Ian McEwan is a giant of English literature, who is known for intricate, detail-obsessed storytelling (Atonement), but he is also a master of small stories. His latest novel is a short murder mystery told from the perspective of a late-stage fetus who has picked up quite a lot about the outer world by listening to podcasts and conversations. His mother Trudy, it turns out, is plotting an awful scheme against her husband John. Her partner in crime is her lover, her husband’s banal and obnoxious brother Claude.

The novel does not attempt to give any plausibility to our protagonist’s observations and reflections, which makes this a less gimmicky plot device than it otherwise could be. It is simply something the reader accepts. But at times our fetal narrator’s musings on subjects ranging from Islam to identity politics are too indistinguishable from McEwan’s own Guardian editorials. Don’t get me wrong – McEwan’s a smart guy, but this stuff feels out of place in an otherwise engaging story.

It’s a short novel that keeps your attention, not because of especially surprising plot twists and clues, but because the near-helplessness of our narrator adds a layer of intimate horror to the proceedings. Nutshell is not McEwan’s best work, but still worth the read. 3.5 stars, rounded up.

This is a documentary by Werner Herzog which talks about the Internet and it’s affect on our lives as humans with interviews of those who have been affected by it. What the future possibly holds for us with our Internet technology. It also goes into the history of the Internet and where it all began.

I found it somewhat interesting. There were some cool things in it and interviews that I found eye opening but other than that it wasn’t amazing.

Feels like any other movie about the Internet. Pretty boring. Not technical, that’s what made it boring for me.

Natura’s Ice Creamery located in the town of Hahndorf is surrounded by massively over priced cafes. The pricing of this store is $5-7 for a hot dog and $7-10 for a baked potato which is pretty in line with what you would see at any other store around South Australia. Food presentation was way over what you would expect for a cafe and tasted great.

100% recommended if you are in the area, Don’t spend $20 on a sandwich in the surrounding stores.

This place is the one of the best places to grab a quick sandwhich if you live within a ~15 minute walking radius and don’t want to pay more than $7 for a vegetarian meal. They have a variety of cheeses, breads, and toppings just like standard deli but with the addition of a variety of mock meats. I love the vege duck sandwhich on dutch crunch with BBQ instead of mayo & mustard. They also have some extra items on the menus that I haven’t tried yet (the veggie corndogs and hummus in particular). I’m not sure the quality of food would make me travel across the city to acquire it, as I’m sure there are other options in the city that fill the same niche I like to go there for, but if you’re in the area, it’s worth checking out.

Moana tells the story of a girl of the same name who lives in a small village on the (fictional) island of Motunui. She’s the daughter of the village chief and set to lead her tribe, but she feels an inner calling to the ocean, which is off limits for the islanders.

The island, it turns out, is dying, and in order to restore it to life, Moana has to flout the ocean prohibition and go on a quest to return the heart to the island goddess of Te Fiti, with the help of the guy who stole it in the first place: the demigod Māui (loosely inspired by the mythological figure and voiced by Dwayne Johnson). Māui turns out to be a bit of a jerk, making the quest that much more difficult.

The CGI visuals are gorgeous, and teenage Hawaiian actor Auli’i Cravalho does a great job with Moana’s character, as does Dwayne Johnson with Māui. The quest is in parts predictable Disney formula and can feel a bit “on rails” for that reason, but the songs make up for that – including a fantastic villain song performed by Flight of the Conchords singer Jemaine Clement, and a remarkably good performance by Dwayne Johnson. They’re on YouTube, and if you don’t plan to check out the movie, you may want to at least listen to some of its standout songs (and then change your mind):

• You’re Welcome is the song performed by Johnson, which occurs shortly after his first encounter with Moana. The video shows the full scene and gives you an idea of some of the humor of the movie as well.
• Shiny is the aforementioned villain performance by Jemaine Clement, which is audio-only. Clement voices the gigantic coconut crab Tamatoa, pictured above.
• How Far I’ll Go and I Am Moana are more typical Disney fare, performed beautifully by Auli’i Cravalho. Mild spoilers in the second song.

I would give the movie 4 stars, but the music pushes it up to 4.5, rounded up. Recommended!

“The world deserves access to its greatest minds”, the slideshow begins, showing images of war zones. “Now more than ever the world needs access to reliable information.” The video is a fundraising ad for Project Syndicate, a nonprofit based in the Czech Republic.

