From the BBC news website today on Sony’s decision to prosecute people who import certain goods into Europe: “Critics of Sony’s approach feel that the electronics giant is preventing gamers in Europe from getting their hands on Play Station 3s early, even if they have to pay a hefty premium.” Critics of Sony don’t think. […]
Fellow Three Monkeys blog, Our Man in Gda?sk, recently commented on the state of Polish literature, focusing on the genre of “dirty realism” exemplified by the writings of Marek Nowakowski. This literary preoccupation with nostalgie de la boue is also evident in one of the more interesting recent collections of short fiction from an Irish […]
From “Can You Tell a Sunni From a Shiite?” in The New York Times: At the end of a long interview, I asked Willie Hulon, chief of the [FBI�s] new national security branch, whether he thought that it was important for a man in his position to know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. �Yes, […]
Square-jawed publisher, John Ryan, the “brains” behind such consciousness-raising mags as VIP, GI (AKA Gay Ireland), and, latterly, The New York Dog, shows he’s hip to the new media zeitgeist with his latest venture, Bloggorrah. Proudly claiming to be “unfiltered and updated 10 times daily,” Bloggorah appears to be positioning itself as a Hibernian version […]
It appeared way back in the September 8 issue of the TLS, but I’ve only just read the review by Jerry A Coyne of Frederick Crews’s Follies of the Wise. Coyne applauds Crews’s skewering of contemporary fallacies–“not only Freud and psychoanalysis, but also other fields of intellectual inquiry which have caused rational people to succumb […]
The canniest political elites are able to lull their subjects into experiencing what George Orwell dubbed doublethink: “The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” In the contemporary political scene, a passive electorate is expected to swallow a) that the government, being a success, is naturally supported […]
Traktat o ?uskaniu fasoli (Treatise on shelling beans) is the title of Wies?aw My?liwski’s latest book. It takes that most self-indulgence-prone form of a monologue (delivered to a stranger). In one passage from the essay — errr, novel — the narrator describes an incident from his childhood. Children can be so cruel some times, and […]
How would the Sunday newspapers fill their proliferating pages if teams of university researchers did not dutifully supply them with nuggets of trivia? For instance, this weekend the Sunday Times reported that: Street names are a key indicator of social class and thus personal wealth, according to new research by Professor Richard Webber, of University […]
A soap maker named Unilever is trying to start a debate about beauty in Poland. The back page of this weekend’s Gazeta Wyborcza is entirely given over to an advertis– sorry, a manifesto about “real beauty.” (Fair play to GW: it is clearly marked advertisement.) Straight away there is something suspiciously close to a tautology: […]
