Article archive | The New York Review of Books

The National Digital Public Library Is Launched! by Robert Darnton | The New York Review of Books
▻http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/apr/25/national-digital-public-library-launched/?pagination=false

http://www.nybooks.com/media/photo/2013/04/02/darnton_1-042513_png_470x487_q85.png

The Digital Public Library of America ►http://dp.la, to be launched on April 18, is a project to make the holdings of America’s research libraries, #archives, and museums available to all Americans—and eventually to everyone in the world—online and free of charge.

#bibliothèque #domaine_public

L’Etat envisage de vendre ses parts dans des entreprises semi-publiques - Libération
▻http://www.liberation.fr/economie/2013/04/05/l-etat-envisage-de-vendre-ses-parts-dans-des-entreprises-semi-publiques_8

Dans son entretien au quotidien financier américain, Arnaud Montebourg a refusé de dire quelles participations pourraient être mises en vente. Après un dérapage budgétaire en 2012, le gouvernement a reconnu qu’il n’arriverait pas à atteindre l’objectif d’un déficit à 3% du PIB cette année et qu’il négociait un délai avec la Commission européenne.

L’Etat a déjà annoncé la semaine dernière la vente d’une participation de 3,12% dans l’équipementier aéronautique Safran pour 448,5 millions d’euros. Parmi les importantes participations publiques, on compte des parts très majoritaires dans EDF ou Areva, ainsi que des participations minoritaires dans France Télécom, Air France-KLM, GDF Suez ou encore Renault.

This Is Not a Revolution | Hussein Agha and Robert Malley (The New York Review of Books)
►http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/nov/08/not-revolution

Darkness descends upon the Arab world. Waste, death, and destruction attend a fight for a better life. Outsiders compete for influence and settle accounts. The peaceful demonstrations with which this began, the lofty values that inspired them, become distant memories. Elections are festive occasions where political visions are an afterthought. The only consistent program is religious and is stirred by the past. A scramble for power is unleashed, without clear rules, values, or endpoint. It will not stop with regime change or survival. History does not move forward. It slips sideways.(...) Source: The New York Review of Books

This Is Not a Revolution – Hussein Agha and Robert Malley
►http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/nov/08/not-revolution

Day by day, the civil war in Syria takes on an uglier, more sectarian hue. The country has become an arena for a regional proxy war. The opposition is an eclectic assortment of Muslim Brothers, Salafis, peaceful protesters, armed militants, Kurds, soldiers who have defected, tribal elements, and foreign fighters. There is little that either the regime or the opposition won’t contemplate in their desperation to triumph. The state, society, and an ancient culture collapse. The conflict engulfs the region.

The battle in Syria also is a battle for Iraq. Sunni Arab states have not accepted the loss of Baghdad to Shiites and, in their eyes, to Safavid Iranians. A Sunni takeover in Syria will revive their colleagues’ fortunes in Iraq. Militant Iraqi Sunnis are emboldened and al-Qaeda is revitalized. A war for Iraq’s reconquest will be joined by its neighbors. The region cares about Syria. It obsesses about Iraq.

Islamists in the region await the outcome in Syria. They do not wish to bite off more than they can chew. If patience is the Islamist first principle, consolidation of gains is the second. Should Syria fall, Jordan could be next. Its peculiar demography—a Palestinian majority ruled over by a trans-Jordanian minority—has been a boon to the regime: the two communities bear deep grievances against the Hashemite rulers yet distrust each other more. That could change in the face of the unifying power of Islam for which ethnicity, in theory at least, is of little consequence.

Weaker entities may follow. In northern Lebanon, Islamist and Salafi groups actively support the Syrian opposition, with whom they may have more in common than with Lebanese Shiites and Christians. From the outset a fragile contraption, Lebanon is pulled in competing directions: some would look to a new Sunni-dominated Syria with envy, perhaps a yearning to join. Others would look to it with fright and despair.

