Latest Goodies
:
-
Mohammed Morsy and the Muslim Brotherhood may have seriously overestimated the Islamist movement’s grip over Egyptians’ allegiances. Having passed a decree which awarded the presidency both legislative and executive powers, as well as rendering the President himself immune from judicial oversight, the Brotherhood now has on its hands protest as serious as any which a post-Mubarak government has faced.
Read more -
For the first time in their history, Czech citizens will directly elect their president next year, to replace the notoriously Eurosceptic incumbent Vaclav Klaus. The stakes are high in this election, for it will be a large-scale stress test for Czech democracy and European integration in Central Europe.
Read more -
A dynasty that is so degenerate that it massacres children and tortures the truth—such a dynasty’s days are numbered. Yet the shrewd tyrant Deng Xiaoping resorted to a trick: in the spring of 1992, he made a historical trip to Shenzhen in the South, where he announced the opening of China to foreign investment and the global market in order to save his party from a political crisis.
Read more -
October 1st saw once again that liberalism does not equal democracy. The great and very skillful neoliberal autocrat Mikheil Saakashvili lost democratic elections to the opposition. This vote in Georgia was not so much a victory for the opposition, but a verdict to Georgian electoral autocracy.
Read more -
A supranational construct of Europe that imposes boundaries but also makes them negotiable has contradiction built into its genetic code. Looking at maps of Europe at various times since antiquity, this hardly seems new – Europe's external borders as well as its internal ones have shifted infinitely often.
Read more -
The political upheavals of the Arab Spring and electoral victories of Islamist parties have brought a resurgence of talk about the ‘Turkish model’—a template that ‘effectively integrates Islam, democracy and vibrant economics’, according to a gushing New York Times article last year, which hailed Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as ‘perhaps the Middle East’s most influential figure’.
Read more -
Mehrotra was one of the authors of the 1995 historic preservation act that protects that part of Mumbai, the first such law in India. From 1996 until 2005, even after the move to Michigan, he directed Mumbai’s Urban Design Research Institute, advising the city and developers on thoughtful, context-sensitive design.
Read more -
Out on the dance floor the guests were in high spirits, dancing the twist to Michael Jackson songs performed with a Russian accent by a local singer. The men had taken their jackets off and their shirts were tight.
Read more -
Eddie Aikau was born in 1946, and grew up with his five siblings in a Chinese graveyard in Pauoa Valley, on Oahu. Hawaiians of Chinese ancestry have lived in Hawaii for more than two hundred years, though most showed up in the mid-to-late nineteenth century to work on booming sugar and pineapple plantations.
Read more -
For Clifford it was precisely because Northern Ireland was neither a state, nor included in the workings of British democracy (due to an act of “supreme sacrifice” by Ulster unionists in 1920), that the Troubles happened.
Read more -
The wood cabin’s kitchen is dark and cramped. At the table sits Witch with a bowl in front of her. In her hand she holds a wet sponge with which she is wiping the phosphorus off matchboxes. Dark red droplets drip into the bowl. Witch’s hands are red and bony, and she herself is as dark as an overdone roast potato. She has a mop of dark wiry hair. Outside the window are the sickly beds of the vegetable garden. The sky is leaden.
Read more -
On Thursday, 21 June 2012 the Paraguayan Chamber of Deputies voted 76-1 to impeach President Fernando Lugo on the grounds of poor performance of functions. The following day, following a brief debate, the Paraguayan Senate voted 39-4 to confirm the decision, thus bringing to a premature end an administration that, in winning the 2008 elections, had interrupted 61 years of Colorado Party rule, and taken part in the first democratic change of power in the country’s history.
Read more -
Los Angeles is well known as a place anchored by Hollywood and home to celebrities, beach culture and endless sunshine. There are also the dystopic representations of the city as intellectually vacuous, absent of any redeeming culture and rife with traffic jams, suburban sprawl, environmental noxiousness and racial conflict.
Read more -
Any emergent social movement will faces obstacles, will proceed unevenly and with difficulty as it undermines people's resistance toward cultural change. In Ukraine, the decades ahead will present ever greater challenges to the formation of a consensus on women's rights, even as people's awareness of the patterns of anti-woman discrimination increases.
Read more -
Literature seems to be everywhere in Cartagena and not just because Gabriel García Márquez still has a house there. I was prepared to find a literary city as I had recently read Ilan Stavans’ biography of García Márquez. But as I rambled through the jewel of the Caribbean with two local poets, René Arrieta Pérez and Pedro Blas Julio Romero, poetry seem to cascade down from balconies like bougainvillea.
