Freedom force

Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance. By Robert Gildea.Belknap; 608 pages; $35. Faber & Faber; £20.

GUY MOQUET was just 17 years old when he was executed by firing squad in Nazi-occupied France. In a poignant letter to his family before his death in 1941, the young Communist résistant wrote: “My life has been short, I have no regrets, if only that of leaving you all. I am going to die…Mummy, what I ask you, what I want you to promise me, is to be brave and to overcome your sorrow.” Môquet swiftly entered French history as a Resistance martyr, and remains a potent symbol. In 2007, on the day of his inauguration as president, Nicolas Sarkozy vowed that Môquet’s farewell letter would be read out each year in every French high school.

That a Gaullist president should devote his first day in office to the memory of a Communist is a measure of how far the narrative of the Resistance continues to shape France’s sense of itself. Môquet, said Mr Sarkozy, embodied more than a patriotic belief in France: he showed that “the greatness of man is to dedicate himself to a cause greater than himself.” To this day, French history textbooks dwell on such Resistance heroes. Men in berets, rifles slung over their shoulders, have become in the collective imagination an emblem of the national...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1EZtikG

Hydra-headed

The New Threat from Islamic Militancy. By Jason Burke. The New Press; 304 pages; $24.95. Bodley Head; £16.99.

ISLAMIC STATE (IS) poses a terrorist threat that is greater than any before or since the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, at least according to the British home secretary, Theresa May, speaking last November as she sought to justify extensive new counter-terrorist powers for the government. Barack Obama, also seeking greater powers to attack the group, made a similar assertion three months later: that IS threatens the American homeland itself. With the fall of Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria in May, IS has shown that it is still on the march. How much ought the West to fear the self-styled “caliphate”?

Perhaps not as greatly as politicians make out, according to Jason Burke. In his latest book, “The New Threat from Islamic Militancy”, he usefully divides the dangers into three main sources, and readers may gain a degree of reassurance from each; so long, that is, as they are not living in the Middle East or parts of Africa.

Into the first category of threat fall the two main organised groups, al-Qaeda and IS. Much of the book consists of a detailed (if somewhat familiar) account of their history and progress. Al-Qaeda, Mr Burke rightly notes, has been constrained and degraded by punishing drone...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1NCBPSJ

Blighting the horizon

The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers. By Gillian Tett. Simon & Schuster; 304 pages; $28.00. Little, Brown; £20.

WHY do organisations fail? Sometimes it is because their market or purpose disappears completely, as in the case of, say, video-rental shops. But often it is because as they grow, they lose the same innovative streak that made them a success. Like individuals, groups can become stuck in their ways, with fatal results.

In her new book Gillian Tett, a columnist with the Financial Times, blames silos for such failures to adapt. Through eight fables, Ms Tett argues that internal divisions and classifications, say, between doctors and surgeons, hold back creative thinking and encourage turf wars. Breaking them down can lead to innovation and, subsequently, success.

Take Sony. Having invented the path-breaking Walkman, a portable cassette player, in the late 1970s, Sony was one of the world’s foremost technology companies. Yet it fell behind during the transition to digital music,...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1EZtfFB

Bones of contention

Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them. By Nancy Marie Brown. St. Martin’s Press; 288 pages; $26.99.

IN 2010 an amateur Icelandic historian gatecrashed an international symposium on the Lewis chessmen, the greatest cache of medieval game pieces ever found. Gudmundur Thorarinsson, a chess-player (and an engineer by profession), hoped to convince the assembled scholars that the 92 walrus ivory pieces unearthed on the Isle of Lewis, off the west coast of Scotland, in 1831 were the work of a woman carver commissioned by a medieval Icelandic bishop. He was dismissed as a “nuthead”. Though no one really knows where the chessmen were made, the consensus of curators of the Lewis hoard held by the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland is that they probably originated in Norway late in the 12th century.