The location reflects the organization’s original purpose. Project Syndicate was started in 1995 to help syndicate the views from “leaders and thinkers” from Western and Western-aligned countries to Eastern European newspapers. Today, it explains its model as follows:

News organizations in developed countries provide financial contributions for the rights to Project Syndicate commentaries, which enables us to offer these rights for free, or at subsidized rates, to newspapers and other media in the developing world.

While its tax returns are not publicly viewable, Project Syndicate’s CEO assured me that “it is registered as a public benefit corporation, 501c3 equivalent, in the Czech Republic. As such we register audited financials, board minutes, annual reports, etc every year with the appropriate Czech courts as required by Czech law.” He broke down the revenue composition of the organization as 60% subscriptions, 37% foundations, and 3% donations.

The website lists the Gates Foundation, the European Climate Foundation, and the UAE-based Al Maktoum Foundation as funders. That list is incomplete and may only reflect recent funding; George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, for example, gave $350,000 in 2014.

PS columns are translated by PS into multiple languages, and into many more by the participating newspapers. Each column includes a small speaker bio, but not a disclosure statement like the ones found in The Conversation (which I reviewed here).

Indeed, even funders themselves use PS to get their views out to newspapers around the world. This includes many columns by George Soros and by Bill Gates, two by Melinda Gates, and four by Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum. Each story includes an author bio, but does not disclose these funding connections.

Beyond its funders, the “greatest minds” whose opinions Project Syndicate spreads around the world include former and current world leaders, experts in academia, Nobel Prize Winners, and for whatever reason, Bjørn Lomborg. Lomborg, whose Ph.D. is in political science, has turned being a contrarian on environmental issues into a career, and his policy work (which many experts have described as scientifically dishonest) tends to be used by conservatives to justify luke-warmism: watered down approaches to solving environmental issues.

Columnists from politics include former UK Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, and former US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Some of these folks are life-long public servants, others (like Blair and Fischer) have turned their post-politics careers towards more lucrative objectives. Blair in particular has been busy: consulting for the financial services industry, advising dictators through Tony Blair Associates, making a secret deal with a South Korean oil firm. None of these connections are disclosed in his PS bio, which focuses solely on Blair’s work through NGOs and academia:

Tony Blair was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007. Since leaving office, he has founded the Africa Governance Initiative, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, and the Faith and Globalization Initiative.

This shows why disclosure statements are important.

By uncritically publishing views by Blair, Gates, Fischer, Brzezinski and other members of political and economic elites, PS implicitly will be less likely to air voices that are highly critical of them. This is not a publication that will give much credence to voices that allege that Henry Kissinger was a war criminal, a claim that even center-left Vox had to agree with.

Nor is it likely to criticize Brzezinski’s own record promoting Operation Cyclone, the massive, multi billion dollar program to arm Islamic extremists in Afghanistan as fighters against the Soviet Union, a program now widely regarded as exemplifying the blowback phenomenon where former allies turn against the state actor sponsoring them.

Indeed, as I write this, Project Syndicate is busy defending Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, with an editorial by Ali Al Shihabi, the “executive director of the Arabia Foundation, a new think tank that will focus on the geopolitics of the Arabian Peninsula”. Al Shihabi has calmly reassuring words for those disturbed by attacks such as the bombing of a funeral ceremony which led to 140 deaths. Totaling up the human cost of the war so far, he concludes: “For an air campaign waged for nearly two years against an unconventional army, this figure is not particularly high.”

That is not to say that Project Syndicate is a right-wing site. Far from it, its columns tend to occupy the center-left to center-right, to borrow a phrase from Hillary Clinton, and that’s following a more international definition of “centrism” than the right-leaning US version.

For example, PS created a special focus section on Donald Trump called “Trump: An American Horror Story”, and the site frequently reports on environmental issues and the international efforts to combat climate change. Here, too, it tends to follow more of a Hillary Clinton vision than a Bernie Sanders one, promoting fracking through several stories including, of course, one by Lomborg, who predictably calls it “this decade’s best green-energy option”.

In fairness, the credentialist centrism that defines Project Syndicate does leave room for a lot of sensible voices, including leaders of various NGOs and generally reasonable politicians arguing for peace, democracy, and apple pie. It has even given plenty of space to prolific progressive firebrand Yanis Varoufakis. But Jeffrey Sachs, who’s stuck with the project the longest as its first monthly columnist, is perhaps the best example of this benevolent form of punditry, the elite-friendly “how about we try this crazy thing” mentality that actually sometimes leads to positive agendas being implemented.

