FOREIGN BOOM
As Inside reports, talks between the Writers Guild of America and the Hollywood studios have not produced an agreement of any kind. A strike is therefore likely. In a New York Times op-ed, Salman Rushdie argues that a strike may have some beneficial consequences—fewer bad films on screens and an opportunity for Americans to see more films from abroad. "In the 1960's and early 1970's, a flood of great non-American filmmakers pried Hollywood's fingers off the cinema's throat for a few years. The result was a golden age, the time of the great films of Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray; of the French New Wave; of Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman. Now, once again, world cinema is blossoming—in China, in Iran, in Britain. And it may just be that the mass audience is ready, at long last, to enjoy rather more diversity in its cultural diet. After all, there are plenty of dreadful American films we could all cheerfully do without."

AMONG THE PRETTY CLOTHES HORSES
David Brooks of the Weekly Standard recently went to Italy to view the Milanese fashion runways. "For when you actually look at the fashion world, you see two things. First, and most obviously, you see what is indeed a decadent floating party cycle for Eurotrash. One of the perplexities of my week in Italy was that I repeatedly found myself deep in cocktail chatter with semi-beautiful women with no fixed address and no clear occupation, talking about, say, the wonders of homeopathic jet lag remedies. But second, and more ominously, you see the shape of things to come. For underneath the glitter, fashion is a highly competitive industry. In fact, this is the quintessential industry of the Information Age."

OH, WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE L.A. TIMES BOOK REVIEW? According to Scott Timberg of New Times, Los Angeles' book scene has blossomed, yet the book review of the city's main paper fails to reflect the passion so many Angelenos have for their books. Is this merely professional griping or jealousy—in cities where people talk about books, almost everyone seems to have an idea of how they would run a book review—or a serious allegation? Since no book review attempts to be comprehensive (for example, the New York Times Book Review doesn't review all of the books on its best-seller list even if a certain title is wildly popular in Staten Island, while the New York Review of Books chooses to assess the merits of a book only when it informs a theme that the editors believe is of interest), Steve Wasserman, editor of the L.A. Times Book Review, can be forgiven for his partiality. The same cannot be said, however, for Timberg's employers at Los Angeles' New Times, who do not have a books section on their Web site.

VENDLER'S MERRILL
In last Sunday's L.A. Times Book Review, Caroline Fraser wrote about James Merrill, whose Collected Poems has even been talked about in New York. Fraser writes, "As early as 1972, in a review of Merrill's Braving the Elements, critic Helen Vendler defined the expectations his work had summoned up in what has become one of the most oft-quoted characterizations of it: ‘The time eventually comes, in a good poet's career, when readers actively long for his books: to know that someone out there is writing down your century, your generation, your language, your life—under whatever terms of difference—makes you wish for news of yourself, for those authentic tidings of invisible things that only come in the interpretation of life voiced by poetry.' " It is no surprise at all that the indisputable queen of poetry criticism, the very same Helen Vendler, writes about Merrill's Collected Poems in this week's New Yorker. In 2001, Vendler says: "By the end of his life, a broad democracy of suffering replaces both the youthful isolation of the earliest work and the somewhat larger, but still restricted, social compass of the middle poems. … The poet can admit that his emotional life doesn't differ very much from that of other people." Daniel Mendelsohn wrote about Merrill for the New York Times Book Review.

THE POLITICS OF GESTURE
The sociologist Erving Goffman, author of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and Interactive Ritual, made a career of cataloging and interpreting gestures. If he were alive today, or if his books were better remembered, one can safely say that his name and his work would be a familiar refrain on chat shows of a political or social nature. What happens, however, when governments rely more on gesture than policy and when journalists ask more questions about presentation than content? "What can and should governments do?" asks the historian Eric Hobsbawm in the current issue of the New Statesman. "More than in the past, they are under unceasing pressure from a continuously monitored mass opinion. This constrains their choices. Nevertheless, governments cannot stop governing. Indeed, they are urged by their PR experts that they must constantly be seen to be governing, and this multiplies gestures, announcements and sometimes unnecessary legislation. And public authorities today are constantly faced with decisions about common interests which are technical as well as political. Here, democratic votes (or consumers' choices in the market) are no guide at all. … Moreover, these ways may prove to be unpopular, and in a democracy, it is unwise to tell the electorate what it does not want to hear. How can state finances be rationally organized, if governments have convinced themselves that any proposals to raise taxes amount to electoral suicide, when election campaigns are therefore contests in fiscal perjury, and government budgets exercises in fiscal obfuscation? In short, the ‘will of the people,' however expressed, cannot determine the specific tasks of government."

