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“The Wire” creator David Simon on modern America as a “horror show”

Journalist and television writer David Simon delivered a speech to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas that was every bit as scorching as his incendiary television series The Wire. “I come from a country that is utterly schizophrenic, he said of the United States. Because of its society, economy and politics, he said, it is “a horror show.” Simon chose as his “dangerous idea” a subject sure to provoke free-enterprising Americans: Karl Marx. “He was really sharp about what goes wrong when capital wins unequivocally, when it gets everything it asks for,” Simon told the audience at Australia’s Sydney Opera House.

Headliners

A snapshot this week from the surveillance beat: Writers of the world call for end to mass online surveillance Five Nobel literature laureates are among 560 international writers who today have put their names to an appeal, “A stand for democracy in the digital age”, against widespread “mass surveillance” by governments and corporations. It is, they argue, an attack on “a basic pillar of democracy . . . the inviolable integrity of the individual.” — The Irish Times Dog waste-scooping business takes page from ‘CSI’ “…  using dog DNA to track down owners who break property rules.” — Chicago Tribune

Nelson Mandela too good for government leadership

Nelson Mandela was too good for his or South Africa’s own good, writes international affairs columnist Jonathan Manthorpe. Excerpt: Those qualities of tolerance, forgiveness, respect for the others’ views, and uncritical loyalty to friends, comrades and family that made him one of the most saintly public figures of the last century, also framed his less than stellar performance as a government leader. Mandela has bequeathed an almost unique culture of reconciliation that diverted South Africa from the real prospect in the early and mid-1990s of a blood bath either between whites and blacks, or between rival black ethnic groups or

Introducing F&O’s Expert Witness series

Facts and Opinions introduces Expert Witness, a series of occasional works by experts in their areas, in our Think section of analysis and commentary. Expert Witness will publish eclectic essays, papers and occasionally even works from the past that strike our interests. It will include original pieces created for F&O, as well as selected works from other sources. We are pleased to launch Expert Witness today with an essay about Nelson Mandela, and a science paper  about biodiversity in a world undergoing human-made change. Learning from Mandela is by trans-national professor and author Heribert Adam, an expert on peacemaking, human

Art tackles big data

That didn’t take long: artists have surged into the wake left by whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden, whose revelations of America’s massive surveillance program roiled the murky waters of  international politics. An art show in Munich last month, Big Data Art 2013, interprets digital information. One piece, by German artists Sebastian Drack and Tobias Feldmeier, changed shape and colour whenever someone sent a contentious word into cyberspace on Twitter. The words were included on the list of hundreds of keywords monitored by American security agents, reported The Guardian. The following video is one example. I don’t find its audio and visual

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