What’s great about Friday morning? Having the Economist placed at your feet. And even though this is a blog, sometimes it takes having the paper placed in your hands to do a good scan. Premesso’s not-quite week in review, drawn from the weekly of record: 1. On February 15, La Padania interviewed Pier Luigi Bersani, …
Author Archives: hnbjr
Minetti on CNN
[youtube_sc url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE9Da8Pw4Rk] Minetti’s English is not the issue. Someone claimed she was near-native, which is obviously not true, but she speaks English much better than many a company head, tourist operator, receptionist at one of the few blue-chip firms, or other people who are expected to deal with the non-Italian public. Of interest is the …
Berlusconi’s Steganography
Yesterday the FT ran the following photo, shot by AP photographer Riccardo de Luca, above-the-fold in its Europe edition. The unspoken message is clear: you’re old, and it’s time to leave. Even in a recent broadcast, Berlusconi seems old and tired — his hair obviously dyed, the wrinkles showing. My personal distaste for him notwithstanding, …
Remembering to Forget
Growing up, no annual pilgrimage to my grandmother’s native Cape Fear was complete without a trip to the Brunswick Nuclear Power Plant‘s visitor center. Nothing seemed strange about this habit at the time: they had educational and interactive exhibits, complete with a stationary bike you could ride to see how much human power it took …
Lelemore Lelemore
If you find recent write-ups on the doings at Arcore too much to bear lately, then get your day started right with this hilarious Grease parody. Warning: not only do you have to follow the news and Italian, you have to know have Italians interpret/hear English. There’s enough code-switching in this for a linguist’s wet …
It Felt Like a Kiss
As I said last weekend, I’ve been on a heavy Adam Curtis kick recently. Century of the Self is quite a worthwhile flick, but his latest, It Felt Like a Kiss, really pushes the boundaries. An experimental film commissioned initially by the BBC, Curtis collobarated with the Punchdrunk production company on it. It certainly has …
Obama at Tuscon
After a British colleague thoroughly exhorted me to watch Obama’s Tuscon speech, I did so. The fact that my own family wrote me in praise of it somehow didn’t provide the same motivation. It’s a fine speech; particularly towards the end where he couches his dreams of what American could be in the terms of …
On Wrestling with Angels
Have you ever wanted to do something difficult, perhaps out of frustration, or to beat fear? Maybe you ran a marathon, or took up biking, or read a long book or worked out a difficult puzzle. What you in all likelihood did not do was have men ten years your junior punch you in the …
The Trap
I first encountered Adam Curtis via 2004’s The Power of Nightmares, which I watched while I was a graduate student. It was an interesting and provocative thesis — that the rise of the neocons had a parallel in the rise of radical Islam, and that both were based in the politics of fear. His style of …
Tonfo, and Ri-Tonfo
Just to keep things somewhat organized, I’m breaking this out of today’s roundup. Yglesias, like most normal people with a sound and sober understanding of the dismal science, is totally baffled by Italy’s deeply dismal recent growth. Not that I blame him. But I think one of his commenters, Halfkidding, hits it on the nose: Italy …