Monthly Archive for July, 2008

Reports from the cell face

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on July 20, 2008
in Arts and culture and Health and medicine
. 1 Comment

Back in April, I posted something here about the unexpected depilatory effects of chemotherapy, and asked readers if they thought there was a place for the personal in the Prospect blog. More generally, I asked, what makes writing about illness interesting to others?

The response was encouraging, both on the comments board and in private messages. To sum up, people appreciate having a clear description of things that don’t usually get noticed – sheer reporting from the cell face – and a level of analysis that can connect the particular to the general.

I started scoping out some themes right away for a series of postings, but got distracted by treatment and other major life difficulties. Now I am back. The aim is to find a language to talk about the body that is neither personal nor impersonal. It’s about a particular experience, but not “my story” in narrative. That old literary form, the personal essay, delivered by blog.

The first in the series will focus on blood: how the composition of what is flowing through our veins can affect the mind, and our existence generally.

Others will look at being a patient; the way one learns to assess risk and mortality; and the impact of serious illness on our relations with other people.

Any feedback on these themes, or indeed others that you think I should consider, is very welcome.

 

Prospect online this week

Published
by
Susha
on July 17, 2008
in Inside Prospect
. 5 Comments

This week in Prospect online,  Jonathan Power looks at the state of Nigeria. It’s more than a year since Olusegun Obasanjo stepped down as president. His successor, Umaru Yar’Adua, has been nicknamed “Mr Go Slow” by the press for his cautious style of decision-making. Might Obasanjo, seeing the country’s progress stall, be tempted to stand for president again?

Also this week, Lesley Chamberlain revels in her roof garden. Provided that you have a head for heights, roof terraces are part of the poetry of the city, offering panoramic views and the chance to rise above the hectic urban world.

Gulen, NPR and me

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on July 15, 2008
in Media and Prospect affairs
. 1 Comment

Earlier today I was interviewed about the Prospect global public intellectuals poll by Robert Siegel on All Things Considered on the US radio network NPR - to listen, click here and follow the link at the top.

Bizarre measures against terrorism

Published
by
Will Daunt
on July 9, 2008
in Science and technology
. 1 Comment

Since 9/11, terrorism has, of course, been an all-pervasive issue. But an interesting aside to the traditional narrative of fear, hatred and polemic with which terrorism goes hand in hand is capitalism’s capacity to incorporate such horror into traditional market structures. Much has been made of the branded nature of al Qaeda, and the carefully timed video clips of al Qaeda representatives spouting extremist rubbish has all of the finesse of a well planned viral advertising campaign. Indeed, for an organisation which has no concrete identity (no offices, no official staff, no payroll) it has been incredibly “successful,” if such a term can be applied.

So, it was with little surprise that we found this, a list of the top ten strangest anti-terrorism patents. All are genuine, and all display a keen nose for profit come the expansion of the war on terrorism. Perhaps the most apocalyptic is the Biohazard Suit with Built-In Toilet, an invention that suggests a world where un-gassed public conveniences are few and far between.

Prospect online this week

Published
by
Susha
on July 9, 2008
in Inside Prospect
. 9 Comments

In Prospect online this week, Rebecca Davies, online film editor at the Telegraph, asks why there are so few female film critics in Britain. Many of the first writers to treat cinema as something worth reviewing were women, and the situation is different in the US, for instance, where there are prominent female reviewers. Can women really just have lost interest in the medium, or is it sexism?

Also this week, Stephen Schwartz responds to the surprising result of the Prospect/Foreign Policy global public intellectuals poll, and Ehsan Masood’s article on the winner, Fethullah Gülen. Gülen, argues Schwartz, is not a new type of intellectual at all—and Gülenism is essentially a cult of personality.

Why Federer should have won

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on July 8, 2008
in Sport
. 10 Comments

There can be no doubt about it: sport does not get any better.
Sunday’s battle was the greatest Wimbledon final of all time, the
perfect match in every respect except one: the wrong man won. My
admittedly biased view (I’m a Federer fan) is that poetic justice, and
the narrative arc of the match, would have been better served by
Federer, and not Nadal, triumphing in the dying light. Here are five
reasons why:

1) Comebacks make for the best sporting stories, and a victory for
Federer would have been the most remarkable of comebacks, eclipsing
Murray’s against Gasquet in the fourth round.

