Karlin Lillington For most earthlings, just finding a hotel with Internet access is a challenge. Nasa, however, thinks big. The space agency intends to have Mars “Internet-enabled” in the next three to four years. Last week at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Dr Vinton Cerf, a senior vice-president at telecom company MCI, joined […]
Ron Sakolsky is an academic, journalist and activist whose main interest is the cultural politics of music. He’s not a serious musician although he “dabbles” in several instruments. Sakolsky is visiting South Africa until the end of the year. While he is here he plans to interview Mzwakhe Mbuli in jail to talk about his […]
With the controversy surrounding Mark Hipper’s portraits of naked children still simmering, Fiona MacCarthy reports on an exhibition of Lewis Carroll’s photographs of little girls Xie Kitchin, little girl photographed as a pert Chinaman, perched in skimpy silk kimono on a pyramid of tea boxes. Alice Liddell dressed up as a small beggarmaid, rags falling […]
No child has ever fallen in love with reading from being given a textbook, argues Jay Heale It is well known that there is a crisis in education in this country. But there is one aspect of this agonising situation which seems to have been overlooked. We are so anxious to teach children how to […]
Digby Ricci THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION by Gore Vidal (Knopf) One hates to bow to conventional wisdom, but Gore Vidal really is a far better essayist than he is a novelist. In his essays, the erudition is elegantly startling, but never obtrusive, and the much-vaunted “mordant wit” is a rapier, not a bludgeon. Thus, Susan Sontag’s […]
Robert Kirby: Loose cannon I have it on the best authority that Monica Lewinsky is actually what is known in the espionage business as a “high-grade deep mole”. In truth Monica works for Saddam Hussein who personally coached her in the finer points of presidential seduction. The entire oval office sexual farrago is a brilliantly […]
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s President, Laurent Kabila, is pondering a future as obscure as his past not because of his evident lack of administrative talent, his taste for the good life or the minimal support of his fellow citizens. Instead, consider a broadcast on Congolese state radio last week: “People must bring a machete, […]
Mail & Guardian reporters The Natal High Court handed down a landmark judgment in favour of press freedom last week when it denied an application by the Inkatha Freedom Party to gag the Mail & Guardian. The IFP launched a two-pronged attack on the newspaper last week, applying to the court to stop the M&G […]
William Boot A secret commission of inquiry into the collapse of Namibia’s copper mining industry wrapped up its proceedings in Windhoek this week and is expected to move on to Johannesburg. It was established to investigate the role of Goldfields SA, owner of the Tsumeb Corporation Limited (TCL), in the closure of all four of […]
stars – the friends and enemies Colette The woman who owns the theatre [where Sartre’s play, Dirty Hands, was being staged], an ex-beautiful woman, a dreadful whore, having slept with thousands of men, took us to her home for dinner. The dinner was strange and wonderful: Arabian dishes, because she was once the mistress of […]