Gazeta Wyborcza has a regular feature in which they ask the same set of questions about tourism of various people. You know the type: “I left my heart in… [answer]”; “My best holidays were in… [answer]”; “My favourite hotel… [answer].” This week the respondent was a Daria Pawęda, described as a journalist and traveller. Her […]
(Continued from Tuesday.) Klein adopts the age-old yet fashionable metaphor of the “body politic” to demonstrate parallels between electric shock treatment administered to individual “patients” (and, later, torture victims) and the “shock therapy” acolytes of Friedman diagnosed as a remedy for ailing societies. Commencing to build on this slightly over-extended analogy, Klein points to how […]
Aleksander Wat was a precocious young fellah. He wrote “JA z jednej strony i JA z drugiej strony mego mopsożelaznego piecyka” (I from one side and I from the other side of my little herring-iron oven) at the age of 14 and a short story “Lucifer Unemployed” in his early 20s. With a title like […]
To start on a superficial note: Naomi Klein, scourge of corporations and hollow brand iconography, is well-served by the publishing behemoth (Pearson PLC, as embodied by Penguin Books) charged with distributing her latest treatise, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Coming in a shade of yellow typically associated with radioactive and biological hazard […]
A character called Jakub Sosnowski has gone into business in Poland selling cog notes for ignoramuses. That is: you pay him and he tells you what such and such a book is about or what such and such a record is like. In this way you can shine at social gatherings to which you have […]
“Sometimes publishers get texts which have not been properly read, even by their own authors – books in a terrible state,” says editor Filip Modrzejewski in this week’s Polityka. It’s worse than that, Mr. Modrzejewski. Sometimes readers get books that even the authors haven’t read. The picture painted in the article is dispiriting. For one […]
Poor Gazeta Wyborcza. Your heart has to go out to them. They must feel like they’re banging their heads off a brick wall in there. Today’s lead story is about how the Polish National Insurance is about to open up its records on 25 million Poles to the CBA (Central Anti Corruption Bureau, in reality […]
The signs are unmistakeable. All over the land it is evident that Polish politicians have shaken off the complexes and shackles of yesteryear. The East is awake! The last time I saw election posters here almost every single photograph of the candidate had the very top of his or her head cropped by the photographer. […]
That’s the message sent by both Dziennik and Gazeta Wyborcza today. The Polish ambassador to the Poland-occupied nation of Iraq was injured in an explosion. Someone else was killed. Here’s the GW (electronic version, today): W Bagdadzie bomby raniły polskiego ambasadora Dwie lub trzy bomby wybuchły na trasie konwoju polskiej ambasady w Bagdadzie. Zginął funkcjonariusz […]
Poland has agreed after all to allow international observers inspect its elections. They are trying to say it was all a big mistake caused by the incompetence of the minister for foreign affairs. She is pretty incompetent, though, so it might even be true.
