US engineer Martin Cooper holds the world’s first handheld cellular phone, which he invented in 1973, alongside his current mobile phone at a conference in Oviedo, Spain. The original allowed 35 minutes of talk time and weighed 1kg
Europe
Who really brought down the Berlin wall?
There was an undignified moment in November’s celebrations of the fall of the Berlin wall, when two Nobel peace laureates seemed poised for a full-scale war over who had been most influential in 1989. Talking to German magazine Der Spiegel, Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa downplayed Moscow’s role in the thaw and called Gorbachev a “weak politician”—leading the former leader of the USSR to denounce Walesa for wanting “a bigger slice off the pie.” (President Sarkozy, meanwhile, was busy scraping egg off his face as his claim to have been in Berlin on the big day turned out to be less than entirely accurate.)
The debate could have thundered on but, fortunately for all involved, clarification was at hand in the form of Daniel Johnson, editor of the British monthly Standpoint and, in 1989, foreign correspondent for the Telegraph. In a lengthy November cover story for his magazine, Johnson reveals that it was, in fact, him who brought down the wall. At least, he says, the question that he asked—“what will happen to the Berlin wall now?”—at the press conference on 9th November earned him, in the words of one author, “a measure of credit for bringing down the wall.” Strangely enough, several other journalists (including the German Peter Brinkmann and the Italian Riccardo Ehrman) have claimed that their questions, asked after a statement on free movement from the East German central committee, were more vital. But Johnson—who compared his role as an observer to TS Eliot’s in 1942—sets the record straight, pinpointing the failure to answer his query as “the moment when the cold war ended.”
By a remarkable coincidence, Prospect’s own editor David Goodhart was also in East Berlin that night—although his rather more unworldly location was a conference on rock music promotion hosted by East Germany’s culture ministry. As he explains on Prospect’s blog, this meant that “I am the only British journalist who witnessed that great evening in the company of pony-tailed American pop music impresarios.” Not quite the hand of history—but a striking image nonetheless.
International
Zimbabwe’s unlikely economic turnaround
This autumn, Zimbabwe’s central statistical office announced that monthly inflation had declined to less than half a percent, down from 1 per cent earlier this year—and from 231,000,000 per cent last July. What caused so remarkable a turnaround? The bland official line was that this was largely due to the lower cost of food and non-alcoholic drinks—although the government’s decision to legalise foreign currencies also helped, as did the IMF’s promise of a $400m loan. But is it all too good to be true? President Mugabe has been striking a more conciliatory tone of late, and spoke out this October in favour of “fresh, friendly and co-operative relations with all those countries that have been hostile to us in the past.” Judging by the recent arrest of five student leaders for daring to say that “Mugabe is the major outstanding issue that is stalling progress” however, Zimbabwe’s return to the bosom of the international community still has some way to go.
Science
Cambridge spat makes waves in particle physics
Disputes in the glamorous world of physics are generally notable for how few people can understand them. Take the recent grumbling about the election of renowned string theorist Michael Green as Lucasian professor at Cambridge—a post previously held by Stephen Hawking and Isaac Newton. The Lucasian is officially a professorship in mathematics. Here Green is a sound choice: few disciplines are more mathematically arcane than string theory. Some physicists, however, worry that the field is little more than a theoretical cul-de-sac unjustly hogging research funding and public attention. Sceptics include physicist and blogger Peter Woit (whose blog argues that there is “absolutely no evidence” for string theory) and Lee Smolin, author of The Problem with Physics (the problem being, naturally, strings). Could Woit’s somewhat grudging congratulations to Green be partly attributable to his own lack of tenure at Columbia University? Perhaps physics spats are easy to understand after all.
