter working on an assignment with Médicins Sans Frontières in Kabul, when a jeep in which he was traveling came under machine gun fire. He was shot several times in both arms—his left remains pretty much useless—and, while...
Der Spiegel
The Real Reason We Are in Afghanistan: Counter-insurgency is an emotionally appealing theory for us today. Instead of only killing terrorists, it focuses on subjects close to the heart of a humanitarian or a journalist: tackling human rights’ abusers, eliminating corruption, establishing the rule of law, building schools and clinics and, ultimately, creating a legitimate, stable state at...
BBC | Adam Curtis
BP & The Axis of Evil: BP is accused of destroying the wildlife and coastline of America, but if you look back into history you find that BP did something even worse to America: They gave the world Ayatollah Khomeini. Of course there are many factors that led to the Iranian revolution, but back in 1951 the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company - which would later become BP - and its principal owner...
June 2010
2 posts
Rolling Stone
The Great American Bubble Machine: G oldman wasn’t always a too-big-to-fail Wall Street behemoth, the ruthless face of kill-or-be-killed capitalism on steroids —just almost always. The bank was actually founded in 1869 by a German immigrant named Marcus Goldman, who built it up with his son-in-law Samuel Sachs. They were pioneers in the use of commercial paper, which is just a fancy way...
Der Spiegel
Daily life in Iran, one year after the uprising: My week begins before the revolutionary court. I have to defend a woman who is accused of moharebeh or “war against God.” That’s a euphemism our prosecutors use to describe activities critical of the government. Anyone who is found guilty of moharebeh can expect to receive the death penalty. My client is shaking all over when...
May 2010
7 posts
The Guardian
Why are muslims so hyper-sensitive? Ayaan Hirsi Ali enters an apartment in New York followed by a bodyguard. The 40-year-old, who for the last six years has been unable to turn up at a venue without it being checked by security, is a writer, polemicist and critic of Islam. She is also a Somali immigrant, an ex-Muslim, a survivor of child genital mutilation, an exile many times over, a former Dutch...
Foreign Policy | Morozov
How to become an internet freedom-warrior: Get seriously worried about the Internets. Surround yourself with social media gurus who don’t know anything about foreign policy but have a gazillion Twitter followers. Try convincing the world that U.S. technology companies are your new ambassadors, out on a noble mission to spread freedom and democracy around the globe (things not to mention: oil,...
Harper's
The End of the Free Market: Globalization has been the dominant driver of international politics and global markets for a generation. But in several countries around the world, we’re now seeing a fast-emerging struggle between free-market liberalism and a new form of capitalism dominated by the state. The collapse of communism didn’t bring about the final victory of free-market capitalism,...
Spiked
How ‘Anti-Capitalism’ Undermines a Critical Perspective: Why are the prevailing perceptions of the crisis so superficial and backward? In a nutshell, because ‘anti-capitalist’ values now predominate in Western societies. I put ‘anti-capitalist’ in quote marks because this critique is not in fact against capitalism or the market economy per se; it is really against any form of...
New Statesmen | Slavoj Zizek
Joe Public V the Volcano: That humankind is becoming a geological agent on earth indicates the beginning of a geological era that some scientists have named the “Anthropocene”: the time of man. Certainly, there are good reasons to surmise that the main cause of the unexpected strength of the devastating earthquake in China in 2008 (if not the earthquake itself) was the...
Erroll Morris V Adam Curtis
It Becomes a Self-Fulfilling Thing: What I’m trying to say to people is: “Look, you do face a terrorist threat, as is obvious from the attacks on America and more recently on my country. But you’re looking in the wrong place. You’ve created this sort of phantom enemy, which is a disorganized network. When in fact what you’re actually facing is an idea that springs up all over...
The Guardian
Chris Morris - Bin Laden Doesn’t Really Do Jokes: Morris has spent the past five years researching, scripting, shooting and editing a comedy about suicide bombers. He has gone with it, got through it and come out the other side, and if he’s gone mad in the process, it is sometimes hard to tell. In the course of a chaotic three-day spell, I run into the director on several...
