Special report: ‘Myths of British ancestry’ by Stephen Oppenheimer | Prospect Magazine October 2006 issue 127
Never heard of this stuff. Wow.

Business Week published this while I was bicycling across Switzerland. But it’s not like anything reported in the article has changed in three or four weeks.
Bucharest rivals Bangalore for availability of exceptionally gifted programmers at rock-bottom prices

Is Romania really ready for the EU? asks Cristian Lupsa in the New Republic.

Terrific appreciation of Dmitri Shostakovich in the weekend FT (not this last weekend, of course, I’m a little behind on my reading) on the centenary of his birth:
The Fifth Symphony was a compromise that didn’t compromise. It was a squared circle. It was genius with a welcome mat. It made the Soviet state pigs feel [...]

The next anniiverssary guest post is by the funny and clever Michael Manske.
Border disputes between Slovenia and Croatia flare up with the regularity of teenage zits, and they’re about as equally exciting. The latest one to pop was in the swampy little Slovenian hamlet of Hotiza last week, when Croatian police arrested some Slovenian [...]

So, we have a new government, and Göran Persson is resigning as party leader. I ended up voting for the Center party, the most inoffensive of the rightwing parties. I was a little tempted to vote a blank ballot. I know this new government will do all kinds of bad things, and now I’ll be [...]

Romano Prodi, writing in Le Monde, claims that the European Union is inherently a left-of-center project. It’s an interesting claim–certainly one that Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl would probably dispute. But certainly the European institutions have changed since either of those Chancellors’ days, and a contemporary view might lend more strength to Prodi’s views and [...]

Our next anniversary guest post is written by the the great Jonathan Edelstein.
It’s starting to look like the season of referenda in the near abroad.
On September 17, less than a week from today, voters in the unrecognized republic of Transnistria, located between Moldova and Ukraine, will be asked to vote on whether to “renounce [their] [...]

This anniversary guest post is from the brilliant John Emerson.
“It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
`By thy long beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me ?…..
He holds him with his skinny hand,
`There was a ship,’ quoth he.
`Hold off ! unhand me, grey-beard loon !’….
(Coleridge, “The Ancient Mariner”)
“I alone have escaped [...]

This anniversary guest post was written by the indispensable Jérôme Guillet, who normally writes for The European Tribune.
Laurence Parisot, the head of MEDEF, the French business
organisation, recently complained that:

There is one word who meaning for the public has changed in the past 25 years: “reform”. It used to be synonymous with progress, and now it [...]