2)  The greatest sporting performances are those in which a player
reveals, in the course of a match, qualities that no one suspected
them of possessing. Nadal didn’t reveal anything new during Sunday’s
final; we knew before it started that he was a player of machine-like
strength and consistency, able to maintain a certain level of
performance whatever the situation. But few people could have
suspected that Federer was capable of such bloody-mindedness, such
courageous determination to stay in a match that he should have lost
in three sets. Steeliness isn’t a quality one associates with Federer,
largely because he has never had much need for it; his talents mean
that he has rarely had to fight.

3) Federer is, though only 26, like the king whose grip on power is
waning. He clearly does not feel ready to hand over power, and there
is something both heroic and tragic about the spectacle of him
clinging so desperately on. It matters, of course, that Federer is
such a likeable king; few people felt much sadness, for example, when
Sampras was toppled. It would have been a glorious act of defiance had
Federer managed to resist Nadal’s onslaught.

4) Surely a player as great as Federer deserved to beat Borg’s record.
In many ways, he has been unlucky that his career has overlapped with
Nadal’s - the best ever clay court player. Had it not done so, he
would surely have won at least two grand slams by now, equalling Rod
Laver’s record. So it seems almost cruel that Federer should have been
denied the chance to break Borg’s record as well.

5) Federer’s backhand passing shot to save the second match point in the
fourth set tie-break was so brilliant, in the circumstances (and
remember his backhand hadn’t been working very well up to that point
in the match), that it alone deserved to win him the title.

Saudi Sinatra rocks the casbah

Published
by
John Kelly
on July 7, 2008
in Arts and culture and Middle east
. 1 Comment

The 10,000 crowd at the Fez festival of world sacred music were ecstatic—some literally so—when Mohamed Abdou (left) took centre stage on 15th June. The Saudi Sinatra is virtually unknown in the west, but in the middle east he is a multimillion-selling superstar. Backed by the magnificent syncopated strings of Abderarahim Mountassir, with a full mixed choir and desert percussion, the white-robed crooner rocked the casbah, or, more accurately, the magnificent gates of Bab Makina, surely one of the world’s most exotic venues, with a selection of hits old and new. His repertoire deals poetically with the poetry of the desert, sand, night and palms, but mostly Allah.

Non-believers were thin on the ground, perhaps because the event was unhelpfully billed as “Monotonous Chants of Heijaz,” but Prospect contributor and world music expert Joe Boyd and myself were converted. File under “you had to be there,” but George W needs to know that Islam has some of the best tunes.

My “Glastonbury moment”

Published
by
Will Daunt
on July 2, 2008
in Arts and culture
. 0 Comments

This year’s Glastonbury reminded me why I first fell in love with the festival. I have been one of the faithful, having slogged my way through the last five Glastonburys, even declaring 2007’s Helm’s Deep of slush and sewage to be a success. But this year was faultless. The intricacies of on-site weather meant that Thursday’s downpour was in fact a blessing, preventing the site turning into a dustball in the ensuing three days of sunshine. Jay-Z was predictably brilliant. Neil Diamond was unpredictably brilliant.

But there was more to the experience than enjoying good weather and seeing good acts. For this year, I was one of those acts. Having played in bands since I was 18, I was asked to fill out a friend’s alt–country/folk outfit. We were due to play the Park stage at 11am on Friday, a small beer tent later that evening, then an even smaller green tea trading tent in the healing fields on Saturday afternoon. The first of the three gigs was great—four or five hundred people sitting down, enjoying breakfast, then kindly standing for an ovation, of sorts. The other two were fun, relatively low key, and pleasantly experienced through the warm fuzz of organic cider.

But the most intriguing thing about playing at Glastonbury is the strangely relaxed perspective it grants. A combination of soundchecks and gear-lugging means that instead of the endless walking involved in being a punter, racing from stage to stage, you’re coerced into drinking with a bearded sound engineer who has worked at the tiny tea tent every year for the past 15, and who in all that time has never even seen the Pyramid stage. Our gig in the healing fields, an area devoted almost entirely to alternative medicine, was watched by no more than 30 people, all of them happily drinking herbal tea. Yet, when we finished, the proprietor of the bar forced a plate of lentil curry in our hands, leaving me with the feeling that I had had a definitive “Glastonbury moment.”