April 2010
9 posts
Jeff Jarvis
Bizarro Identity: I’m still trying to get my head around Facebook’s moves to become the king of identity online. Hell, if Leo Laporte couldn’t quite figure it out on yesterday’s taping of This Week in Google, then I’m not capable. But here’s where I am. Help me advance this….I think my problem is this: I want the exact opposite of what Facebook did. I want the Bizarro Facebook. Instead of...
BBC | Adam Curtis
The Weird World of Waziristan: We are told that we are fighting to prevent terrorist attacks in Europe and America. But the reality is that the Taliban have no interest in attacking the West. In the public imagination and in much journalism the Taliban are seen as exactly the same as political Islamists such as bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri. The truth is that they are the very opposite of each...
SEED
Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens: Perhaps our current science over-estimates the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligence evolving. Or, perhaps evolved technical intelligence has some deep tendency to be self-limiting, even self-exterminating. After Hiroshima, some suggested that any aliens bright enough to make colonizing space ships would be bright enough to make thermonuclear bombs,...
Time
Kabul Nightlife, Thriving in Between Bombs: But on most nights, Kabul’s expatriates go out and partake in the manic craziness of the city’s bar and restaurant scene in houses reminiscent of America’s Prohibition-era speakeasies, behind 20-ft.-tall blast walls and an outer perimeter of armed Afghan security guards. “It’s like dancing at the edge of a...
Salon
If you want to understand Kyrgyzstan, read this: Kyrgyzstan’s distinct developmental path owed something to Kyrgyz culture itself. One opposition leader told me that the Kyrgyz are “the most insubordinate, rebellious, and mutinous nation” in Central Asia. Another insisted — in a slight toward their neighbors — that it’s harder to govern three Kyrgyz than...
Washington Post
In Maryland, George Clinton, Parliament-Funkadelic and a missing Mothership: It was the spring of 1982 and Parliament-Funkadelic frontman George Clinton and his bandmates were battling debt, drug addiction and each other. Brooks, who ran the group’s Washington-based tour production company, says the only way he could pay the band’s debts was to pawn its gear. With no place to...
New Yorker
Is white the new black? The Caucasian race begins with an evocation of bondage, and the skull of a young Georgian woman helped seal the connection between whiteness and weakness. It is a delicate race, always on the verge of being overrun or adulterated, dethroned or debunked. The supposed perfection of whiteness makes it vulnerable: every flaw and quirk, every tangled bloodline and degraded...
Salon
How Americans are propagandized about Afghanistan: Although numerous witnesses on the scene as well as local investigators vehemently disputed the Pentagon’s version, and insisted that all of the dead (including the women) were civilians and were killed by U.S. forces, the American media largely adopted the Pentagon’s version, often without any questions. But enough evidence has now...
NY Times
How Green Is My iPad? With respect to fossil fuels, water use and mineral consumption, the impact of one e-reader payback equals roughly 40 to 50 books. When it comes to global warming, though, it’s 100 books; with human health consequences, it’s somewhere in between.
March 2010
15 posts
The Guardian
Freedom is not found online: After four years of running a search engine in China, Google last week relocated it to Hong Kong. On the Chinese mainland, Google had been self-censoring search results to keep on the right side of the Communist party; now that it has moved offshore the entire service will face interruptions from the Great Firewall – a massive, sophisticated system that monitors...
New Statesman
Interview with Slavoj Zizek: I don’t have answers. When people ask me what we should do about ecology, the financial crisis - my god, what do I know? What I can do, as a critical intellectual, is to ask the right questions. Sometimes the way you formulate or perceive a problem can be itself be part of the problem. The classical example is tolerance. Why is it that we today automatically...
UN Dispatch
The Somali Pirates’ Business Model: A basic piracy operation requires a minimum eight to twelve militia prepared to stay at sea for extended periods of time, in the hopes of hijacking a passing vessel. Each team requires a minimum of two attack skiffs, weapons, equipment, provisions, fuel and preferably a supply boat. The costs of the operation are usually borne by investors, some of whom...