Mr Thorarinsson’s theory, however, caught the eye of Nancy Marie Brown, an American who has written extensively on the Viking age. Alerted by the disparaging of medieval Iceland as a “scrappy place full of farmers”, she begged to...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1NCBRtN

Ties that bind

The Story of the Lost Child. By Elena Ferrante. Translation by Ann Goldstein. Europa; 464 pages; $18 and £11.99.

NOVELS become literary blockbusters for many reasons. Some are created by mountains of marketing cash, some by media saturation. “Fifty Shades of Grey” and Harper Lee’s long-lost work, “Go Set a Watchman”, both fit this mould. Others are fuelled by something quite different, and their success is impossible to predict. In recent years “The Neapolitan Novels”, four volumes by an anonymous Italian author calling herself Elena Ferrante, have become a fictional juggernaut that not even the author’s English-language publishers, Europa Editions, saw coming.

Starting with “My Brilliant Friend”, which came out in Italy in 2011, the books focus on the lifelong attachment of two women from a tough Neapolitan neighbourhood. In America, where Ms Ferrante had a modest following, not much happened until 2013, when the translation was written up by James Wood, chief critic of the New Yorker. (Ann Goldstein, the translator, is an editor at the magazine.) By the time the...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1EZtekV

Educating Aida

Good clean family fun

A BABY giggles as its headphones supply a critique on Japanese society to accompany a video of school girls whirling with phallic “moya-moya” sticks fashioned from imaginary heart tissue. The video installation is part of an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo that includes Makoto Aida, who has specialised for years in being offensive. Bizarrely, the show is intended for youngsters on their summer holidays, and is all the more provocative for that.

Mr Aida is often labelled sadist, racist and misogynist. An exhibition at the private Mori Art Museum in 2012-13 included a video of himself masturbating in front of the kanji characters for “beautiful young girl”. Another notorious work showed countless naked and bloodied schoolgirls being mashed up in a fruit blender. 

The artist usually demurs when asked what his works mean, but here he says his aim is to show a highly unusual family speaking in a blunt way, to encourage others. His wife, also an artist, and his son built some of the exhibits. Japanese mothers are mocked in a study of a Chanel-...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1NCBQWO

The new rustbelt

IF YOU visit south-western Ontario and the Niagara peninsula you will see scenes of industrial decay. Steel mills, vehicle-parts factories and food processors sit abandoned, their car parks studded with tufts of grass. The region has the look of a rustbelt, and that has Canadians worried.

Manufacturing took a beating in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when high oil prices drove up the value of the Canadian dollar, making factories less competitive. But Canada should now be recovering from that bout of Dutch disease. The “loonie”, as Canadians call their currency, has been dropping along with oil prices. On August 25th it fell to its lowest level in a decade against the American dollar. That, plus the strong economy in the United States, the market for three-quarters of Canada’s exports, should have scraped off much of the rust.

So far it has not. Factory sales rose 1.2% in June, but were 3.1% below their level of a year earlier. The failure of manufacturing to respond to the tonic of a weaker currency is one reason why the economy probably contracted during the first half of 2015.

Now Canadians are starting to suspect that much of what they lost may never come back. In 2000 manufacturing accounted for 18% of GDP, not much lower than the share in Germany; by 2013 that had dropped to 10%, about the level in Britain and the United States. Factory...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1Kn7oOr

Plaguing paradise

Not how it looked in the brochure

SPEYSIDE on the island of Tobago has taken a direct hit. So have Skeete’s Bay, Bathsheba and other beaches on the southern and eastern coasts of Barbados. Cancún, a Mexican resort, has been struck. The bombardment takes the form of globs of sargassum seaweed which have landed on Caribbean beaches this year, forming piles that are sometimes metres deep. They emit a rotten-egg stench when they decompose, ruining holidays for anyone with a sense of smell. Hilary Beckles, the vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, calls it “the greatest single threat to the Caribbean economy I can imagine.”