The Agony of Syria by Max Rodenbeck | The New York Review of Books
►http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/sep/27/agony-syria/?page=2

The main reason that Syria’s agony has gone on so long is not because large numbers actively or enthusiastically back the government. The Assads do have supporters beyond their Alawite core, but such outsiders are mostly seekers after spoils, such as Bedouin tribes that have gained some special favor, or business clans that won lucrative concessions from the Assads. Their numbers have dwindled rapidly in recent months, ironically, again, largely because the government’s own brutality has made it increasingly clear that the regime is untenable as is, and incapable of reform.

Abu Tony, a Christian activist in Damascus, says with a shrug that the influx since the spring of thousands of desperate refugees into the capital has made it plain, even to the well-insulated wealthy or to those who took comfort in blocking their ears to anything but state propaganda, that this is a criminal regime. The increased pace of defections does not surprise him. “The inner circle think they have a Samson option, to threaten to destroy the whole country,” he says. “But they will find there is nobody left to carry it out.”

What has so far made many Syrians reluctant to sacrifice for the revolution is not loyalty to the state but fear of chaos. They have seen neighboring Iraq and Lebanon descend into years of sectarian warfare. They know that forty years of the Assads’ ostensible secularism have not succeeded in burying Syria’s own confessional resentments. Quite realistically, they expect that even after the regime falls, there may be worse to come.

Just what that might be, no one can predict with confidence. Even more than in other dictatorships, Syria’s long years of tyranny have left a lingering pathology of mistrust. Much of Syria’s elite is tainted by association with the regime. The organized opposition is fragmented. Its meetings have the tenor of an Afghan Loya Jirga, where impressive-looking people turn out to represent themselves and a few cousins, and most energy is exerted undermining other factions.

Are Hackers Heroes? by Sue Halpern | The New York Review of Books
►http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/sep/27/are-hackers-heroes

In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world…. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it—often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Our Romance With Guns
►http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/sep/27/our-romance-guns

Like so much else in the United States, the costs of our infatuation with guns are not evenly distributed. In 2008 and 2009, gun homicide was the leading cause of death for young black men. They die from gun violence—mainly at the hands of other black males—at a rate eight times that of young white males.2 From 2000 to 2007, the overall national homicide rate remained steady, at about 5.5 per 100,000 persons. But over the same period the homicide rate for black men rose 40 percent for fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds, 18 percent for eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, and 27 percent for those twenty-five and up. In 1995, the national homicide rate was about 10 per 100,000; the rate for Boston gang members, mainly black and Hispanic, was 1,539 per 100,000. In short, it is not the typical NRA member, but young black and Hispanic men in the inner city, who bear the burden of America’s gun romance.

#armes

Why Marxism is on the rise again | World news | The Guardian
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/04/the-return-of-marxism

Un article qui a beaucoup tourné depuis 10 jours et dont je n’ai pas lu les 1142 commentaires

This chimes with something Rancière told me. The professor argued that “one thing about Marxist thought that remains solid is class struggle. The disappearance of our factories, that’s to say de-industrialisation of our countries and the outsourcing of industrial work to the countries where labour is less expensive and more docile, what else is this other than an act in the class struggle by the ruling bourgeoisie?”

There’s another reason why Marxism has something to teach us as we struggle through economic depression, other than its analysis of class struggle. It is in its analysis of economic crisis. In his formidable new tome Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism ►http://www.versobooks.com/books/1114-less-than-nothing , Slavoj Žižek tries to apply Marxist thought on economic crises to what we’re enduring right now. Žižek considers the fundamental class antagonism to be between “use value” and “exchange value”.

#marx #capitalisme et toujours la question de la #valeur

#Social #connections and content - #Google Social #Search
►http://www.google.com/s2/u/0/search/social?hl=en

This is the #network of connections Google uses to identify relevant social search results.

Generation Why? by Zadie Smith | The New York Review of Books
▻http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/25/generation-why

Israel & Palestine: Can They Start Over? - The New York Review of Books
►http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23456

#israelpalestine

Scandal in Africa - The New York Review of Books
►http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21691