Over at Teekay’s

The revised text of a talk I gave in Vienna last November is now available here. It talks about the decisive events in Bosnia and Kosovo that 2006 might bring, though — as alluded to even in November — one of them, the Hays talks on Bosnia’s constitution, look considerably less grand than they might have then.

Fatah wins, Hamas gains in Palestinian election
Wall Street Journal Europe, January 26, 2006, p.2

Read:

Pope warns about loveless sex
Seattle Post Intelligencer

Thought:
What does he know about it?

There’s been a gradual shift away from the hack of lore to clean proper guys and gals with journalism degrees from prestigious universities. Gone is the generalist who’d do the police beat for the first couple years, then switch into a foreign posting, and come back to the national desk. I’m not sure that’s a good development, but it’s not up to me to judge. What I can judge, however, are headlines, and I’m not sure they’ve gotten better. (Maybe they’re all written by the lone surviving hack in the newsroom?) I mean, what do they teach the kids in headline writing 101 if this is the result?

Abduction of U.S. Reporter Underscores Risks in Iraq
New York Times, January 23, 2006

Technorati Tag: Iraq

Use ropey old plonk to accompany cheese, experts suggest
The Guardian, 19 January 2006

(Warning: shameless self-promotion)

The First Post, an excellent newish online magazine that runs short, provocative pieces is running a short, provocative piece by yours truly today; its main point is that “new revelations of collusion with the US war on terror damage Europe’s clout.” Check it out.

This happens very rarely indeed.

I’m sitting here at my kitchen table, innocently writing some stuff and listening to an internet radio station playing the first Brahms concerto — music I know inside out. All of a sudden it hits me how extraordinary this particular rendering is — and I’m listening just through my PowerBook’s speakers.

My reference record for this has always been Pollini and Abbado. But I was blown away by this one: it made me realize how inadequate Pollini is, not at any technical level but in his interpretation. The soundfile doesn’t give me much info beyond “Gilels,” but a cursory glance at this page suggests that this is most likely the Gilels and Jochum record with the Berlin Philharmonic — two artists I never particularly cared about. (I always thought Gilels was too muscular, but perhaps that’s not bad for the Brahms warhorse.) This stuff is probably more than thirty years old and sounds better than any other recording I’ve heard.

Not being an espresso drinker myself — ever since moving to the Balkans in the last decade of the last century, I’ve been drinking Turkish (or Bosnian, or Serbian) coffee — I’ve always been a bit mystified by the cult surrounding the perfect espresso, and the derivative cult of the perfect espresso machine. Today’s Süddeutsche Zeitung does a good job shedding some light on the mattter.

It seems your typical aficionado is a guy (no surprise there), lives — if he’s German — in Bavaria or Baden-Württemberg (which together account for 41 percent of the espresso-maker market), has a nice income and is a bit weird. For example, there are websites that provide soundfiles of espresso machines. You read that right. Soundfiles — of the noise a machine makes as the water percolates through the coffee, or whatever the right term for that is. (The article doesn’t give any links.)

But one explanation I found very satisfying. Most of the time I get a funny taste in my mouth from espresso at restaurants around here (Switzerland, Germany, France). The article explains that the machines made by the market leaders in Germany — Jura, Saeco — are crap and consist of plastic parts inside, which means that the water pressure is simply not big enough. What you get is a “solution,” not an “emulsion,” and apparently that’s the whole difference — it’s not just my imagination, it’s actually chemical.

I’ll take my Turkish brew any time over any of these.

Crossposted from East Ethnia

Over at the Post, Howard Kurtz finds himself in a “murky maze” that makes it hard to see “the right course of action.” Here’s his problem:

Should major newspapers and networks have agreed to suppress the news that Christian Science Monitor stringer Jill Carroll had been kidnapped in Iraq? The impulse is understandable, given the Monitor’s plea that publicity might endanger negotiations to win her freedom. But since when are journalists in the business of sitting on news? And would they have imposed a 48-hour blackout for a non-journalist?

The first part seems rather easy to me. There’s two goods the editor has to weigh up against one another: the right of readers to be informed of important news and the obligation of the paper not to endanger anyone through their coverage. Where’s the conundrum? Does Kurtz really think amusing the liberal middle classes over their Sunday breakfast is a higher good than potentially protecting the life of a fellow reporter — or indeed any fellow human being?

And that answers the second part of Kurtz’ predicament.

David Lazarus explains in a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle that it really doesn’t matter, or not to any normal people anyway, what chip a computer runs on — even if the little box in question is a Mac.