There are more than 100 species of sargassum, possibly named after a Portuguese water flower. S. natans and S. fluitans spend their lives afloat and normally bother nobody. Buoyed by gas-filled bladders, they drift from nutrient-rich waters in the Gulf of Mexico into the Sargasso Sea.

They can be as friendly to marine life as a coral reef. Ten species of fish live only in sargassum...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1LDdYSu

Justice decayed

IT STARTED with a shooting. Two men, apparently on a motorbike, attacked a Venezuelan army anti-smuggling convoy on August 19th, close to the main border crossing with Colombia. Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, quickly went on television and vowed to hunt down the “murderers” (though the four victims were injured, not killed). He decreed a state of emergency in six municipalities in the frontier province of Táchira and expelled more than 1,000 Colombians living in Venezuela. The Simón Bolívar International Bridge is closed until further notice.

The expulsions were summary and carried out brutally. But for once, the accusations levelled at foreigners, the usual scapegoats for any problem in Venezuela, were not entirely spurious. Colombians are certainly involved in the lively contraband trade in petrol and other goods, which are made artificially cheap in Venezuela by price controls and the weak currency, the bolívar. (Venezuelan mafias, some of them linked to its army, are equally enthusiastic smugglers.) But most Venezuelans, especially the 5m residents of its capital, Caracas, and its metropolitan area, worry more about home-grown killers...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1VdLald

Looking for a home

FINLAND, with its baffling language and culture of reserve, is not an easy place for outsiders to penetrate. For Nura Farah, the breakthrough came via the dissected brains of dead cows. Ms Farah, who arrived with her mother in 1993 as a teenager seeking asylum from Somalia’s civil war, spent eight years dreaming of a better life in London while she was taunted at school and bore racist abuse on the streets. But in 2001, working as a lab technician in Helsinki, she found herself charged with testing cow tissue for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad-cow disease. The work was fulfilling, her colleagues encouraging, and she moved on to bigger challenges. She took on Finnish citizenship, gave birth to a son and last year became the first Somali Finn to publish a novel.

Finland is a long way from the migrant trouble that has erupted across Europe this summer. But as a country with little history of immigration that has had to integrate an unfamiliar minority, its experience resonates. Most EU countries will soon start receiving asylum-seekers from Italy and Greece, the main entry-points for illegal migrants. Many residents, particularly in Europe’s...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1EmApZE

Derailed

A MAINLINE train station in France at the end of summer hums with the thrill of journeys taken and families reunited. The French travel more by high-speed rail than any other European nation. Trains in the French mind are about more than just efficiency and convenience: they are a symbol of national prowess. Which is why the thwarted attack on August 21st on a high-speed train bound for Paris has stirred up a particularly difficult debate.

The attempted assault took place when Ayoub El Khazzani, a 25-year-old Moroccan-born man, emerged from an on-board lavatory shirtless and armed with an automatic rifle, nine clips of bullets, a hand gun and a box-cutter. Thanks to the fortuitous presence and quick thinking of two off-duty American servicemen, who together with other passengers overpowered him, nobody was killed. François Hollande, the French president, said that the assault would otherwise have “degenerated into carnage”. He awarded the Légion d’honneur, the country’s highest honour, to six of those who intervened.

The French public prosecutor, François Molins, has opened a formal investigation into attempted murder in connection with a terrorist act. Mr El Khazzani claimed that he found the weapons in a park in Brussels, the Belgian capital, where he boarded the train, and that he meant only to rob passengers, not kill them....

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1Lyk6Zk

And another one

Melina Mercouri liked doing it

WHEN in doubt, call an election, goes a Greek political adage. It is as valid as ever. After only seven months in power, Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister, resigned on August 20th with the intention of winning a new mandate. The move followed a revolt by hardline legislators in his leftwing Syriza party over austerity measures, wiping out Mr Tsipras’s majority in parliament. Greeks will vote for the sixth time in eight years on September 20th or 27th.

