We’ll get the first one out of the way early: Twenty-two men played. In the end, Germany won.
(Over Costa Rica, 4-2 just for the record and so anyone who pulls this post out of the archives years from now will have the context at hand.)
Predictions for Poland vs Ecuador?

Anyone taking Costa Rica tomorrow? For the sheer perversity?
Just wondering.

There is not much market for reviews of books published almost a decade and a half ago, so without further ado, my thoughts on The Prize, by Daniel Yergin. This evaluation is overdue because I started reading the book when I bought it, back in 1997. I put it down around page 400 (which is [...]

When I lived in Vienna, in 2001-2002, I lived in the 11th District, Simmering, a roughish working-class suburb struck through with railway lines and motorway spurs. Specifically, I lived in one of the four huge brick gasometers of the former city gasworks, once Europe’s biggest, now redeveloped as a mixture of shops, flats and a [...]

Her lies in the naturalisation process notwithstanding, it seems that, one way or another, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the controversial feminist, Islam critic, and former Dutch parlamentarian, will be able to retain her Dutch citizenship. If she still wants it.
Even though she had reportedly planned to move to the United States to work for the [...]

Krrrrushing the opposition in the Eurovision Song Contest!
Monster hard rock heavy metal zombie mask wearing whatever group Lordi from Finland dominated the contest, though some Russians think it’s a sign of European conspiracies against Russia. Like everything else in the world.
I used up my snark quota for this week already, so I don’t have anything [...]

No doubt the usual suspects will be hugely enjoying the claim by Austria’s hard-right interior minister Elisabeth (Liesl) Prokop that 45 per cent of Muslims are “unwilling to integrate”. In fact, it’s more than a claim - as well as rhetoric, she’s got a “study” to support her election positioning. Unfortunately, the study still isn’t [...]

Since the withdrawal of the CPE and the resulting collateral damage to Dominique de Villepin, not to mention Nicolas Sarkozy’s unexpected appearance as a unity figure at the height of the crisis, it’s rapidly being promulgated as conventional wisdom that France “is ungovernable”/refuses to “reform”/cannot be “reformed”. There is only one problem with this discourse, [...]

I suppose I should be happy that there is a recent, one-volume general history of the Hungarians. Their history is not exactly the stuff of bestsellers, even if Hungarians were crucial in everything from computers to the atomic bomb to Hollywood studios. Ten million people, give or take, speaking a non-Indo-European language in and around [...]

What to do when you haven’t finished a book but find yourself with something to say about it?
Convention dictates that one should finish a book before reviewing it (although I have my doubts about any number of published reviews), but on the other hand, The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes, was published 20 years ago; [...]