What The World is Reading

Struggles: The New Yorker

In “The Wretched of the Earth”, Frantz Fanon wrote that “the last battle of the colonised against the coloniser will often be the fight of the colonised against each other”, and to watch “the intertwined agonies of South Africa and Zimbabwe today” is to see what he meant. Philip Gourevitch describes the “sinister solidarity” between Thabo Mbeki and Robert Mugabe, as South Africa continues to strenuously deny Mugabe’s systematic terrorising of his people. And yet, American ambassador James McGee continues to document Mugabe’s worst excesses, operating as though America’s standing on these matters weren’t tainted by Abu Ghraib, water boarding and its own extensive record on torture.

Economy: Why it’s worse than you think: Newsweek

Despite all the optimists predicting that the American recession will be short-lived and tomorrow will be better, it probably won’t. Though the US economy can survive bubbles, bad debt rut is harder to climb out of. The housing and credit crisis, rising energy and food costs have worsened in recent months and the battered financial system is less responsive to stimulus efforts. What’s worse, the future seems to be powered by China, and Russia, and Dubai and Mumbai. “It’s as though we’re home watching reruns while everybody else is out partying”.

Violence on the Left: Dissent

Political philosopher and longtime India-watcher Martha Nussbaum takes off from the communists of West Bengal after Nandigram and Singur to examine the knot at the heart of all Leftist political movements of the 20th century: “is solidarity itself a major political value or is the basic value that of justice to each and every person, treating each and every one as an end?”

How the web was won: Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair does a fascinating recap of Internet pioneers, “a history of the Internet in the words of the people who made it”. From concept to creation, the commercial web, the browser wars, the boom and bust of the dotcom era, the “modern times” of Google and Facebook and finally, a rather vague “last word”, the piece chronicles the eureka moments, the debates and the excitement that surrounded every step.

And finally, here are some of memes circulating around the American election trail this week:

• Rebecca Traister at Salon wants to remember Hillary Clinton as “a pain in the ass, sometimes ill-behaved, and a woman who changed history”.

• Slate makes us wonder if Hillary’s loss is, secretly, Bill’s gain, if her presidency would have scuttled his business relationships and the Clinton Foundation.

• German magazine Die Tageszeitung puts its foot in it with a piece entitled “Uncle Barack’s cabin” and prompting the eternal question — satirical or tasteless?

• Jon Stewart on the Daily Show sends up the TV punditocracy circa Dec 2007, confidently predicting that Clinton would “crush Obama” “crush Obama” “crush Obama”.

•And the mood-killer of the week is New York magazine, which says, “I’m not sure we totally can,” outlining 10 November scenarios that can sink Obama.