I was at cocktail party last week when I heard the terrifying news. A notice in Scientific American reported that video games change brain chemistry. In a study conducted at the Cyclotron Unit of Hammersmith Hospital in London, Dr Paul Grasby and his fellow researchers determined that playing video games triggers the release of dopamine […]

Robert Kirby ONE MIRACLE IS NOT ENOUGH by Rex van Schalkwyk (Bellwether) About a quarter of the way through Rex van Schalkwyk’s very disquieting book I had moments of a curious temporal shift. So much of what I had been reading could well be the Kafkaesque testimony presented to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission of, […]

pull-out John Grobler Insurance companies operating in Namibia are threatening to pull out before the implementation of controversial legislation analysts say will spell the beginning of the end of Namibia’s market economy. The Long-Term Re-Insurance Act will require the companies to pay increasing amounts of their income on premiums to the government. Sanlam (Namibia) managing […]

off air Ferial Haffajee Just as viewers were starting to get used to presenter S’bu Khumalo doing his cool and chatty thing on Sunday nights, the long-awaited television arts programme, aRt, has been taken off air. aRt played out for the last time on Sunday night and will be replaced in October by a new […]

Swapna Prabhakaran The tale of Cato Manor has always been a tragedy – an old South African tale haunted by the horror of forced removals and the ghosts of families split asunder. Old men remember it with nostalgia as a once special place and a community which was crushed to nothing under the weight of […]

Stewart Dalby Spending it It used to be said that television would see an end to newspapers, but newspapers are still with us. Similarly, the computer was supposed to herald the paperless society. What use pens, then? In fact, pens are very much with us and vintage fountain pens are now highly valuable and collectable […]

Charl Blignaut `I’m a bit of a tart,” says Marianne Fassler as I settle against a plastic blow-up cushion embedded with pink flowers on a big old chair in her elegently kitsch Johannesburg lounge. “I think I know how to promote myself in the media. Put it this way, I’ve always had good press. But, […]

Iden Wetherell He is being compared to Britain’s combative wartime leader Winston Churchill in local media tributes which border on the hagiographical. But whether this proves to be President Robert Mugabe’s finest hour ultimately depends on the outcome of the war he is busy directing in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In a decision that […]

Alex Sudheim `Make sharp, the picture is on!” yells the usher to the throng of patrons still jostling for popcorn and cooldrinks around the kiosk. Behind him, the 400-seater cinema is packed to capacity as the enormous screen flickers into vivid life. Its a cold, rainy Sunday afternoon in a deserted and windswept Durban city […]

Ferial Haffajee Strike action in South Africa is on the increase – but it is fuelled less by party political tension and more by the shrinking economy. “This is not Cosatu [the Congress of South African Trade Unions] sending warnings to the [African National Congress/South African Communist Party/Cosatu] alliance. But the strikes are political if […]