World

There was an interesting, if occasionally frustrating, profile of Valery Gergiev in last week’s New York Times magazine. Frustrating because the article was headlined “The Loyalist” (the cover line was “An Overture to Russian Nationalism”) that seemed to want to condemn Gergiev for being a) proud of being Russian and b) far too close to the Kremlin. The former charge seems perverse unless, that is, any expression of Russian patriotism is inherently threatening and the latter seems, in some ways, almost inescapable if the Mariinsky Theatre (formerly the Kirov) wants to be able to do business and thrive in Russia. Still, the article opens with a striking scene: Gergiev conducting

People protest during France’s second nationwide strike in two months, to demand a boost to wages and greater protection form the crisis, on March 19, 2009, in Marseille, southern France. Photo: GERARD JULIEN/AFP/Getty Images It’s springtime which means that even if there weren’t an econmic crisis our friends in France would be taking to the streets. This is as it should be. My one year old godson, I’m pleased to say, is already a veteran of street action, having been wheeled out to protest against proposals for primary school reforms. Even rites of passage happen earlier these days. Anyway, the good news for Sarkozy is that the Socialists are in

It’s nearly April which means it’s nearly Armenia time too. That is, we are approaching the latest edition of Washington’s reluctance to call the Armenian genocide what it is and was: genocide. On the campaign trail, of course, everyone says how important this is; in power such concerns melt away. My friend Matt Welch points out that, unsurprisingly, the Obama administration is no different to any of its predecessors in discovering that the responsibilities of power require a degree of historical trimming. The Los Angeles Times reports that the administration is “hesitating” about making any presidential statement affirming the genocide or, presumably, endorsing the annual effort to have Congress call

Terrifying news. Terrifying that is for anyone reared in the free-wheeling yet genial and sensible world of British parliamentary style debate. It turns out that Larry Summers, erstwhile Saviour of the Universe, was a policy debater while he was an undergraduate. Noam Scheiber reveals all in his informative profile of Mr Summers: Personality aside, Summers has long been associated with a certain tactical and strategic brashness. “I’m somebody who wants their errors to be of trying to do too much rather than trying to do too little,” he told Portfolio magazine last September. One early outlet for this instinct was the college debate circuit, which Summers joined while an undergrad

Ramesh Ponnuru disputes my suggestion that he is on the side of the Traditionalists in their battle with the Reformers over the future of the GOP. His view is that: The point of my column was to question the wisdom of drawing the battle lines in those terms. Those of us who think that the conservative message should be modernized will fail to do so if we proceed by insulting traditionalists rather than trying to persuade them. And yes, perhaps I was too hasty putting Ponnuru in the traditionalists’ camp even if his column spends much more time arguing that the GOP needs Rush Limbaugh and not much time stressing

President Evo Morales of Bolivia is not everyone’s cup of tea. And Bolivia remains a country that has no need to search for additional problems. That said, Morales is a voice of sanity on the subject of the Drug War. Washington’s reponse? Fall into line, sonny. Or else. As Jaime Deramblum explains in (where else?) the Weekly Standard: In November, Morales demanded that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) cease its operations in Bolivia. The DEA completed its exit from Bolivia in late January. Before leaving office, President George W. Bush responded to Bolivia’s lack of cooperation with anti-drug efforts by suspending its privileged trade status under the Andean Trade

Way back in 1994 the Economist reported on this whole World-Wide-Web thingy: This sort of reads like ancient history now, but of course some, even many, of the problems people were wrestling with then (how to make online publishing pay!) remain largely unsolved. I think 1994 was when I got my first email address; it was also a time when the universiy ran classes called “Computing for Historians” which didn’t amount to much more than “This is a computer. This is how you turn it on. It’s like a typewriter but different.” No-one had laptops and the university paper was still put together using scissors and glue…  

I now get magazines sent to my home rather than my office, which means that I actually read them from time to time. The latest issue of The Liberal, for instance, contains a fascinating article by Sarah Churchwell about the home-spun language used by Sarah Palin and John McCain during the US presidential election. She demonstrates that the attempt to paint Barack Obama as an out-of-touch metropolitan intellectual failed, but it is a brilliant analysis of how powerful this particular discourse remains in the US culture wars. “The real winner of the 2008 election,” she says, “may yet turn out to have been the English language”.         I was struck by the following

How so? Well, how can he say stuff like this and expect to be taken seriously? Mr. Obama rode to the White House partly on his savvy use of new technology, and he has a staff-written blog on his presidential Web site. Even so, he said he did not find blogs to be reliable, citing the economy as one example. “Part of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs,” he said, “is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully, then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another…” I mean, really. How preposterous….

On the one hand, the rumpus over the gifts exchanged between Gordon Brown and Barack Obama is, as TIME’s Michael Scherer puts it, “exhausting”. Also, magnificently trivial. But let’s face it, giving the PM a collection of DVDs is pretty rubbish. As Iain Martin notes, Brown is an American history buff (his favourite political book is said to be Robert Caro’s monumental biography of LBJ) and it would not have taken much thought to find a better, more appropriate present. Now one of Mark Hemingway’s readers raises a vital, as yet unanswered, question: It would be funny if the DVDs Mr Obama gave Mr Brown were Region 1 NTSC and

The White House could easily have granted the press conference Gordon Brown so clearly craved. Though there was something a little craven, a touch humiliating about much of the build-up to this week’s Prime Ministerial visit to Washington, it’s reasonable to suppose that, in this instance at least, Brown may have been treated a little shabbily. The kindest way to view this is that the White House is so focused on economic fire-fighting that it has little time for diplomatic niceties; alternatively it sends a tough reminder as to who wears the trousers in this relationship partnership. There’ll be none of this Athens to Rome nonsense, Mister Brown. (Was it