It makes political sense for Mr Tsipras to seek a new mandate right away rather than try to limp on. Austerity measures imposed by European creditors will start to bite in October, after which governing may become even trickier.

The creditors have mostly supported the return to the polls even if it increases short-term uncertainty. In any case, they intend to drip-feed aid only when the measures Mr Tsipras signed up to have been implemented.

The most recent opinion polls show Syriza leading the centre-right New Democracy party by 24% to 22%, an unexpectedly narrow margin; some 15% of voters are undecided. Polls...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1Lyk6Ze

Knocking on heaven’s door

Ready to launch

EVER since the end of the Balkan wars in 1999, the most important question in the region has been when and how to join the European Union. Slovenia made it in 2004 and Croatia followed in 2013. For the rest, however, the goal is still far off. The prospects of Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia—all at different stages of EU integration—have appeared stuck for some time.

But recent months brought progress, mostly unnoticed in the rest of crisis-ridden Europe. On August 25th Kosovo and Serbia signed several EU-aided agreements, including one giving Kosovo’s Serb-dominated municipalities more rights. The EU also mediated an agreement leading to new elections in Macedonia, where a political crisis had come to boiling point. An unworkable EU policy blocking Bosnia’s advancement was abandoned.

The single biggest change, says Remzi Lani, an Albanian analyst, is that western Balkan leaders now take their cue from Berlin, not Brussels. “It is the German moment,” he says. The shift was on display at a regional summit in Vienna on August 27th. Heads of government met as part of...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1EmAsog

The gambler

WHEN he became Turkey’s first popularly elected head of state last year, Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to be no “ordinary president”. Departing from political tradition once more, he has now called early elections for the first time in the country’s modern history after his Justice and Development party (AK) lost its 12-year majority in parliament on June 7th and failed to form a coalition government.

The setback has not dented Mr Erdogan’s oft-voiced determination to create a powerful executive presidency. It may even have made a return to the polls more attractive, showing him firmly in charge. “Agree or not, Turkey’s regime has de facto changed,” he said on August 14th, implying that a rewriting of the constitution that he has long sought may be unnecessary. Proving his point, Mr Erdogan has stretched the boundaries of his supposedly non-partisan role. He refused to give the opposition leader, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the chance to form a government, triggering allegations of staging “a civilian coup”.

Returning to the polls is a gamble, however. Mr Erdogan appears convinced that voters, having directed a warning shot at his party at the recent polls, will return it to power. But pollsters see little evidence of that. For the time being, Ahmet Davutoglu, the prime minister, has been asked to form an interim unity...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1Lyk6IX

It’ll cost you

GETTING divorced? Going to the doctor? Flushing a loo? If so, you are increasingly likely to receive a bill from the government. As cash-strapped Western countries try to balance their books without raising unpopular taxes, they are charging higher fees for everyday services. American cities tap their residents for around a quarter more in such charges than they did at the turn of the century. Half the countries in the EU have increased health-care charges since the financial crisis. In Britain, where a severe fiscal squeeze is under way, new fees are popping up in unexpected places, from the criminal courts to municipal pest-control agencies (see article).

Pay-as-you-go government has advantages. Charging for services helps allocate resources efficiently, deterring overconsumption, just as parking meters stop people hogging spaces. And far from being uniformly regressive, fees can be fairer than general taxation. Selling water by the litre, as Ireland controversially began to do in...

from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1VdIGmT

Lots of heat but not much light

THE intensity of the argument in Washington, DC, over the nuclear pact between Iran, America and five other powers is in some ways impressive. Such an important agreement merits close scrutiny. Sadly, much of the talk has been wildly misleading (see article). For example, Ted Cruz, a Republican presidential hopeful, says the deal would make the Obama administration “the leading global financier” of Islamic terrorism, “sending billions to jihadists who will use that money to murder Americans”. Some critics seem motivated more by loathing of Barack Obama than by the flaws of the accord itself. Yet the White House has hardly been blameless, either. Mr Obama’s insistence that rejection of the pact would put America on a path towards war with Iran is cynically calculated to play on voters’ fears.

