You’re likely to relish Joshua Ferris’s acclaimed debut novel, Then We Came to The End, if you enjoy narratives that revoice the 19th century’s omniscient narrator as a sardonic first-person-plural Greek chorus in the style of The Virgin Suicides.Even if you don’t fall into that audience category, anyone who’s ever worked in an office “environment” […]
A Wall Street Journal article (link via Fimoculous.com) examines the “second-generation” impact of search engine technology: “When Ms. Wilson, now 32, was pregnant with her first child, she ran every baby name she and her husband, Justin, considered through Google to make sure her baby wouldn’t be born unsearchable. Her top choice: Kohler, an old […]
Frank McDonald, the environmental correspondent of the Irish Times, is a self-confident (some might say self-satisfied) journo who has succeeded in establishing a niche for himself as an expert. Long known for his blistering attacks on aesthetically crippled development projects (which often appeared–like the articles in Playboy–amidst reams of glossy hype in the paper’s property […]
The front page of today’s Gazeta Wyborcza – apart from the strange claim that a 46.7% voter share for the left wing candidate in France’s presidential elections is a “crushing” defeat – re-runs the pensions time bomb scare story. The story is expanded on in the economics section and commented on by Witold Gadomski on […]
It’s the time of year when Polish schoolchildren don suits and take school leaving exams, wrestling with the incompetence of Poland’s Ministry for Education bureaucrats. The reason they dress up like Little Lord Fauntleroys is that until very recently their own teachers examined them and pronounced them fit or unfit for further education, imprisonment, poverty […]
As the flock of handsomely renumerated jurists take flight from the Four Courts after deliberating the fate of a 17-year-old girl wishing to terminate her pregnancy, I’m sure I’m not the only one left at the end of this week with a feeling of simmering outrage over the sorry episode.Outrage not just over the faintly […]
May 3rd is the day on which Poles celebrate the anniversary of their 1791 constitution, which is considered by some (mostly Poles) the most progressive in Europe of its day. Only the American constitution beats it, the national mythology goes. It did not liberate the peasants but it did take on some of the worst […]
I don’t really have the time today to do justice to Bertie’s excuses or to savage the Health Service Executive’s Taleban-style priorities, so I merely offer a link to some startling photographs I came across recently*. They reveal that, pace most febrile Western reporting, modern life in China is not all about iPod factories and […]
“You have the right to remain silent…” The cop shows have taught us that the accused in the interview room has the option to keep schtum while being grilled by the fuzz. This prerogative is not something we usually associated with a head of state looking to renew his contract. But this is Ireland, and […]
Now I have an environmental as well as an aesthetic justification for the somewhat crepuscular vibe at The Monkey’s Typewriter.Click here for the “low-wattage” palette.(Thanks to Catriona for the tip.)
