Prospect Magazine» Magazine

High noon in the middle east

Jake Wallis Simons — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:23:55 +0000

Grenades seized by the Israelis last November aboard MV Francop, a container ship on course from Iran to Syria

“Netanyahu thinks he is the superpower,” remarked Bill Clinton bitterly in 1996, “and we are here to do whatever he requires.” Today, as the Americans and the Israelis refuse to budge on the fraught issue of settlements in East Jerusalem, this statement rings truer than ever. US-Israeli relations are at a historic low. But the current standoff is about much more than settlement-building. Underlying it is Washington’s concern that Netanyahu’s repeated gestures of provocation—like the establishment of Jewish heritage sites in the Palestinian territories—are drawing the region towards a conflict unprecedented since 1948. And this time there is a nuclear dimension.

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Why Iraq war films fail

Tom Streithorst — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:27:24 +0000

A US army private based deep in the Sunni “triangle of death” south of Baghdad put it piquantly to me in May 2007: “We’re a reality show everybody’s bored of.” The soldiers know that nobody cares. According to minute-by-minute television ratings, viewers switch off as soon as an Iraq story hits air. When Siegfried Sassoon wrote his poems, and when Erich Remarque wrote All Quiet on the Western Front, much of their audience had lived through the same hell. During both the world wars, the entire nation was involved, and the experience of the soldiers was an intrinsic part of the national psyche. Not any more. I’ve met dozens of soldiers who, since the invasion, have served three or more tours in the warzone, spent more time with their platoons than with their families—and yet they realise that, back home, nobody knows or is interested in what they have been through.

Hollywood also recognises that the Iraq war is bad box office. Even winning the Oscar didn’t goose The Hurt Locker’s ticket sales much. In mid March it barely beat Tooth Fairy on the earnings list in America. On the same three days as Tim Burton’s critically panned Alice in Wonderland grossed $62m, The Hurt Locker only took in $800,000. The big-budget Green Zone also opened to disappointing numbers. And yet, thankfully, some film and documentary makers still feel compelled to explore the topic. More than 30 movies have been made about the Iraq war. Considering how little the average person knows—or cares—about the conflict, we urgently need these films to tell us what is going on. Do they succeed?

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The case against the hockey stick

Matt Ridley — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:56:51 +0000

Messy, truncated data? Trees on the Gaspé Peninsula in Canada: one of several pieces of evidence for rising temperatures that have been called into question

Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion is one of the best science books in years. It exposes in delicious detail, datum by datum, how a great scientific mistake of immense political weight was perpetrated, defended and camouflaged by a scientific establishment that should now be red with shame. It is a book about principal components, data mining and confidence intervals—subjects that have never before been made thrilling. It is the biography of a graph.

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Men: feminism needs you

Laurie Penny — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:28:45 +0000

…to revise your gender identity

In his provocatively-titled Prospect article, Why Feminism Favours Men, Jim Pollard argues that feminism has left men on top: delivering better sex and doing away with the obligation to pick up the bill on dates, while women still get lower salaries and do the majority of the housework. The failure of the movement to deliver equal pay for women means men must have triumphed, he suggests—as if the economics of gender were no more than a giant set of scales. This not only misrepresents feminism’s aims, but does a sad disservice to men.

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The overpopulation myth

Fred Pearce — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:44:43 +0000

Many of today’s most-respected thinkers, from Stephen Hawking to David Attenborough, argue that our efforts to fight climate change and other environmental perils will all fail unless we “do something” about population growth. In the Universe in a Nutshell, Hawking declares that, “in the last 200 years, population growth has become exponential… The world population doubles every forty years.”

But this is nonsense. For a start, there is no exponential growth. In fact, population growth is slowing. For more than three decades now, the average number of babies being born to women in most of the world has been in decline. Globally, women today have half as many babies as their mothers did, mostly out of choice. They are doing it for their own good, the good of their families, and, if it helps the planet too, then so much the better.

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Jonathan Safran Foer on eating animals

Elizabeth Kirkwood — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:09:57 +0000

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of the novels Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Everything is Illuminated, which won the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award.

Eating Animals, his first extended work of non-fiction, is a powerful and disturbing look at the moral and environmental effects of factory farming and the devastating impact our dietary choices have, on both our health and the world around us. A combination of philosophy, science, memoir and reportage, the book examines the stories we tell ourselves to justify our eating habits and how such fictions can lull us into a brutal forgetting. The novelist JM Coetzee has said of Eating Animals: “Anyone who, after reading Foer’s book, continues to consume factory farm products must be without a heart, or impervious to reason, or both.”

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Stephen Collins’s monthly cartoon: tweaks on the iPad

Stephen Collins — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:56:50 +0000

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Cartoon: Small talk

Prospect — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:50:39 +0000

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Cartoon: The Lehman Brothers gang

Prospect — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:34:51 +0000

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Cartoon: Climate science

Prospect — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:30:24 +0000

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