The fate of the deal will be decided over the next five or six weeks. Given Republicans’ hostility, Mr Obama knows that he will probably have to use his presidential veto following a first vote in...

from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1VdIFPS

Let them in and let them earn

ISLAMIC STATE (IS) does not hide its brutality. When it burns men alive or impales their heads on spikes, it posts the videos online. When its fighters enslave and rape infidel girls, they boast that they are doing God’s will. So when fugitives from IS-occupied Syria or Iraq say they are frightened to return home, there is a good chance they are telling the truth.

The European Union is one of the richest, most peaceful regions on Earth, and its citizens like to think that they set the standard for compassion. All EU nations accept that they have a legal duty to grant safe harbour to those with a “well-founded” fear of persecution. Yet the recent surge of asylum-seekers has tested Europe’s commitment to its ideals, to put it mildly (see article). Neo-Nazi thugs in Germany have torched asylum-seekers’ hostels. An anti-immigrant group is now the most popular political party in Sweden. Hungary’s prime minister, channelling his inner Donald Trump, warns that illegal migrants,...

from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1hI5RaG

Awaiting its iPhone moment

IS IT vividly realistic—or is it still just vapid razzmatazz? Virtual reality (VR), a technology that flopped in the 1990s, is making a glitzy comeback. The dream of a headset that can immerse you in a detailed, realistic 3D world is now being pursued in earnest by a gaggle of startups and the giants of technology alike. Last year Facebook bought Oculus, the most prominent VR fledgling, for $2 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s boss, says “immersive 3D content is the obvious next thing after video.” Google supports VR in several of its products and is backing a secretive new company called Magic Leap. Microsoft, having missed the boat on smartphones, has developed an impressive VR system named HoloLens. Tech leaders have decided that VR could be the next big thing after the smartphone (see article). Are they right?

The VR devices appearing in the next few months will focus on video-gaming, where VR is a natural fit. But the technology will eventually have many other uses: in data visualisation...

from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1hI5SLM

Manage like a spymaster

UNTIL recently, for most businesses security was a question of buying decent locks, doors and windows, installing CCTV, making sure that reception staff sign visitors in and out, and trying not to leave confidential papers in the photocopier. But attacks on their computer systems, be they by business rivals, political activists, criminals or foreign governments, are much harder to defend against—and can have far worse consequences than a physical break-in. A company can suffer a devastating blow to its reputation, its intellectual property, or its ability to serve customers—not to mention its bank balances. It may never learn who has attacked it or why, or how much information has been taken; so it may never be sure if it has done enough to plug the leak.

Cyber-security is now burning a hole in boardroom tables. Before the recent hacking of Ashley Madison, an online broker of adulterous trysts, the most notorious example in the past year was that of Sony Pictures Entertainment, in which a torrent of embarrassing e-mails, personal information about employees and copies of unreleased films was released on the internet by unknown infiltrators. But...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1JA69ul

Snap judgments

A WHOLE generation of young people has been snapped up by Snapchat. Every day around 100m people worldwide use the smartphone app to send (sometimes saucy) photos, videos and messages that quickly disappear from the recipient’s phone. Some 60% of American smartphone users between the ages of 13 and 34 use the service, the firm claims. It is among the most highly valued private technology firms in the world: its most recent financing round, in May, put a $16 billion price tag on it.

The app’s impermanent messages, which help protect the sender’s privacy, have made it popular among young users. So has its clunky user interface, which dissuades parents from using the app. One of Snapchat’s most-used features is “stories”—mash-ups of videos that users take with their smartphones’ cameras, recapping their day’s activities, over which they can doodle and write captions before sharing them with friends. Perfect for the “selfie” generation.

In recent months advertisers, eager to reach young consumers who spend less time with older media, have become captivated by Snapchat’s potential. Both Facebook and Google reportedly tried to buy it in...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1JA6ahY