Of course, I’m not suggesting that such experiences are reserved for the likes of Jack White and Amy Winehouse, just as I am in now way comparing my own foray onto the stage with theirs. It’s merely that in previous years I have been guilty of wanting to ‘make the most’ of the festival, by squeezing in as many bands as possible. This year I saw fewer than ever, and at the risk of sounding like an old hippie, experienced more than ever. And the backstage toilets were clean. Let’s not forget that.

John Gieve - financial fall guy?

Published
by
Jonathan Ford
on July 2, 2008
in British politics and Economics
. 1 Comment

John Gieve’s participation in our financial roundtable turned out to be virtually his last hurrah as deputy governor of the Bank of England in charge of financial stability. A couple of days after Prospect was published, news leaked out that he would be stepping down from the post next spring, two years early. What’s more, the news emerged in the most humiliating way possible for Gieve—on the eve of the annual Mansion House speech, when the Bank governor and the chancellor of the exchequer address the bigwigs of the City. It looked as if Gieve had been made the fall guy for the financial crisis.

His departure may gratify those who argue—like Mark Hannam, another roundtable participant—that regulators as well as bankers should face the chop when things go awry in financial markets. But there is a school of thought that Gieve did a more than reasonable job. Philip Stephens took up the cudgels on Gieve’s behalf in the FT on 1st July, pointing out that Gieve’s performance was perhaps more sure-footed than that of Mervyn King (who has recently been reappointed to his post as Bank governor). Gieve spotted much earlier than his boss that the severity of the crisis necessitated a major injection of liquidity into financial markets. King, Stephens points out, was at the time still hung up on the idea of not rewarding bankers who had taken foolish risks—even as a financial Chernobyl was unfolding around him.

That said, these differences don’t seem to have had much impact on the outcome. King got it in the end. Would things have been different had he taken Gieve’s advice sooner? In the roundtable, Gieve himself pretty much pooh-poohed the idea.

But if Gieve did a pretty good job in what were very difficult circumstances, it is also right that he should go early. The biggest lack in the crisis—from the perspective of the authorities—was early intelligence about stresses in the markets. The Bank now intends to correct that lack. Its expanded financial stability role will involve monitoring what banks are doing to gauge emerging risks. That requires someone with a deep knowledge of the markets, something that Gieve—a former civil servant—lacks.

King should now replace Gieve with Paul Tucker, a Bank insider with the necessary independence of mind and market expertise. This is clearly what he wants to do. But worryingly, the treasury may try to frustrate King. It seems to favour the alternative of appointing an old City hand—even though this would run the risk of the Bank being captured by the very people it is supposed to be regulating. Stephens’s article—which implied King may have been complicit in Gieve’s departure—may have unwittingly handed the mandarins some ammo in this fight.

The one thing surrounding Gieve’s departure which does deserve criticism is the way it was handled. Gieve was an able and loyal servant of the Bank and was entitled to leave with his dignity intact. Whoever leaked his departure in the way they did, and for whatever reason, paid him back in very poor coin.

Prospect online this week

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on July 2, 2008
in Africa, Energy and Inside Prospect
. 2 Comments

What kind of man is Robert Mugabe? How did the internationally feted liberation hero of the 1970s turn into the blood-soaked tyrant of today? Heidi Holland, who knew Mugabe when they were both anti-Ian Smith activists in the 1970s, attempts to answer these questions in Dinner with Mugabe, her new “psychobiography” of the Zimbabwean president. Tom de Castella reviews the book for Prospect here. Meanwhile, Zimbabwe-watchers will not want to miss Stephen Chan’s dispatches from Harare for Prospect online, to my—entirely unbiased—mind the most in-depth and informed coverage of the Zimbabwe election crisis to be found in western media.

Also this week: Derek Brower explains how oil subsidies in the developing world are keeping the price of oil sky-high—and how they are playing havoc with the assumptions of market economists.