Mind the Gap

The Charlie Hebdo attackand its aftermath in the streets and in the press tempt one to dust off Samuel Huntington's 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Despite the criticisms he provoked with that book and his earlier 1993 article in Foreign Affairs, recent events would seem to be proving him prescient.

Or was he?

Of Cultures Destroyed by Western Sexual Exploitation and Violent Religious Prudery

In working on my latest book Perv, some of the saddest material I came across involved the stormy cross-cultural conflicts erupting between Western ideals of sex and those discovered among other “exotic” societies. The field of cultural anthropology has its own dark history in this regard. For an embarrassingly long time, in fact, some unethical scholars were in the dubious business of publishing thinly veiled “ethnopornographies” of their trusting subjects. With revealing titles such asUntrodden Fields of Anthropology (1898), Neger-Eros (1928), and Erotikon (1966), these researchers seemed far less concerned about educating Western audiences than they were in titillating readers with lurid true stories of savage lust. Some of these scandalous volumes even included explicit “photodocumentation” of the subjects at hand, which arguably involved the production of sexually exploitative images of indigenous people.

Social impact bond: philanthropy is trying to tap new pools of funding to produce measurable social results

THE seven teenagers sit with their feet tucked under tan desks in a classroom in New York City’s Rikers Island jail, taking turns answering “icebreaker” questions they’ve fished from an envelope.

The philanthropist Ronald Cordes with a microfinance borrower in Uganda.

“What’s your favorite thing to do with your time?” asks one young man, the rowdiest of the group. He answers himself: “Reading.”

“Really?” says Joyce Gendler, their peppy 22-year-old instructor, with just a hint of incredulity. “Good.” A few minutes later, she begins to engage them in the day’s activity, making sympathy cards for people who are sick.

The adolescents are part of a new program aimed at building personal responsibility and life skills, with the goal that fewer of them will re-offend. 

A federation, yes, but what kind?

Kopelnitsky

"Whether it be poltical, budgetary, or based on financial solidarity, the idea of ​​a more integrated EU is in fashion. But just what final form would the Federal Union take in the end? Nobody really knows, and that’s the whole problem."
Jan Macháček

When Angela Merkel, at an economic forum in Davos in January, diffidently mentioned federalism, her words essentially went down without provoking a great response. In the six months since then, though, notions about a federal EU have proliferated by the sackful. The head of the European Commission, Barroso, and some European foreign ministers have called for one, but no one from the Czech Republic has joined the chorus.