Project Syndicate content is licensed under conventional copyright – the newspaper subscriber model depends on at least some subscribers paying for the content. That said, the content is available online, sometimes in abbreviated form that requires logging in. There’s a small discussion section below each story, which usually receives a small to moderate amount of activity. There is no prominently noted way to submit corrections for any story.

The Verdict

Although non-profit, Project Syndicate is effectively mainly funded by for-profit media. It amplifies the perspective of elite voices across all sectors of society, while concealing conflicts of interest. The lack of obvious disclosure even regarding writers whose organizations are funders of the project, and the use of PR blurbs like Tony Blair’s, is especially iffy.

The bias towards credentialism is likely good for continuing to attract foundation funding and subscribers, but it doesn’t in fact engender a diverse set of perspectives. The Conversation, previously reviewed here, is a more inclusive alternative, in spite of its own selective focus on voices within academia.

Until Project Syndicate addresses some of its transparency deficits and manages to pivot towards a broader definition of “the greatest minds” with less emphasis on credentialism and increased focus on marginalized and underrepresented voices, I cannot recommend it as a source of analysis.

Nevertheless, I personally do follow Project Syndicate on Twitter to get a window into what views are being promoted by elites around the world, but it’s especially important to read it critically and conduct one’s own investigations of an author’s motivations and opposing viewpoints. Three out of five stars.

Archive-webextension is a Firefox add-on for saving pages into the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The importance of this work is commonly neglected, but the web is very volatile and ephemeral, which warrants care so that people can have access to this whole treasure trove. Backups are important, and archiving the Internet is serious business.

The add-on itself is simple, and was made mainly to replace a previous add-on that did this work, but became incompatible with newer versions of Firefox, as it is no longer maintained. It is made as a webextension, so that it can be compatible with the new directions Mozilla is taking Firefox. It works well and I can recommend it to anyone interested in helping save our shared history.

That being said, internationalization would be a welcome addition (and not too complicated either), so I’m giving it four stars. It can always improve, right?!

Disclaimer: You may find my opinion biased as I’m part of Peers, the same project that archive-webextension belongs to, and I speak to its author, zPlus, on IRC sometimes. Although really, I couldn’t find much to complain about in this add-on, and I think it fills an important role.

Partially inspired by the real-life case of Efraim Diveroli (played by Jonah Hill) and David Packouz (played by Miles Teller), War Dogs tells the story of two kids who were best friends in high school and reunite to build a shady company selling weapons of questionable origin to the United States government. The story is told from the perspective of the naive Packouz, who throws his lot in with Diveroli in hopes of becoming a good provider for his family, but gets in over his head almost immediately.

The film portrays Diveroli as a grotesque sociopath, and Jonah Hill has fun with the role, which doesn’t necessarily mean the audience does: watching a person behave as obnoxiously as possible gets old pretty quickly. In contrast, Miles Teller’s Packouz is simply boring, a “babe in the woods” character whose relationship is strained by the secrecy and lies surrounding his work.

The movie is at its best when it focuses on the parts of the story that are in fact based on the real world case: the open contracting process for arms sales, the growth of the Diveroli/Packouz business into a company that manages to land one of the biggest Pentagon contracts, the process of acquiring and re-selling arms of dubious provenance.

The arms business is one of the dirtiest in the world, and it deserves fiction and documentaries that uncover the link between the war profiteers and the untold harm their work inflicts on people they will never meet. In contrast, War Dogs is merely the story of a couple of hustlers whose actions are portrayed largely divorced from any real world consequences. The story unfolds fairly predictably and leaves us with little payoff.

Still, thanks to reasonable performances by Teller and Hill, and a fine cameo by Bradley Cooper, War Dogs is by no means a terrible movie – a reasonable choice for a boring evening or a long flight.

The Conversation may well be the most remarkable news site you’ve never heard of. After a start in Australia in 2010, the site has since added five editions: UK, the US, Africa, France, and a Global edition. The premise is simple enough: academics, researchers, and PhD students write news backgrounders, special reports, and explainers for complex topics, targeting a general audience. Readers are encouraged to engage in discussion with clearly stated and enforced community standards – and authors frequently participate in those conversations, as well.

