Dan Hind, author of The Threat to Reason and the forthcoming The Return of the Public, has launched a renewed offensive against Britain's "absurdly" one-sided libel legislation for the Guardian's "Comment is Free" ...
Slavoj Zizek speaks to Liz Else for the New Scientist about Living in the End Times.
On ecological disaster:
If we are the bad guys, all we have to do is change our behaviour. But in fact nature is not a good Mother Nature, it’s a crazy bitch.
... we should alienate ourselves more from nature so we become aware of the utter contingency, the fragility of our natural being.
Avi Shlaim, author of Israel and Palestine, comments on the Middle East peace summit in Washington for the Guardian:
The pope, according to a no doubt apocryphal story, maintains that there are two possible solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict—the realistic and the miraculous. The realistic solution involves divine intervention; the miraculous solution involves a voluntary agreement between the parties themselves. The American-sponsored peace talks that got under way in Washington last week may be viewed in this light. It will take nothing less than a miracle to produce a peaceful settlement of the century-old conflict between Jews and Arabs over the Holy Land ...
Yet the possibility of a change of heart cannot be entirely ruled out. Maybe Netanyahu will surprise us all by moving on from the relentless rejectionism of the past to become a peacemaker. And maybe the pope will start smoking pot.
Visit the Guardian to read the article in full.
Brian Dillon reviews Slavoj Žižek's Living in the End Times for the Daily Telegraph:
Slavoj Žižek may well be the last great thinker of our time. In an era when lighting on one half-formed notion—"the end of history", "the third way", "Islamo-fascism"—is enough to get one hailed as a public intellectual to rival Russell or Sartre, the Slovenian philosopher puts all conceptual comers to shame...
In this RSA Animate, based on First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Slavoj Žižek investigates the surprising ethical implications of charitable giving.