The Monkeys Digest - a round up of what's best on the net

The Monkey's Digest

Three Monkeys is committed to producing interesting and eclectic material online, but also to the finding and highlighting of great online content. The Monkey's Digest is our own small contribution to rewarding the thousands of sites that are committed to producing intelligent, interesting, and unique material online, that too-often gets hidden behind the rubbish heap of dancing-chimpmonk videos or the latest Britney Spears/ Paris Hitlon/ Knut the bear headline.

Our writers take note, as they scour the net, and post links here to interesting articles/essays & interviews - along with a brief description. We post links in good faith. If your page appears here, and you'd rather it didn't, just let us know and we'll take it down asap.

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Panda Sluggers vs Panda Huggers

Evan Osnos, author of a piece about Chinese nationalism, answers questions at the New Yorker. The hot topic is media bias/prejudice when dealing with China.

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The photographer's invidious distinction

Jim Johnson, in Art.Signal magazine, discusses the dichotomy imposed by critics that forces photographers to choose between "art" and "documentary"

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Too much life - not enough Disk Space

Chet Raymo, at the age of 71, muses on what he remembers and the things that he must have forgotten. We may now be in the position to lengthen life, but because the Brain is biologically intrinsically limited, our 'remembered lifespans' will remain t

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LIve Earth Fall Outs fail in world-record bid

Indie band Fall Out Boy, who played Al Gore's Live Earth jamboree, failed in a world-record bid to play on all continents within a two-week period. That darn global warming interfered with their plans to play on an ice shelf in Antartica

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Alan Sokal - Beyond the hoax

At least when it comes to religious superstition or other discourses which don’t even pretend to be rational, we can point to an objective standard of proof and evidence through scientific enquiry in response. When it comes to the very corruption of

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Terry Pratchett would eat the arse of a dead mole if...

Terry Pratchett talks frankly about being diagnosed with Alzheimers. "I'm confused, irascible, disjointed, just as I always have been," Pratchett tells the Guardian

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Arthur C.Clarke and the Face of God

The nine billion names of God, by the late Arthur C.Clarke, printed in full."Luckily it will be a simple matter to adapt your automatic sequence computer for this work, since once it has been programmed properly it will permute each letter in turn an

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Publish cultural league tables and be done with it

Nick Hornby takes a swipe at cultural absolutists, and argues that nobody who's ever listened to a particular early Springsteen bootleg has ever bombed a country

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Jailed and tortured for being a Facebook Prince

Novelist Laila Lalami, at The Nation, tells the story of Fouad Mourtada, a software engineer tortured and jailed for having created a Facebook profile of Morocco's Prince Moulay Rachid

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What occupied territories?

Yonatan Mendel, in the London Review of Books, goes through the words Isaeli journalists do and don't use when reporting on relations between Israelis and Palestinians

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Ian Paisley and the Papish Broadcasting Corporation

Reflecting on Ian Paisley's political legacy, Oliver Kamm (via Slugger O'Toole) reminds readers of an emblematic incident between Paisley and the BBC's Martin Bell

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New Technology Utopianism

"Online publications can't possibly be cheaper when our metric for preservation is not years but centuries. Paper lasts and is far cheaper in the long run", says Cathy Davidson while writing about the open access plans for Gutenberg

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Mourning the man who killed the novel

Stephen Marche profiles the late Alain Robbe-Grillet, the most famous novelist in history to never have written a famous novel

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A beginer's guide to Muslim bio-ethics

How do Muslim bio-ethicists face up to the challenges of developoing technologies? Wired magazine asked that very question, and got some answers involving in-vitro fertilisation and gene-therapy

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Climate Change and the Commons

The solution to climate change is to view the atmosphere as a commons, and introduce carbon caps and emissions-trading, argues Peter Barnes

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EU legal experts warn against Slovak Concordat

EU legal experts have issued a report warning of the dangers of a special treaty between the Slovak state and the Vatican, stabilising terms, amongst other things, for Doctors to deny abortion & contraception on grounds of conscience

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Bad luck Socrates & Aristotle

A.C.Grayling takes on the Theists, arguing that to suggest a variation on the popular mortal-girl-impregnated-by-the-gods theme is solely responsible for Western Civilisation merits no more than a horse-laugh

