With the Eurovision Song Contest now completed for another year, it’s time for another international contest of intrigue, bargaining and frankly bizarre voting. In other words, the IOC today announced the shortlist of cities to host the 2012 Olympic Games.
Four European cities have made the shortlist: Paris, Madrid, London and Moscow, with New York the [...]

Well, the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest has ended with yet another country scoring a first ever victory - Ukraine. What seemed like several hours of voting ended with a rather comfortable victory for Ruslana’s Wild Dances in the end or, in simpler terms, the ex-Soviet block voting proved stronger than the Balkan block voting. The [...]

Further to my Eurovision piece yesterday, BBC News has an article about the costs of hosting the contest. Funding changes now mean that the host broadcaster doesn’t have to pay the full cost, with over 50% or more being paid for by the EBU, but Estonia spent it’s entire tourism budget for 2002 - $26million [...]

On Saturday night the people of Europe will come together. Gathered together around their television sets across the entire continent, they will jointly watch a broadcast from Istanbul that will highlight European culture, bring all the nations of the continent together in unity and show the vibrant, dynamic future of Europe.
Well, that’s the theory. In [...]

Crooked Timber goes from strength to strength, now adding John Holbo and Belle Waring to the masthead. (John & Belle will also continue to maintain their own blog.)
Kieran Healy notes that CT now has the numbers to field a rugby side. (He even provides a diagramme.) Down in the comments, Cryptic Ned asks:
When?s the [...]

Last year, reading around a bit to try to come to grips with Islamic terrorism, and the mindset that drives it, I read Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples. Published in 1998, it’s a bit of a seqel to Among the Believers, which was written in the wake of Iran’s revolution of 1979 [...]

I first read Primo Levi in 1963. I picked up a second-hand copy of If This is a Man, a Four Square paperback published for two shillings and sixpence and which cost me (as we used to say it) one and six. I still have the book - now falling apart - with that second-hand [...]

Yesterday I woke up and opened my front door to find a guy sitting on our garden wall playing a harmonica. Well, not in fact. Was it in a dream, then? No, not that either. It was a thought that just came into my head as I woke up and I lay there contemplating the [...]

This post is a follow-up to the one below on Hannah Arendt and the notion of the banality of evil. I fear, from one or two of the comments, that the reservations I expressed about her arguments may have led to misunderstanding. My point was certainly not to suggest that one shouldn’t try to understand [...]

[I'd like to start by thanking the Fistful of Euros team for inviting me to guest-blog here this week. I'm hoping to offer a mini-series on European thinkers, focusing on just an aspect of the ideas of the thinker I choose in each case. I say 'hoping to' because I still have to compose the [...]