In The News

This Is Not Only a French Crisis - All of Europe Must Heed the Flames

Timothy Garton Ash November 10, 2005
With urban insurrection raging from Normandy in the north to Marseille in the south, it is now impossible for the French to dismiss the country’s enormous demographic faultlines with appeals to republican greatness and unity. The riots revealed that France, the European country with the largest proportion of men and women of immigrant descent, faces a tremendous social and cultural crisis. In a...

In Vino Vilitas

Barbara Supp November 9, 2005
Once the rarefied realm of connoisseurs, the wine industry now must bend to the forces of the market and not the tastes of the palate. Europe, the birthplace of wine, can no longer rely on its continental sophistication and experience to control the wine market. Experts estimate that 2005 will be the first year in which wine imports into Europe will outnumber wine exports. Fearing the loss of...

You Shouldn't Have to Burn Cars to Get a Better Life—Ask My Bolivian Cleaning Lady

Niall Ferguson November 7, 2005
Both Britain and France have endured violence at the hands of their Muslim minorities in recent months: Britain in the July 7 London Underground attacks; France in the wave of nationwide rioting that has now gone on for more than a week. They need not endure such violence in the future. Their problem is not so much an excess of immigration as it is a lack of assimilation: the Muslim youths...

South Korea Locked in Movie Quota War

Barbara Demick November 2, 2005
The South Korean film industry is taking on Hollywood in a heated conflict over the number of foreign films that can be shown every year in South Korea. Filmmakers in South Korea are up in arms in response to what they consider inappropriate pressure to open the South Korean market to Hollywood productions. The issue centers on a government quota that requires South Korean films to be shown in...

Suburban Riots a Recurring Feature of French Life

Tom Heneghan (Reuters) November 2, 2005
The Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, wracked by days of clashes between Muslim immigrants and police, is far from unique. One of many such suburbs created by an influx of Arab and African immigrants in the 1960s and 1970s, the town suffers from the same social tensions simmering beneath the surface across France. France's Muslim immigrants live in low-income, high-crime slums from which...

Romancing the Globe

Ibsen Martinez November 1, 2005
Approximately 2 billion people around the world tune in on a regular basis to watch Latin American soap operas known as “telenovelas.” While Hollywood and the US television industry are often seen as the defining forces of cultural globalization, the success of telenovelas is a global phenomenon that is being celebrated as “reverse cultural imperialism.” The plotlines of telenovelas usually...

Attracting the Adults

Hicham Safieddine October 28, 2005
As the threat of terrorism, too often conflated with Islam itself, continues to dominate Western consciousness, it is instructive to note instances in which US, and Arab culture overlap. One such instance is the Arab television network MBC’s plan to popularize the classic US cartoon The Simpsons in Egypt. The idea of marketing The Simpsons to an Egyptian audience presupposes a certain shared...