My Favourite Periodical:


30th June:

"A bite at Apple

SIR – I disagree with your paean to Steve Jobs (“The third act”, June 9th). Fed up with PCs, Microsoft and viruses, I switched to Apple a couple of years ago. My experience to date: an Apple PowerBook screen that is on the blink, a defective Mac desktop screen, a faulty iBook laptop motherboard, and three dead iPods. I admire their software, but Apple's hardware is appalling. The only protection is buying expensive insurance known as AppleCare. Innovation, yes. Quality, no. Customer care, forget it.

Raj Merchant
Morristown, New Jersey"

"In the speech Mr Hu said that, over the three decades since China began its “reform and opening up”, changes to China's political structure had proceeded in an “active and prudent way”. More accurately, they have been practically non-existent."

"The quest for higher royalties may actually be doing record labels more harm than good. People generally do not buy music unless they have already heard it. Internet radio makes it easy to zero in on a preferred genre, so listeners are more likely to discover music they would want to buy. Many online stations even provide links to online music stores—free of charge."

[On a politically correct form of religious tolerance] "How far is it really possible for people who disagree about a matter to which they ascribe supreme importance to admire one another's integrity and rigour? That question may be easier to answer in music than it is in prose."


July 7th:

"In Bangladesh, households are often asked to pay something towards the filters that strip their water of arsenic. These charges are not mean-spirited. They aim instead to turn victims into proprietors. A financial contribution is proof of a household's commitment to a scheme, which helps to ensure a filter's upkeep. Halima paid 300 takas ($4.30) for her filter. Now she wouldn't part with it for 5,000."

"Experts such as Joseph Dwyer of Management Sciences for Health, an American consultancy, say that the pitiful state of poor countries' health services is the main reason for the gap between what is promised and what is spent. Julian Schweitzer of the World Bank says that physical and human shortages in local health services represent “a huge bottleneck to aid”. Now the aid bonanza may be making things worse. Jordan Kassalow of the Scojo Foundation, an American charity, observes that rich single-issue outfits tend to divert the best medical talent to trendy causes and away from basic medicine against diarrhoea and respiratory infections—the chief killers of children."

"Dr Kassalow's charity trains local entrepreneurs to do simple eye tests. It makes spectacles for $1 and sells them for $2. The franchise-holders sell them for $3. Profitability means sustainability, he argues; Western-style training offers higher-quality care in theory—but is too expensive in practice. What poor countries need is lots of people, trained flexibly and quickly, at lower levels of skill, he says. Workers trained this way are more likely to stay in the villages where they are needed."

"He meets an angry café owner who rails at the widespread corruption. Still angry, he goes on to say that there is a word for what the Chinese must do. Mr Gifford expects him to say “revolution”. Instead, he spits out “endure”. He has, Mr Gifford observes, “summed up thousands of years of Chinese history.”"

"Mr Del Pino... knows how filthy the toilets are, because he checks personally. “I started as a young civil engineer building bridges—now I clean toilets at Heathrow,” he reflects."


[On Liz Claiborne] "Almost every woman knows the feeling. You get into the lift, and a very important woman in your office enters after you, talking to a very important man. She is impeccable, from polished court shoes to understated earrings. You are not. You are wearing trainers, because you want to be comfortable on city pavements, and a blouse that doesn't quite match the skirt because the one that matched better was too grubby round the neck when you went to find it. Nothing is ironed, and there is a faint stain on the skirt that is yesterday's lunchtime soup ineffectually rubbed off with a Kleenex.

The very important woman glances at you, from the feet upwards. Her lip curls almost imperceptibly. She looks away. You wish that you might become a vapour, and leak away through the lift walls...

She had taught women to be sassy and sporty in a man's world; though nothing would ever stop them, among themselves, eyeing each other most disparagingly up and down."


July 14th:

"As well as war fantasies, there is sometimes also a dose of sexual wish-fulfilment. A video recording by a Kuwaiti ideologue, Hamid al-Ali, declares that a martyr in the cause of jihad goes to paradise to enjoy delicious food, drink and a wife who will “astonish your mind” and much else besides; her vagina, apparently, “never complains about how much sex she had”, and she reverts back to being a virgin."

"Mr Sinn's new work is a thoroughly updated English-language version of a German book that has gone through no fewer than 11 editions. Not for nothing is Angst a German word."

"Moreover, much of Germany's renewed vigour reflects stringent control of real wages, which has secured a fall in unit labour costs when they have been rising elsewhere. Yet merely squeezing pay to gain competitiveness is not a long-term solution."


July 21:

"Sir Michael sees himself as the father of PNG's independence—he has even put himself on the 50-kina banknote. He argues that, given its natural and historical handicaps, the country cannot develop at the speed that outsiders expect of it. He talks with pride of being a “great chief” in his home village. His people there rely on him to provide for all their needs. In return they offer their loyalty. Likewise in the country as a whole: the Westminster system has been “adapted” to local traditions, so members of parliament are given state money to distribute as they see fit in their home districts. Outsiders who call this corruption or patronage-politics “don't understand our culture.”"

"The American government has earmarked scores of millions of dollars to help Iranian “civil society” and pro-democracy groups. But reformers inside the country dare not touch this money. Ebrahim Yazdi, leader of the Freedom Movement, which supported the revolution but is now a courageous voice for democracy, says that such programmes merely give the authorities an excuse to “intensify the repression”. The government cites these American funds as proof that the United States is plotting its overthrow. Fearing (or claiming to fear) that America is fomenting a “velvet” revolution, it has used them to justify its arrest of foreign visitors. In recent months almost all contacts between “civil society” and the West have fallen under real or manufactured suspicion... The more that outsiders meddle, the deeper the regime digs in. Better to let the country find its own way towards democracy, the reformers say. But can the world afford to leave Iran to its own devices? If they are nuclear devices, perhaps not."

"“I pray to God that I will never know about economics,” President Ahmadinejad once said when questioned about apparent contradictions in his economic policy."

"Perhaps Brussels should accept its fate as an international city, and switch to English, like some European Singapore (although with waffles, frites and dirty streets)?"

"As is often the way, an external threat is a uniting influence. But now the multiregionalists have been seen off, the “Out of Africa” winners can join battle among themselves."

[On a book on the Great Depression] "Like some of the best James Bond films, the villain of her story was in a wheelchair: Franklin Roosevelt."

[On Lady Bird Johnson] "She knew he was a handful at first sight: lanky and good-looking, impossibly full of himself and his political ambitions, bossing her about from the first date onwards, rushing her so precipitately into marriage in November 1934 that they had neither a proper ring nor flowers. But he gave her “a queer sort of moth-and-flame feeling”, so she followed. The orders continued: to bring him breakfast in bed, to have a hot meal ready whenever he and his congressional cronies came home, to serve him seconds instantly (“Bird, bring me another piece of pie!”). A snap of his fingers, and she would run across the room. A public dressing down for her dowdiness and shyness (“Bird, why can't you look nice, like Connie here?”), and she would take it on the chin."