Daily Archives: February 6, 2013

A sea of Seuss hats at an event at the Library of Congress in 2010.

A sea of Seuss hats at an event at the Library of Congress in 2010.

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Myanmar pro-Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi presided over the country's first international literary festival over the weekend. The Irrawaddy Literary Festival in Rangoon featured such international authors as Vikram Seth and William Dalrymple, along with around 80 Myanmarese writers, most of whom have not been translated into English. The festival comes as Myanmar (also known as Burma) begins to relax its censorship laws.

"All over Dr. Seuss's beloved children's books, his characters sport distinctive, colorful headwear unless they are the kinds of creatures that have it sprouting naturally from their heads in tufted, multitiered and majestically flowing formations." The New York Times, in honor of an exhibit of Seussian headgear opening today at the New York Public Library.

NFL players re-imagined as Dickens characters, from McSweeney's: Otis Grigsby "maintains a cheerful outlook on life despite being much afflicted by gout, baldness, and an old harpoon injury."

In a profile of the French spy novelist Gerard de Villiers, New York Times writer and Middle East expert Robert F. Worth makes the surprising assertion that the Lockerbie bombing was carried out by Iran and not by Libya, and quotes a CIA official who says "the best intelligence" points to the Iranians. This has been something of an unconfirmed conspiracy theory for years.

Jared Diamond, the popular anthropologist with an endearingly apparent comb-over and a tendency toward overgeneralization, is in trouble with the indigenous rights group Survival International because of his new book The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Director Stephen Corry wrote, "Describing tribal peoples as more violent than industrialized societies sounds much like the arguments put forward by missionaries, explorers and colonial governments from the 16th century onward."

Ernest Hemingway's garden gate is up for auction.

The Most Important Books Coming Out This Week:

See the rest here:
Book News: Myanmar Celebrates As Censorship Recedes; And Oh Those Seussian Hats

By Jonathan Earle

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: February 6, 2013 (Issue # 1745)

MOSCOW Thegovernments plans toprotect children fromharmful online content are causing increasing alarm among anti-censorship activists, who see one regions plans tointroduce asmut-free version ofthe Internet as thelatest move tobanish distasteful speech.

Details ofthe Kostroma regions plan, which appeared inthe media last week, sparked talk ofa white list toaccompany thefederal governments existing blacklist ofwebsites that are deemed tocontain extremist information or child pornography, or to promote bad behavior.

Theplan would give net denizens inKostroma, amostly rural region about 190 kilometers northeast ofMoscow, theoption between using theexisting Internet, with all its dangerous andunsavory corners, anda clean version, consisting ofhundreds ofthousands ofinoffensive websites.

Anon-governmental organization called theSafe Internet League, which has close links toboth theKremlin andthe Russian Orthodox Church, has already picked 400,000 websites safe forchildren, andthe number is growing, theKostroma regional administration said Wednesday ina statement.

News reports quoting theleagues acting director, Denis Davydov, as saying that astrict parental control option would be thedefault, meaning that users would have toopt out rather than in, quickly sent bloggers andfree-speech activists intoa frenzy.

Connectivity advocate Matvei Alexeyev said theinitiative was probably illegal Article 29 ofthe Constitution guarantees theright tofreely seek, receive, transmit, produce anddistribute information byany legal way not tomention technically unfeasible.

There are more than 633 million websites inthe world, according toa recent estimate, Alexeyev wrote Friday ina blog post onEkho Moskvys website. When will thesite-by-site check be finished? In200 years?

The rest is here:
Child-Safe Internet Plan Sparks Censorship Fears

NY-NJ-Metro Thursday 02/21/2013 and 02/22/2013 Conference on Ukraine and Media - Columbia University

International Conference Braking News: Censorship, Media, and Ukraine

February 21 and 22nd, 2013

Columbia University

The Ukrainian Studies Program, Harriman Institute at Columbia University is organizing a conference entitled Braking News: Censorship, Media, and Ukraine to be held in New York City February 21 and 22, 2013. The conference will gather the worlds top analysts on Ukrainian media at Columbia for two days to examine the contemporary state and functioning of Ukrainian media. These experts will discuss how media operate in Ukraine what they contain and how they are sustained.

Braking News: Censorship, Media, and Ukraine will consist of a keynote address, two panels, one roundtable discussion and a film presentation. The conference, which will be open to the public, will commence on Thursday, February 21, 2013 at 7PM with a keynote address by Andriy Kulykov entitled Ukrainian Media: Old Pressures, New Challenges which will be followed by a reception. Friday, February 22nd will feature two panels and a roundtable made up of an international gathering of scholars, as well as practitioners, of Ukrainian media. The first panel, entitled The Media, the Market, and Democracy: Ukraine in a Global Context, will explore the relationship between market forces and how Ukraines media operate in a global environment. It will look at issues such as ownership structures, global media convergence, trends towards infotainment, how this affects media content, journalistic standards, and the process of democracy more broadly.

The second panel, Media Discourse, Ideology, and Discrimination will examine the ideological dimension of Ukrainian media discourse, paying particular attention to the representations of language, historical memory, ethnicity, race and sexual orientation. It will analyze both the unchallenged reproduction and fierce contestation of identity, legitimacy and normality and these processes' contribution to social inequality and discrimination. The roundtable will be a discussion between representatives of the worlds leading news sources on Ukraine about reporting on Ukraine in the West and Ukraines presence in Western media. The conference will conclude with a presentation by Yuri Shevchuk of a 2011 Serhii Bukovsky film entitled Ukraine: When the Countdown Began.

Among those who will be participating in the conference are: Mark Andryczyk, Niklas Bernsand, Brian Bonner, Maksym Butkevych, Tanya Domi, Marta Dyczok, Anastasiia Grynko, Myroslava Gongadze, Matthew Kaminski, Volodymyr Kulyk, Andriy Kulykov, Alexander Motyl, Natalya Ryabinska, Yuri Shevchuk, Olena Tregub and Andrew Yurkovsky.

The conference is free and open to the public. For more information contact Dr. Mark Andryczyk at 212-854-4679 or ma2634@columbia.edu.

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

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International Conference ‘Braking’ News: Censorship, Media, and Ukraine