Read more -
Katrien Jacobs, a conference speaker from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, studies what she calls porn activism. In People's Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet (Intellect, 2012), she discusses the recent flourishing of that culture's pent-up desire for porn manifesting itself in a range of new outlets, and she sees in this phenomenon the seeds of popular counterauthoritarianism.
Read more -
‘Astonishing thought: that any culture or civilisation should have this continuity for five or six thousand years or more; and not in a static or unchanging sense, for India was changing and progressing all the time,’ marvelled the country’s future ruler a few years before coming to power.
Read more
by Sebastian Normandin
So this is the thing. I’ve been breathing a long time but, driven by the objective of writing a book, only recently started deliberately thinking about it. We commonly view breathing as a pedestrian automatism, but I try to imagine how this simple physiological function was once perceived as miraculous. Always that fine but-oh-so-definitive line between breathing and not. 
by Alexander McGregor
In the construction of a genuinely socialist state, shaped upon Bolivarian principles, arguably little has been achieved in the last fifty years and the regime, apparently, withstands the inevitable decay of popular support through both repression and an almost mystical, religious prosecution of the ‘eternal possibility’: keep fighting, oh sons of Cuba, one day we shall be finally rid of our enemies and then we may be truly free.
by Dylan J. Montanari
For anyone who has ever heard Fried lecture, it is easy enough to hear his voice as one reads his writing. He is unafraid of the “I,” using it so earnestly that his work seems to take on the mode of confession at times, especially when he is at his most enthusiastic or urgent. 
by Jenny Diski
I am awkward around art. Not at all confident about how I should look and what I should feel. I stand both pleased and helpless in front of this painting and look, think about what I’m looking at, and wonder about it, in as much as I can, because I’m not an art historian. Often, standing in front of paintings I wonder what it is I am supposed to be feeling beyond the looking and thinking. 
by Masha Tupitsyn
In America, we aim to raise children who can do things — anything — not children who can’t. Ruthless competition and competence is at the heart of the American dream. However, when it comes to contemporary America, and contemporary American masculinity in particular, what exactly does it mean to be capable of “anything” now?
by Daniel Tutt
Alain Badiou’s translation of Plato leaves us with the rare sense that politics can once again be associated with truth, courage and justice. We have an agency at our disposal that comes in the passionate work of bringing the idea of equality (communism) into existence. 
by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser
Oddly enough, many analysts forget that when Chávez won the presidential elections in 1998, his populist discourse did include references neither to anti-neoliberalism nor to radical socialism. Instead, the role model that he had in mind was that of Tony Blair’s Third Way. Chávez wanted to rebuild the economy by finding a new balance between the state and the free market.
by Russell Bennetts
1. John Barrowman.
3. Music I listen to for pleasure being used for pain. (I know this happened IRL, but nonetheless.)
6. Maya’s Lana Del Rey impression in the final scene of the movie. 
by Joanna Walsh
What are dreams for? Elliptical, intimate, (seemingly) significant; from predicting the future to returning the repressed, these least fathomable experiences have always had an interpretive function laid on them. A similar question lies at the heart of the Oulipo. 
by Daniel Bosch
It could very well be that Harvard University Press is smart enough to recognize a Harvard edition of LTYP will have an imprimatur. Whatever its relative virtues, the Harman translation out of Cambridge, as Banville points out, is “likely to become the standard one.”
by Elias Tezapsidis
From its very first issue in 1986, Spy Magazine was a radical project. It was not the product of celebrities and their PR teams, nor did it aim to please those in the public sphere. Voicing the frustrations of intelligent journalists in a sardonic way, it acquired a thinking following that hungered for the esoteric references that abounded in its pages.
by Leo Tolstoy
An elder sister came to visit her younger sister in the country. The elder was married to a tradesman in town, the younger to a peasant in the village. As the sisters sat over their tea talking, the elder began to boast of the advantages of town life: saying how comfortably they lived there, how well they dressed, what fine clothes her children wore, what good things they ate and drank, and how she went to the theatre, promenades, and entertainments.Most Popular
Berfrois Likes
| 1. | Ciudad Blanca |
| 2. | The Finger of Doom |
| 3. | Hobbes |
| 4. | No Problemo |
| 5. | Montezuma’s Gym |
| 6. | Jailhouse Mouse |
| 7. | Feeling Good |
Archives