- Blog
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Wolff on the war
Execellent writing on war frenzy in the American media from Michael Wolff in The Guardian. ‘The story now is about the war as a fighting-man event, not a political event. It’s 90% a Pentagon story. No context, just blow by blow. The excitement is about going along, about having access, wearing war clothes, eating war…
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Too easy
Timothy Garton Ash is doing heroic work on both sides of the Atlantic – more important than ever as the fog of war thickens – to articulate the complicated, nervous, ambivalent support for Blair and the war amongst lefties and liberals who think the ‘no war’ stance is just too easy… The Guardian, New York…
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Reporter/cyborg
On Tuesday, in The Guardian, before the war began, I wrote: “Our proximity to the fighting is unarguable. The collision of network-era news gathering tools, weblogs and interconnected internet communities will produce a kind of ecstasy of information and communication. The war will be fought as if it were on the other side of the…
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Libeskind in New York
Choosing an architect to replace the twin towers was always going to be a pretty high stakes game. The fact that it was happening in New York City, one of the most politically and culturally charged places on earth, could only make the whole thing more intense. Hal Foster (architecture critic and generally cool postmodernist)…
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Fantasy social classes
Got this link to a review of Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class: and how it’s Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life from the Demos Greenhouse. “The Creative Class is not just distinguished by its members’ professions, but by their lifestyles. Florida paints a picture of a group of people whose creativity permeates…
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A quiet city
2023 UPDATE: I’d forgotten that the invasion of Iraq, which, when it began, had been so well-telegraphed, filled us all with such dread. I mean we all knew the exact day and time it would happen, weeks in advance. And London – other cities too – was in a state of alert (maybe not so…
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Essential
As the bombing begins, Azeem reminds me to revisit Where’s Raed, a blog kept, apparently, by a young Iraqi from within Iraq – from Baghdad itself, in fact.
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Digital cinema
This feature about digital cinema is mostly about the production end (George Lucas has made his last non-digital film and so on) but I think it supports my thesis that the economics of running a High Street cinema are about to change completely. Whether I’m right in thinking that this will produce a new wave…