I agree in general and disagree in this specific case. The move to Intel — and so much has been written about it that I didn’t feel the need to comment until now — opens up a whole new world for Apple and secures the viability of its most basic component for many years to come, in a way that the traditional chipset just couldn’t. It will give consumers more choice and allow for faster, less power-hungry laptops. It does mattter.

But Lazarus’ point is slightly different. His piece exposes the ridiculous hype with which something as boring and basic as a new chip is greeted by talking to a bunch of people about the technology they’re using: a cop’s radio, a concierge’s phone, CDs, DVDs. And they’re all saying the same: they have no clue how it works and don’t care as long as it does. And the same applies to the Mac.

On my way out of the conference hall, I met 10-year-old Cambria Loose, who was exploring Macworld Expo with her mom because she’s got a new iPod and it’s totally cool.

I asked if she knew how her iPod works.

“It’s got all the little chips in it,” Loose said.

Right. But how does it work?

“I don’t know,” Loose said.

Then her face brightened. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “If it works, it’s fine.”

Malta suspends importation of poultry from Croatia
di-ve.com

I left my lovely hometown ten years ago this month and never looked back (or, indeed, went back for more than a few days at a time). And for good reason. Yesterday’s FAZ ran a mildly interesting piece (not available online AFAICT) on the absence of a vibrant scene of young writers in Switzerland, prompted by the fact that not a single Swiss writer made the shortlist of twenty candidates for a literary award. But one passage caught my attention — it sums up pretty well what I always found so stifling about the place.

Die Trägheit der politischen Prozesse, die Ereignislosigkeit des saturierten Alltags, die Absenz einer Debattenkultur und das Fehlen einer bedeutenden Gruppe streitbarer Intellektueller von Format scheinen auch die Literatur zu infizieren. Dispute werden hierzulande, wo jeder jeden kennt, entweder sofort unterdrückt oder vertraulich in Hinterzimmern durch eine föderalistische Lösung entschärft.

The inertia of political processes, the uneventfulness of a saturated everyday life, the absence of a culture of debate and the lack of a sizeable group of combative intellectuals of stature seem to be infecting literature as well. Here, where everyone knows everyone, conflicts get either immediately suppressed or defused behind closed doors through a federalist solution. (Translation courtesy of MMV and exposing, as translations tend to do, that many adjectives that make perfect sense to the casual reader — or writer — are not all that necessary once you take a closer look.)

My favorite newspaper has a piece in today’s literary supplement that talks about the difference between modernists and anti-modernists. Anti-modernists are not reactionaries: they accept the inevitability of modernity but don’t celebrate it. Their main value is liberty, not order; and indeed, the article suggests, the difference between modernists and anti-modernists is a better signpost for political tendencies than the traditional left/right divide. (Of course one could just continue the list: modernists believe in grand social and political projects while anti-modernists don’t — though artistic grand projects are another thing, just think of À la recherche du temps perdu or the Mémoires d’outre-tombe, by two quintessential anti-modernists).

The piece is a review of Antoine Compagnon, Les antimodernes. De Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes, Gallimard, 2005. Sounds like it should join my growing list of books I want to read but am pretty sure I won’t — not any time soon, that is.

This is why one has friends (preferably American): they go on trips and come back with goodies.

These days even switching channels on the TV has become a hazardous activity. I was doing just that when I hesitated, for a split second too long, before moving on from Sky News — a channel I only watched during one occasion, the July bombings in London.

And guess who’s presenting the new flagship news show there?

James Rubin to anchor new international show on Sky News
Issued: September 12, 2005

But it seems that even Sky viewers are not so easily conned:

Viewers switch from Rubin’s new show
Oct 27, 2005 06:55 PM

In any case, this dude is baaaad. Awful. Horrible. So horrible in fact you should really check him out if you have satellite.

Update: To be fair, I just watched an interesting interview between Rubin and Robert Cooper, a foreign-affairs official at the Council of the EU. Rarely have a seen such sweeping coverage of some of the key issues confronting the EU — the Kosovo and Montenegro status; enlargement more generally; transatlantic relations; and above all, Turkey. (Though I’m always rather amused when Americans harangue the EU about admitting Turkey, something that — for better or worse — a clear majority of Europeans are deeply wary of doing.)

When I goof off don’t post for a while you can be pretty sure that I’m up to no good something important (at least according to my own, fairly low, standards). At such moments it takes stupidity of mind-boggling proportions to jolt me into blogging. Here’s one:

Stampede kills 345 Hajj pilgrims
Aljazeera

Thing is, this happens every damn year. As a non-believer the very idea of a pilgrimage is rather baffling to me, but the idea of a pilgrimage where every year scores of people get killed just beats me.