Sport
Why Fifa leads the world in shamelessness
In a recent interview with the Italian paper Gazzetta dello Sport, Sepp Blatter, the president of Fifa, put his cards on the table: “I have not finished my mission in soccer, I need more time. I hope that in 2011 the Fifa congress has further faith in me, otherwise I’ll go back to my village.” This quaint deprecation, writes David Goldblatt, masks his intention to run for a fourth consecutive term as the head of global football. Not even Vladimir Putin could engineer his way to such an extended stay in power, but then the Russian constitution has term–limits and Fifa’s does not. In fact, Fifa has almost no mechanism that encourages transparency or accountability. If Blatter wins, expect the tradition of unashamed authoritarianism to continue. There is good news, though. Blatter must fear a challenge and is getting his retaliation in early; with two world cup tournaments (in 2018 and 2022) to hand out over the next year, it’s a good time to find out who your friends are. Let’s hope that someone plausible is prepared to take him on, and even to keep him honest.
History
Bad historians beware: the truth is out there
This October, inspired by the Guardian’s “bad science” column, Times Higher Education magazine decided to strike a blow for truth-lovers with the nation’s first “bad history” column, written by members of the History & Policy Network. No longer can lazy politicians or cliché-loving hacks slip on their rose-tinted spectacles and moan that things ain’t what they used to be: the professionals are coming. And some cherished British canards have already been hunted down.
How supine, for instance, are today’s MPs? Not very, actually, compared to 50 years ago, when it was possible for two entire years to pass without a single government MP rebelling—unheard of in the supposedly conformist present. Postwar social mobility, too, comes in for a beating, given that less than 20 per cent of manual workers’ children got into grammar schools in the 1950s and 1960s. Even the decline of the family isn’t safe from scrutiny, with the news that there were as many impoverished lone mothers in Britain in the 1880s as there were in the 1980s—the kind of detail that leaves “broken Britain” looking rather harder to blame on the Blair years.
Environment
A new hate for the right
One unexpected outcome of last issue’s supplement on the Copenhagen climate conference was, Prospect learns, a hate campaign of impressive vigour against contributor Alex Renton for his piece on “the human time bomb” of population. Thanks to the blogging vigour of the American right, the claim that Renton has “declared war on the human race” had, at the time of writing, earned more than 1,000 Google hits, while his desire to “cull the developed world” came close to 10,000.
Europe
Who really brought down the Berlin wall?
There was an undignified moment in November’s celebrations of the fall of the Berlin wall, when two Nobel peace laureates seemed poised for a full-scale war over who had been most influential in 1989. Talking to German magazine Der Spiegel, Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa downplayed Moscow’s role in the thaw and called Gorbachev a “weak politician”—leading the former leader of the USSR to denounce Walesa for wanting “a bigger slice off the pie.” (President Sarkozy, meanwhile, was busy scraping egg off his face as his claim to have been in Berlin on the big day turned out to be less than entirely accurate.)
The debate could have thundered on but, fortunately for all involved, clarification was at hand in the form of Daniel Johnson, editor of the British monthly Standpoint and, in 1989, foreign correspondent for the Telegraph. In a lengthy November cover story for his magazine, Johnson reveals that it was, in fact, him who brought down the wall. At least, he says, the question that he asked—“what will happen to the Berlin wall now?”—at the press conference on 9th November earned him, in the words of one author, “a measure of credit for bringing down the wall.” Strangely enough, several other journalists (including the German Peter Brinkmann and the Italian Riccardo Ehrman) have claimed that their questions, asked after a statement on free movement from the East German central committee, were more vital. But Johnson—who compared his role as an observer to TS Eliot’s in 1942—sets the record straight, pinpointing the failure to answer his query as “the moment when the cold war ended.”
By a remarkable coincidence, Prospect’s own editor David Goodhart was also in East Berlin that night—although his rather more unworldly location was a conference on rock music promotion hosted by East Germany’s culture ministry. As he explains on Prospect’s blog, this meant that “I am the only British journalist who witnessed that great evening in the company of pony-tailed American pop music impresarios.” Not quite the hand of history—but a striking image nonetheless.