The Observer
Video games - the addiction: Writing and reading allow one consciousness to find and take shelter in another. When the minds of the reader and writer perfectly and inimitably connect, objects, events and emotions become doubly vivid – more real, somehow, than real things. I have spent most of my life seeking out these connections and attempting to create my own. Today, however, the pleasures of...
The Nation
Living for the City - On Jane Jacobs: Cities, Jane Jacobs famously observed, offer “a problem in handling organized complexity.” In her first and still most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, Jacobs argued that cities are not chaotic or irrational; they are essentially systems of interrelated variables collected in an organic whole. The...
Der Spiegel
The Soldiers Call It War Porn: War used to be a very serious decision. Now we don’t even declare war anymore. We don’t pay war taxes, we don’t buy war bonds. Now we can carry it out without having to deal with some of the consequences of sending our sons and daughters into harm’s way. It also changes the way politicians think about war. You already have society’s...
Foreign Policy
Gaza’s tragically peculiar economy: When I was in Gaza in January I had an opportunity to both speak with tunnel operators and view the tunnels themselves. One can’t help but be struck by how ubiquitous the tunnel trade has become. Most of what one buys in Gaza seems to have come through a tunnel: shoes, clothing, chocolate bars, utensils, appliances. Even fiancés, livestock,...
The Nation
Coalition of the Shilling: As newspapers close foreign bureaus and shrink newsrooms—threatening independent national security reporting at a time when the United States is involved in two wars—think tanks like CNAS have moved to fill the void in new and old media. And while tightfisted newspaper publishers may be less than generous with book leave, think tanks like CNAS and ISW offer a...
Robert D. Kaplan
Man VS Afghanistan: “Doubt,” T. E. Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), is “our modern crown of thorns.” The Special Operations forces that McChrystal led in Iraq were not so afflicted, despite a home front—especially a policy nomenklatura in Washington—that by 2006 had given up on the war. McChrystal, whom Williams called “the singularly most impressive military officer I ever served...
Washington Post
CIA drone attacks produce America’s own unlawful combatants: CIA civilian personnel who repeatedly and directly participate in hostilities may have what recent guidance from the International Committee of the Red Cross terms “a continuous combat function.” That status, the ICRC guidance says, makes them legitimate targets whenever and wherever they may be found, including...
Immanuel Wallerstein
Greek Mess, Euromess, Western Nations Mess, World Mess? Greece’s problems are indeed Germany’s problems. Germany’s problems are indeed the United States’ problems. And the United States’ problems are indeed the world’s problems. Analyzing who did what in the last ten years is far less useful than discussing what, if anything, can be done in the next ten years. What is going on is a world-wide game...
The Nation
The Wrong Kind of Green: It has taken two decades for this corrupting relationship to become the norm among the big green organizations. Imagine this happening in any other sphere, and it becomes clear how surreal it is. It is as though Amnesty International’s human rights reports came sponsored by a coalition of the Burmese junta, Dick Cheney and Robert Mugabe. For environmental groups to...
Arts Technica
How Nokia helped Iran “persecute and arrest” dissidents: Journalist Hanna Nikkanen quotes Nokia’s Lauri Kivinen saying that “there’s been this perception internationally that we’ve supplied them [Iran] with internet surveillance equipment, but this is not true. The statement was made on February 20, 2010, but Nikkanen obtained leaked manuals to the equipment in...
Vanity Fair | Hitchens
The New Commandments: What do we say when we want to revisit a long-standing policy or scheme that no longer seems to be serving us or has ceased to produce useful results? We begin by saying tentatively, “Well, it’s not exactly written in stone.” (Sometimes this comes out as “not set in stone.” By that, people mean that it’s not one of the immutable Tablets of the Law. Thus, more recent fetishes...
Salon
Glenn Beck is the new Abbie Hoffman: Just as the New Left claimed that the New Deal era wasn’t really liberal, so the countercultural right claims that the Republican Party from Nixon to George W. Bush wasn’t really conservative. ’60s radicals like Carl Oglesby denounced John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as sinister “corporate liberals” in the same way that the...