The whole operation is fully non-profit, with funding that comes primarily from a large array of foundations and participating academic institutions. The most recent available tax return for the US edition, which is only 2 years old, notes about $2.3M in annual revenue, but The Conversation Media Group in Australia from which it spun off is a separate entity.

With a network of more than 36,000 writers, the scale of this project is staggering. These authors write in partnership with professional journalists who are part of the Conversation team. All content is under the Creative Commons Attribution/No-Derivatives License, which allows free republication without modifications, including commercial re-use. Because many sites do pick up their content, The Conversation’s reach extends well beyond the 3.7 million monthly users that go to the site directly.

The website runs on a custom content management system which is proprietary and likely to remain so. It is is quite well-designed: pages load fast, the multi-column layout is easy on the eye, the navigation makes sense, and it’s mobile-friendly. The commenting system is one of their own creation which, as of this writing, lacks functionality to edit one’s own comments but is otherwise easy to use.

Each edition has its own Twitter/Facebook/RSS feeds, so in order to get a mix of global and US posts, for example, you can just subscribe to both feeds.

So, what’s the content like? If you’re familiar with Vox.com, think of The Conversation as a less sensationalist version that is more careful with the facts while serving up more diverse views from around the world. Alongside lots of mundane stuff (the US frontpage article right now is “How making fun weekend plans can actually ruin your weekend”), that includes radical perspectives from time to time when they can be found in academia, such as articles by Greek academic and progressive firebrand Yanis Varoufakis.

And it also includes charming articles like How majority voting betrayed voters again in 2016, where a French mathematician advocates that the US should immediately adopt a voting method for presidential elections called “majority judgment” he and a colleague have devised. (The argument is interesting enough, but without grounding in any kind of political reality it is indeed a purely academic one.)

Consistent with standards in academic publishing, authors must disclose conflicts of interest and “relevant affiliations”, making it harder for the site to act as a conduit for advocacy by special interests.

All articles I’ve read meet a certain minimum bar of quality (they make an effort to engage the reader, they’re accurate and clear), but the ceiling varies considerably. In quite a few cases, you’d be better off heading over to Wikipedia to understand a subject, not because the backgrounder by The Conversation is wrong, but because it just consists of a few links and some fairly banal observations. Still, the site is (in my view) vastly preferable to commercial offerings like Vox because it publishes a truly diverse and increasingly global community of authors.

The Verdict

The Conversation is unique, and the site’s founders deserve credit for realizing a bold vision of a non-profit platform that helps us engage in smarter conversations with each other about the world we live in. Whatever your political views, I suggest adding one or more of their feeds to your news mix to sample their content.

If I could pick one area for the site to improve in, it would be to focus more on truly excellent journalism at the expense of sheer volume. Beyond that, a stronger commitment to open source values (opening up the platform, engaging the community in governance issues, using a more permissive license for the content) would be lovely to see. 4 out of 5 stars.

Não é preciso ser especialista em comunicação para atestar o óbvio: a grande mídia no Brasil é controlada por poucas famílias, milionárias e com um interesse premente na manutenção do status quo. Muito do que se chama de “opinião pública” nada mais é que o eco dos mesmos jornalistas, sempre com a mesma agenda liberalizante e sob um cínico véu de imparcialidade. É nesse contexto que pequenas publicações como o Outras Palavras se fazem necessários.

O Outras Palavras é uma plataforma com uma perspectiva de esquerda, e conta com uma riquíssima gama de temas, da economia às artes e da política à tecnologia. Nenhuma temática é imune de problematização, e isso inclui a própria esquerda, que é frequentemente autocriticada.

O site, que ostenta uma licença Creative Commons BY-SA, republica textos de outros autores, traduz peças de pensadores contemporâneos e cria conteúdo original, numa mistura bastante abrangente e interessante. É um dos poucos veículos de esquerda que não insistem no governismo tosco típico da Carta Capital, por exemplo, ou que sentem nostalgia por experimentos socialistas fracassados, como o vermelho.org.br.

Quanto à sua independência financeira, cabe aqui ressaltar uma informação importante sobre como o portal é financiado:

Em 2015, os leitores contribuíram com R$ 140 mil – o que correspondeu a 71% de nossas despesas. Em 2016, planejamos gastar R$ 238,8 mil […]. Deste total, R$ 210 mil – ou 87,5% – virão de contribuições solidárias, por meio de Outros Quinhentos.

Recomendo a todos que desejam estar a par dos acontecimentos recentes do mundo, sempre com um olhar afiado e crítico.