International
Zimbabwe’s unlikely economic turnaround
This autumn, Zimbabwe’s central statistical office announced that monthly inflation had declined to less than half a percent, down from 1 per cent earlier this year—and from 231,000,000 per cent last July. What caused so remarkable a turnaround? The bland official line was that this was largely due to the lower cost of food and non-alcoholic drinks—although the government’s decision to legalise foreign currencies also helped, as did the IMF’s promise of a $400m loan. But is it all too good to be true? President Mugabe has been striking a more conciliatory tone of late, and spoke out this October in favour of “fresh, friendly and co-operative relations with all those countries that have been hostile to us in the past.” Judging by the recent arrest of five student leaders for daring to say that “Mugabe is the major outstanding issue that is stalling progress” however, Zimbabwe’s return to the bosom of the international community still has some way to go.
Science
Cambridge spat makes waves in particle physics
Disputes in the glamorous world of physics are generally notable for how few people can understand them. Take the recent grumbling about the election of renowned string theorist Michael Green as Lucasian professor at Cambridge—a post previously held by Stephen Hawking and Isaac Newton. The Lucasian is officially a professorship in mathematics. Here Green is a sound choice: few disciplines are more mathematically arcane than string theory. Some physicists, however, worry that the field is little more than a theoretical cul-de-sac unjustly hogging research funding and public attention. Sceptics include physicist and blogger Peter Woit (whose blog argues that there is “absolutely no evidence” for string theory) and Lee Smolin, author of The Problem with Physics (the problem being, naturally, strings). Could Woit’s somewhat grudging congratulations to Green be partly attributable to his own lack of tenure at Columbia University? Perhaps physics spats are easy to understand after all.
Sport
Why Fifa leads the world in shamelessness
In a recent interview with the Italian paper Gazzetta dello Sport, Sepp Blatter, the president of Fifa, put his cards on the table: “I have not finished my mission in soccer, I need more time. I hope that in 2011 the Fifa congress has further faith in me, otherwise I’ll go back to my village.” This quaint deprecation, writes David Goldblatt, masks his intention to run for a fourth consecutive term as the head of global football. Not even Vladimir Putin could engineer his way to such an extended stay in power, but then the Russian constitution has term–limits and Fifa’s does not. In fact, Fifa has almost no mechanism that encourages transparency or accountability. If Blatter wins, expect the tradition of unashamed authoritarianism to continue. There is good news, though. Blatter must fear a challenge and is getting his retaliation in early; with two world cup tournaments (in 2018 and 2022) to hand out over the next year, it’s a good time to find out who your friends are. Let’s hope that someone plausible is prepared to take him on, and even to keep him honest.
History
Bad historians beware: the truth is out there
This October, inspired by the Guardian’s “bad science” column, Times Higher Education magazine decided to strike a blow for truth-lovers with the nation’s first “bad history” column, written by members of the History & Policy Network. No longer can lazy politicians or cliché-loving hacks slip on their rose-tinted spectacles and moan that things ain’t what they used to be: the professionals are coming. And some cherished British canards have already been hunted down.
How supine, for instance, are today’s MPs? Not very, actually, compared to 50 years ago, when it was possible for two entire years to pass without a single government MP rebelling—unheard of in the supposedly conformist present. Postwar social mobility, too, comes in for a beating, given that less than 20 per cent of manual workers’ children got into grammar schools in the 1950s and 1960s. Even the decline of the family isn’t safe from scrutiny, with the news that there were as many impoverished lone mothers in Britain in the 1880s as there were in the 1980s—the kind of detail that leaves “broken Britain” looking rather harder to blame on the Blair years.
Environment
A new hate for the right
One unexpected outcome of last issue’s supplement on the Copenhagen climate conference was, Prospect learns, a hate campaign of impressive vigour against contributor Alex Renton for his piece on “the human time bomb” of population. Thanks to the blogging vigour of the American right, the claim that Renton has “declared war on the human race” had, at the time of writing, earned more than 1,000 Google hits, while his desire to “cull the developed world” came close to 10,000.