PLASTIC FUTURE
In Germany, the demand for newsprint, despite vast supplies of fresh paper from Canada and Russia as well as the locally recycled variety, outstrips supply. As the {{Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung#2:http://www.faz.com/IN/INtemplates/eFAZ/docmain.asp?rub={B1311FD3-FBFB-11D2-B228-00105A9CAF88}&doc={AE44CC11-0A14-11D5-A3B3-009027BA22E4}&width=1011&height=741&agt=explorer&ver=4&svr=4}} explains: "The liberalization of the power and telecommunications markets indirectly boosted consumption as utilities booked more and more ad space in the hope of gaining new customers or of convincing people to switch from other companies." Germany is not unique in this respect; nor are newspapers. Printers the world over have witnessed paper shortages and higher costs. Perhaps, as Technology Review reports, plastic "paper" will become the publishers' savior. "The book of the future, e-paper researchers like to say, will look just like a regular book. It will have a hard cover and a spine and several hundred thin, white, flexible pages. But the spine will be filled with electronic circuitry and a wireless data port and maybe a stylus; the pages will be electronic displays. Readers will open the cover and—here the vision gets a little fanciful—be confronted with a list of the works contained in the book, arranged by title, author or subject matter. Because this is 10 or more years from now, data-storage devices will have shrunk even further, and thus embedded in the spine of this single volume may be a hundred novels, even a thousand, all downloaded through the data port." Perhaps, in 10 years' time, when technology has truly taken over the world, there'll be nothing else to do but read and read and read.

IDOL PROTEST
As Luke Harding  reported a few months ago, art treasures from Afghanistan have turned up at New York galleries and auction houses, though the profiteering in religious objects did not lead to outraged protests. Now, with the Taliban destroying (and perhaps profiting from) Buddhist statuary, the protests are deafening. Suck.com and the Guardian columnist Isabel Hilton say the outrage at the Taliban's actions is misplaced. As Hilton writes: "Afghanistan's cultural heritage, belatedly, has our attention. For the sake of the statues of Bamiyan, as well as the people of Afghanistan, perhaps we could find a more constructive response than another round of sanctions. Unless we do, the giant Buddhas will be remembered as the latest victims of a crisis the west contributed to then tried to forget." (To read "International Papers" on the Taliban's actions, click here.)

A READING OF THE RIOT ACT
Conrad Black, proprietor of the Jerusalem Post, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, the Spectator, and the Chicago Sun-Times, has accused one of his columnists of being an anti-Semite. "Writers," Black says in the pages of the Spectator, "like everyone else, have the right to dislike individuals and whole nationalities and ethnic groups. They have the right to express their dislike if they do so rationally, are not legally defamatory, and if they are within the bounds of civilized taste. Unfortunately, last week in this magazine, Taki's reflections were indefensible. He expressed a hatred for Israel and a contempt for the United States and its political institutions that were irrational and an offence to civilized taste. In the process, I am afraid he uttered a blood libel on the Jewish people wherever they may be." In the New York Press, Taki comes to his own defense, mainly by repeating his assertion that the financier Marc Rich is, in his view, a bad Jew. "Marc Rich is a crook who knows the value of nothing and the price of everyone. Clinton is a political Marc Rich, and unscrupulous Jews … took full advantage. … Conrad Black has been snookered by his love for an embattled country. The trouble is that I haven't. I have chosen to remain a Spectator columnist because if you dish it out the way I do, you should be able to take it."

MEDIEVAL PRACTICES
Hysterical technophobia is said be the scourge of Europe. Yet as another food crisis   bears down on the continent, who can blame Europeans for rejecting the prevailing wisdom about the food supply when neither governments nor the European Commission seem able to inform the public about the nature of, for example, mad cow disease, foot-and-mouth disease, and the long-term implications of genetically modified animals and crops? In an assessment of British reactions to the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, Felicity Spector, a British news producer, posits that a new "Medievalism" has swept through Britain (though why distrust of a secretive government and suspicions about a fickle press should be considered "medieval" is a mystery). In the absence of a convincing explanation for why hundreds of thousands of animals should be slaughtered to counter a disease that kills barely five percent of those it infects, let's be clear about who is medieval. Burning carcasses, which European governments insists upon, may get rid of the disease for now, but it does nothing to prevent a further outbreak. Nor does it eradicate it in parts of the world, such as South Africa or Hong Kong, where it's endemic. What's surprising about the outbreak of foot-and-mouth is not that it happened, but why it hasn't happened more often, which leads one ask whether farming methods (and government strictures) contribute to the disease's impact by diminishing an animal's ability to resist the disease and whether commercial concerns receive priority over the long-term health of the food supply. As a Sunday Times editorial explained: "Foot and mouth is not the Black Death: the current virus has been around for the past decade. An American report last week explained the reality of what is happening in Britain. Foot and mouth, it said, is ‘a relatively mild livestock ailment and it is no danger to humans—but once a farm animal has been exposed to infection, it is killed to safeguard international trade.' Precisely. It's all about trade, as the French showed by banning Irish meat exports even though the Irish republic was free of the illness."

RISK ASSESSMENT
In an interview in John Brockman's Edge, Anthony Giddens, one of the draftsmen of the so-called "Third Way," says that a re-evaluation of the slippery concept of risk is the most pressing concern of the new century. Risk, Giddens says, "is very crucial to scientific innovation. … You obviously need risk; no one lives a life without actively embracing risk. Science is about boldness, is about innovation. And the question for all of us is how you find an appropriate balance between these two, especially when you don't know in advance what the consequences of scientific innovation will be."