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Summertime … and the fans are jumping

The weather can be capricious, but entertainment expands and lightens up in the long summer days of the Northern Hemisphere, with a music or theatre festival most weekends. The most unusual is perhaps the arctic Great Northern Arts Festival each July in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, with pop musicians performing alongside Inuit fashion shows and throat-singers. One of the largest occurs annually in central Europe – this year rain failed to deter some 145,000 Europeans from Hungary’s annual electronic music festival, Balaton Sound, in mid-July. In August Edinburgh’s annual Festival Fringe will draw creators from around the world. And in America’s Pacific Northwest this

Ukraine and Palestine as Nature’s Harbingers

Even amid shocking news events, we ignore at our peril the larger reality of what is happening to our world, warns Chris Wood in his Natural Security column. Excerpt: More than on most days, the handcart in which we are all riding toward a very unpleasant destination feels like we’re maybe in sight of the station. Even for a hardened student of the headlines, the human tragedies in the Ukraine and Palestine are sorrowful to contemplate. And yet necessary, too. They confront us not only with the human reality of the moment but also, stripped of their context and backstories, the

Religious extremism slouches onward

“Few parts of the world have avoided the destructive influence of social dislocation – if not always of violence — inspired by religious extremism, based often on racial ultra-nationalism,” writes International Affairs analyst Jonathan Manthorpe in today’s column. Excerpt: It is not just fanatical believers in an intolerant, violent, evangelical and racist brand of Islam that are spreading a shameful stain on the pages of human history in the 21st century. All major religions have in recent decades spawned similar factions of puritanical hatred that are distorting and perverting the route and progress of public affairs, even in secular democracies. In several

The future of education: universities, hogs and logs

Jim McNiven, author of F&O’s Thoughtlines column, tackles the factored global university system — not to condemn it, he writes in today’s column, but to try and explain the harsh reality: “A system whose structures and incentives were created around 1900 has evolved in ways never dreamed of then and is today under threat from funding pressures and its own dysfunctions.” An excerpt: You have to look at universities without their trappings of tradition, semi-mystical feeling and notions of honours and awards. See them instead as not-for-profit education institutions in an age where information is rapidly becoming democratized and commoditized

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