Germany
The Internet Intellectual
Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live By Jeff Jarvis (Simon & Schuster, 263 pp., $26.99) In 1975, Malcolm Bradbury published The History Man, a piercing satire of the narcissistic pseudo-intellectualism of modern academia. The novel recounts a year in the life of the young radical sociologist Howard Kirk—“a theoretician of sociability”—who is working on a book called The Defeat of Privacy.
Cruelty and Collapse
The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944-1945 By Ian Kershaw (Penguin, 564 pp., $35) It can be harder to lose a war than to win one. Nazi Germany won quick victories in 1939 and 1940 against its eastern and western neighbors, Poland and France. Many Germans who had doubted the wisdom of war came around with enthusiasm to the sound of German boots on the Champs Elysées. Warsaw and Paris fell more quickly and with fewer complications than anticipated. Their conquest convinced many Germans, including army officers, that further campaigns could be won by strokes of genius.
Kol Nidre, Israel, and American Jews
Kol Nidre is the most haunting prayer in the Jewish liturgy. I would gauge that more Jews attend synagogue at this moment than at any other time in the year. (You’ve already missed it if you wanted to go.) For some it may be an act of desperation, a stance between belief and non-belief, hovering somewhere between trust and trembling. In any case, it is my or your—if you had decided to try—last chance to settle accounts with God, in the heavens or with the god of your imagination.
Did True Love Blossom At Berlusconi's Bunga Bunga Parties?
Sabina Began, a German-born topless model, has became a microcelebrity in the Italian press for her role in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s notorious bunga bunga parties. Those very parties may now have gotten her in trouble. An investigation is underway to determine whether she rounded up prostitutes for Berlusconi’s guests. Began’s denying those allegations—but earlier this week, she positively gushed to Italian Vanity Fair about her personal liaisons with Berlusconi, saying she fell in love with him within hours of their first meeting.
Doom!
Mitt Romney has shed the dark blue suit, white shirt, and pale blue tie of his 2008 campaign for an open-neck tattersall shirt with its sleeves rolled up. His sideburns are graying, and his eyes are lined, but he still sports a boyish grin and radiates the can-do enthusiasm of a man who is promising to turn the country around the way he once turned around the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.
&c
How Doug Holtz-Eakin’s argument against the stimulus became an argument for it. Michael Lewis goes to Germany, writes an article. A great read ensues. Meeting with the most important economic policymaker in the world is something Obama probably should do. Dan Drezner is gloomy about the world. Mitt Romney loses the Jewish vote.
Could we be hitting peak Wikipedia? At this year’s annual Wikipedia conference, the website’s founder Jimmy Wales carefully denied that the site was facing a “crisis,” but he did confirm an important problem: “We are not replenishing our ranks.” Apparently the free encyclopedia is having trouble maintaining its supply of contributors. Wales speculated on a few reasons for the shortage: First and foremost, Wikipedia has over three million articles, so there aren’t a lot of topics left to cover.
Last week’s heart-breaking massacre of teenagers and others in Norway makes it dismayingly clear that the religious warfare at the heart of Al Qaeda’s crusade against the West and its supporters has now found its mirror-image not in the random act of a deranged lunatic, but in a meticulously planned execution of the anti-Islamic ideology that has been spreading like a poison throughout European political culture for at least a decade.
The time has come to return to the vexatious relationship between art and politics, which was both catnip and quicksand for thinking people during much of the twentieth century. China’s ever-higher profile as global arbiter of matters artistic—commissioning major work from international architectural stars; giving the nod to a booming market in contemporary Chinese art; and all the while drastically restricting the freedom of artists and writers—leaves us honor bound to explore the tangled old alliances and misalliances between artistic power and political power.
Berlin, Germany—When the Merkel government abstained from the U.N. Security Council vote on using military force against Muammar Qaddafi, many international observers were shocked. In the election campaign of 2005, Merkel had lambasted then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder for damaging the transatlantic alliance by opting out of Washington’s plan to topple Saddam Hussein.
