Axel Springer’s Dziennik is in fine fightin’ form to judge by Tuesday’s edition of the paper. They’re not letting those Greens get away with the oil slicks that have been polluting the Wisła (Vistula) lately. An editorial thunders: “Ecologists take their Heads out of the Vistulan Sand.” And it’s all thanks to the brave journalists […]
Did you feel the paradigm shift yesterday? Did your knees tremble as the Italian delegation at the United Nations smiled humbly watching their painstaking work on the abolition of the death penalty turn into a completely non-binding resolution voted for by 109 countries,54 against, and 29 abstentions. The evening news here ran with it as […]
Despite unleashing the phrase “Web 2.0” on an unsuspecting world, Tim O’Reilly can be considered one of the computer industry’s good guys. The books released by O’Reilly are a cut above the usual illiterate tat that passes for software documentation and O’Reilly himself seems to have a genuine belief that technology can be used for […]
This week The New York Times/International Herald Tribune painted a bleak picture of modern Italy with “In a Funk, Italy Sings an Aria of Disappointment“: “[For] all the outside adoration and all of its innate strengths, Italy seems not to love itself. The word here is “malessere,” or “malaise”; it implies a collective funk—economic, political […]
I despatched Ukraine a few weeks ago. Epic though the travelogue was, panoramic and sweeping in its grandeur, it turns out that my deft, broad brushstrokes that summed up an entire country in a series of arresting images left out a few minor details. Here comes Daniel Olkowicz in this week’s Polityka with his impressi—errr, […]
From The Monkey’s Typewriter’s modern-life-is-rubbish research department this urgent piece of information:Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year 2007 is “w00t” “w00t? wtf?”, you might be asking. Well, according to the M-W site it’s an interjection “expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word “yay”.”More […]
Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government John Gormley shows why the Green Party is so popular with da kids by telling us how he spends his days in his blog.This week, John’s in Bali. But he’s not like those FF types with their sleazy junkets. John’s just here to save the planet:”I arrived […]
The most charitable epithet for John Waters’s column in today’s Irish Times is “misconceived.” A more accurate description would be don’t-know-where-to-look awful. Waters’s musings on the death of a young Irish socialite, Katy French –whom Waters admits he met just once–presents the dismaying spectacle of a writer who has floated free from the moorings of […]
Having reached about the half-way point of the novel during this morning’s commute, I can see why Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses won the IMPAC award and secured a berth on so many best-of-2007 lists. Almost every page features a line or paragraph embedded with a truth you didn’t know you already knew. And it […]