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'Coming out' as an atheist on Facebook

Though 61 per cent of Americans polled would find it difficult to vote for a Presidential candidate who doesn't believe in God, more and more person are parading their non-belief on social networking sites like Facebook

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It's not just about the Prozac

Bad Science's Ben Goldacre argues , in the wake of publication of studies suggesting a number of anti-depressants have clinically insignificant benefits, that drug companies be forced to publish all trial results publicly

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Teaching the Holocaust

French President Sarkozy's recent proposals on how to teach the Holocaust to schoolchildren provokes debate and a reconsideration of how the subject has thus far been taught

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Exporting automatic censorship

A thumbnail image of Michaelangelo's 'David' can be enough to bounce a website into a list of banned sites for nudity, and the 'smart' technology responsible is being exported to countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia to help keep the net 'clean'

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Guantánamo bay trials rigged?

A high-ranking Colonel involved in the military commisions judging prisoners held in 'Gitmo' alleges that trials have been rigged from the start

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Michael Wood on the Cohen Brothers

The Cohen Brothers, according to Wood (in the London review of Books), are film-makers who seem forever to be in search - prospecting, almost - for the perfect film

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Cat Power is living happily ever after

Wong Kar-Wai says that 'if Charles Bukowski and Jane Birkin had a child, it would be Cat Power. After years of nerves and alcohol abuse, the indie singer from Georgia has found sobriety, recognition, and fans like Karl Lagerfeld'

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Accepting the Muslim contribution to Europe's heritage - an acid test for democracy?

The readiness to accept past invaders, particularly those of a different religion, as part of one’s national heritage is an acid test for the maturity of one’s democracy

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Hilary needs to learn from Nixon and Reagan

If Hilary Clinton is to comeback in the race for the democratic party's presidential nomination, she'll have to learn from past campaigns by Nixon and Reagan

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Editor resigns against the glass ceiling

Feministing brings attention to the resignation of Marilyn Mitchell, former City Editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

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9 things the Chinese Government need to do

Reporters without borders have published 9 things the Chinese Government need to do, to avoid a boycott of the 2008 Olympics

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Is there a book in this blog - literary blog

Is there a book in this blog? is a group blog to discuss books. Our writers post on books they've read, are reading, or, perhaps have no intention of reading. Literary news, and debates over narrative voices are not uncommon.

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Literature's Radiohead - Wu Ming or Gaiman?

Back in December, mediabistro's GalleyCat posed the question 'Where will we find Literature's Radiohead?'. Not a question of matching literary style up to the Oxford band's musica...

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If Three Monkeys is worth reading, it's because of the calibre of our contributors. A small regular group of writers publish in Three Monkeys, but much of the work is submitted by emerging writers worldwide. If you have a piece that you think would fit well in the magazine, check our submission guidelines here. We'd love to hear from you.

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The View from Bologna - A blog on Italian politics, society and culture The View from Bologna is a regular blog column on Italian politics, culture and society, written from a vantage point by our Monkey in Bologna.
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Newsweek adopts the 'Italian school' of modern journalism, and beatifies Berlusconi

Newsweek, last week, carried a quite astonishing piece on Silvio Berlusconi's first 100 days in office. The glowing tribute stopped short of suggesting that Trenitalia now runs on time, but only just (coincidentally, despite the fact that it was a major election issue, Al...

Caught between Boston and Berlin - an Irish Blog

Notes and reflections from the capital of the Celtic Tiger. Brendan Coffey reports on what it's like to live somewhere between Boston and Berlin.

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Spite and shaft is what we Irish do best

Our Man in Gdansk - A blog on Polish politics and Life Our Man in Gdańsk is Three Monkeys Online's long running blog on Polish politics, media and mores.
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Polish Absurd – A Quickie

Flicking around the TV channels in a friend’s house last night I caught a bit of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. As is usual with Polish TV there was a voiceover (not to be confused with dubbing). As is less usual, he talked viewers throught the songs......

The latest book reviews from Three Monkeys Online Three Monkeys reviews a wide range of fiction and non-fiction books. We're not concerned, in our reviews, with whether a book is new or old, on the best-seller list or not. What concerns us most is whether we like/dislike a title, and whether we've anything interesting to say about it.