February 2010
8 posts
Granta
Borges and Me, and Me: Was this the most significant moment of my life so far? Who knew if this collision with great literature would be the trigger of other stories, or the Fukuyama-esque end of my history as a writer – because what would be the point of writing anything if I went down in history as the person who killed Borges? Luckily for me, Borges was alive. I saw Borges, on his back, the...
The Nation
The Cleveland Model: Something important is happening in Cleveland: a new model of large-scale worker- and community-benefiting enterprises is beginning to build serious momentum in one of the cities most dramatically impacted by the nation’s decaying economy. The Evergreen Cooperative Laundry (ECL)—a worker-owned, industrial-size, thoroughly “green” operation—opened...
LA Times
A lethal business model targets Middle America: Immigrants from Xalisco in the Pacific Coast state of Nayarit, Mexico, they have brought an audacious entrepreneurial spirit to the heroin trade. Their success stems from both their product, which is cheaper and more potent than Colombian heroin, and their business model, which places a premium on customer convenience and satisfaction.
Le Monde
What apocalypses are you nostalgic for? It’s clear now that, from her immoveable titanium bangs to her chaotic approximation of human speech, Sarah Palin is a Terminator cyborg sent from the future to destroy something – but what? It could be the Republican Party she’ll ravage by herding the fundamentalists and extremists into a place where sane fiscal conservatives and swing voters can’t follow....
The Guardian
CCTV in the Sky: Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the ”routine” monitoring of antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance. The arms manufacturer BAE Systems, which produces a range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for war zones,...
Mute
Apocalypse, Tendency, Crisis: In a time of crisis apocalyptic desires and fantasies become pressing and real. Norman Cohn’s In Pursuit of the Millennium offers a secret history of the periodic emergence of a ‘revolutionary eschatology’ in the Middle Ages in response to a collapsing social order, immiseration, disease and war. Responding to crisis these dreamers dared to imagine an...
The Nation | Lessig
How to Get Our Democracy Back: This is corruption. Not the corruption of bribes, or of any other crime known to Title 18 of the US Code. Instead, it is a corruption of the faith Americans have in this core institution of our democracy. The vast majority of Americans believe money buys results in Congress (88 percent in a recent California poll). And whether that belief is true or not, the damage...
Slate | Hitchens
A Nation of Racist Dwarfs: The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent “Constitution,” “ratified” last April, has dropped all mention of the word. The analogies to Confucianism are glib, and such parallels with it as can be drawn are intended by the regime only for the consumption of outsiders. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead...
January 2010
20 posts
The New Republic
For the Love of Culture: Books—physical books, and the copyrighted work that gets carried in them—are an extraordinarily robust cultural artifact. We have access to practically every book ever published anywhere. You do not need to be a Harvard professor to enter the rare book room at the law library. You do not need to touch rare books to read the work those books hold. Older...
Wired
The Next Industrial Revolution: With the tools in place, the second part of this new industrial age is how manufacturing has been opened up to individuals, letting them scale prototypes into full production runs. Over the past few years, Chinese manufacturers have evolved to handle small orders more efficiently. This means that one-person enterprises can get things made in a factory the way only...
The Guardian
Does Journalism Exist?: In an industry in which we get used to every trend line pointing to the floor, the growth of newspapers’ digital audience should be a beacon of hope. During the last three months of 2009 the Guardian was being read by 40% more people than during the same period in 2008. That’s right, a mainstream media company – you know, the ones that should admit the...
Wired | Danger Room
Super-Size My Drone Fleet: The U.S. military already has plans in the works to grow its fleet of Predators and Reapers, the long-loitering, armed surveillance drones that have become a defining feature of the air war over Central Asia and the Middle East. Now, according to a draft version of the Pentagon’s new master strategy plan, the military wants to dramatically up the number of “orbits,” or...
The Baffler
Serfing the Net: And so we have our conversation about the enormous cultural restructuring that is going on, but we are having it in a senseless vocabulary where “content” takes the place of “art” and “information” substitutes for “culture,” “knowledge,” “literature,” “music,” “cinema” and “meaning.” All the mysteries of the creative process are flattened: the fickle nature of the muse, the...