Recent Editor's Picks
Michael Johnson writes about this year's Van Cliburn International Piano Competition:
"....the first major competition to take place since Twitter, Facebook and personal blogs became ubiquitous via portable devices, often operated in real time during performances."
".....probably the most wrenching strain on a competition pianist today is the public battering they are exposed to by critics amateur and professional, now spreading their instant opinions by social media to a global audience."
BBC quoting a report of a conversation that appeared on the Chilean website Reflection and Liberation.
The Pope "is said to have told the Latin American delegation that there were good, holy men in the administration, but that there was also corruption."
".......at this point the Western world has seemingly succumbed to a severe case of economic defeatism; we're not even trying to solve our problems. That needs to change - and maybe, just maybe, Japan can be the instrument of that change."
To read the whole article please click here.
From the BBC: "Grammar is not just an educational issue. For some adults, it can sabotage friendships and even romantic relationships."
Extracts:
Paul Krugman: "Economic debates rarely end with a T.K.O. But the great policy debate of recent years between Keynesians, who advocate sustaining and, indeed, increasing government spending in a depression, and austerians, who demand immediate spending cuts, comes close - at least in the world of ideas. At this point, the austerian position has imploded; not only have its predictions about the real world failed completely, but the academic research invoked to support that position has turned out to be riddled with errors, omissions and dubious statistics."
David Stockman, Budget Director for Ronald Reagans, has written a book "The Great Deformation". As a result, according to The Financial Times, Mr. Stockman will be short of party invitations in Washington.
Below some extracts of Mr. Stockman's article that appears on the International Herald Tribune, i.e the Global Edition of the New York Times:
Incomes for the bottom 90 percent of Americans only grew by $59 on averagebetween 1966 and 2011 (when you adjust those incomes for inflation), according to an analysis by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston for Tax Analysts. During the same period, the average income for the top 10 percent of Americans rose by $116,071........
The findings should "ring alarm bells" for users, privacy campaigners said.
Joseph Bottum, The Weekly Standard: "The Papal Abdication - Benedict XVI's problematic farewell". Extract: