The New York Times has a bittersweet piece today about a smoking ban in France which has been expanded to include cafés: “Even France, Haven of Smokers, Is Clearing the Air.” The ban, “following the spread of Starbucks and the election of pro-American, fitness-friendly President Nicolas Sarkozy,” has occasioned a small identity-crisis for café-wallflowers and everyday French (there are 12 million French smokers). To many, the coffee-and-cigarette combo is an important communal ritual, the way NFL Sunday and religion are for Americans. The Times piece is accompanied by a terrific, five-minute video showing café-owners and patrons decrying the nanny-state—“we want to live, we want to have fun . . . they’re taking that pleasure away from us,”—while engaging in another French pastime: nostalgic self-regard. Like I said, it’s bittersweet.

There’s been a huge amount of talk this election season about the potential impact Youtube might have on the election specifically and on our political life in general. While that impact remains unclear, what is certain is that Youtube has made it more or less impossible for candidates to escape moments like these. And for that, we should all be thankful.

1. John McCain sings!

2. Larry Craig denies!

3. Karl Rove rocks the mike!

4. Rudy’s wife calls!

5. John Edwards primps!

6. Hillary gets patriotic!

7. Here’s one from across the pond: Sarkozy stumbles!

8. Andrew Young “clowns”!

9. Mitt Romney misidentifies!

In our December interview with Terry Teachout, the veteran contributor to COMMENTARY and horizon regular discusses the New York Philharmonic’s trip to North Korea and Peter Gay’s new book Modernism: The Lure of Heresy. He also takes readers on an absorbing outing to New York City’s historic Knoedler & Company, one of Manhattan’s premiere art galleries, to explore a show of paintings by the late Jules Olitski, one of the founders of the Color Field movement in American abstraction (and a longtime subscriber to COMMENTARY).

This coming Sunday afternoon, Ron Paul supporters, hot off their $4.3 million dollar “money bomb” fundraising effort in November, are holding a Boston Tea Party-themed rally at Boston’s Faneuil Hall.

The event is getting attention not only from Paul’s passionate online community, whose campaign videos touting the event (here, here, and here) portend a $12 million dollar plus quarter for Paul, but also from ABC news for the theatrics his supporters have in store:

Overhead during the tea party, an enormous, helium-filled blimp that supporters independently banded together, circumventing current election law, to buy and float to Boston from North Carolina will implore New Englanders to “Google Ron Paul.”

But how can they afford to do this, given FEC limits on PAC fund-raising? Paul supporters, unaffiliated with the campaign, have found an ingenious way of getting around federal election laws and are, perhaps, setting a precedent for future circuses. The ABC report continues:

Instead of forming a Political Action Committee that operates much like a campaign with fund-raising limits, the people behind the blimp, [are] incorporating an actual company, a limited liability corporation, instead of a PAC, through which to sell stakes in the blimp lease to supporters.

Given their unorthodox fund-raising tactics, viral video blitzes, and poll-jamming, it’s unsurprising that Paul’s backers have come up with even more circuitous ways of supporting their candidate and getting his message out. And although Paul is nowhere in Iowa—the latest polls have him topping out at 4.4 percent—his supporters are showing that backwards fund-raising legislation can, and should, be circumvented by entrepreneurial thinking.

The inimitable Charles Johnson over at Little Green Footballs links to an interview between Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch Parliamentarian, AEI scholar, and critic of Islam.

Their conversation, in two segments, itemizes some of the chief difficulties Islam faces in reconciling itself to modernity—mostly resulting from Islam’s literal approach to scripture. Hirsi Ali points out that a distinction between Islamic beliefs and the rights of individual Muslims, as well as economic liberalization, are both prerequisites of an Islamic Reformation.

She has cutting words for the practice of child marriage—such as the Ayatollah Khomeini’s marriage to a nine year old. And she boldly indicts the Council on American Islamic Relations. When Zakaria describes the thesis of Dinesh D’Souza’s book, The Enemy at Home, which proposes an alliance between conservative Muslims and Americans alienated by a permissive culture, Hirsi Ali whispers: “Oh, God.”

Watch.

On Tuesday afternoon, Max Boot sat down with contentions to discuss his recent trip to Saudi Arabia, the controversial National Intelligence Estimate, and the progress being made in Iraq. Included is a brief tour of the Harold Pratt House, occupied by the Council on Foreign Relations.

An interview with the editor of National Review about his recent trip to Iraq, the case for bombing Iran, Ron Paul, and more.

Four members of the “cultural guerrilla” cell Untergunther were exonerated in Paris on Friday for breaking into the Panthéon after-hours to repair the building’s antique, non-functioning central clock. Folk heroes in France, these cultural guerrillas-cum-conservationists share a love of French heritage and ambivalence towards French bureaucracy. As the group captain on the Panthéon project put it: “we would like to be able to replace the state in the areas it is incompetent . . . but our means are limited and we can only do a fraction of what needs to be done. There’s so much to do in Paris that we won’t manage in our lifetime.”

French authorities last stumbled upon the Untergunther’s trail in 2004, when an underground movie theater was discovered under the 16th arrondissement, containing a skull tableaux evocative of Le Théâtre du Grand Guignol.

The Untergunther spent two years in a secret workshop under the Panthéon’s famed neo-classical dome, tinkering on wooden benches and makeshift computers. The group’s expert clockmakers labored in the dead of night under the noses of sleepy watchmen, eventually reanimating the clock.

France’s Centre of National Monuments took spurious legal action when the group came forward, but little came of their attempt to deflect attention from inept security protocols at one of Paris’s cultural jewels. It’s comforting to know that at least some people in Old Europe are keeping time.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a fascinating piece about the board game Monopoly’s usefulness during World War II. The game, apparently, was used by British intelligence to smuggle real currency, maps, metal files, compasses, and other implements to POWs via Red Cross shipments. Soldiers were told to “look out for the special editions, identified by a red dot in the Free Parking space.” This ingenious tactic was used during the cold war as well. Of course, Monopoly had to be swapped out for more culturally appropriate Eastern-bloc variations, such as the Soviet classic “Manage.”

Gordon G. Chang is a regular contributor to contentions and the author, most recently, of “How China and Russia Threaten the World,” from the June issue of COMMENTARY. Chang has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Weekly Standard, and has advised the National Intelligence Council, Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the Pentagon. He has also served two terms as a trustee of Cornell University, his alma mater. Contentions interviewed Chang at our offices in New York City. We discuss American policy towards Taiwan, Beijing’s Olympics, capital punishment in China, and more.

Chang’s newest book, Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes on the World, is available from Random House.

Michael J. Lewis is a professor of art at Williams College and a contributor to the horizon, the arts blog of COMMENTARY. He is the author of American Art and Architecture, a recently published survey of American art history and examination of our nation’s distinct architectural heritage. He published Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind, a study of the Victorian style in American architecture, in 2001, and received the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award in 1994 for The Politics of the German Gothic Revival: August Rechensperger—a critical study of the German architect.

In our interview, Lewis touches on his fascination with the “American empirical” tradition in the arts, the uninspiring and confused proposed designs for a World Trade Center memorial, the bad effects of U.S. News rankings on college students, and the spectacular contribution of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to American architecture: New York City’s Seagram building.

Terry Teachout discusses his essay in the October issue of Commentary “Beyond the Musical Avant Garde”, Claire Danes as Eliza Doolittle, the Japanese lithographer Toko Shinoda, and more.

Fred Siegel, a regular contributor to contentions and the author of Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life (2005), sat with us last week to discuss the Republican debates, good books, and the fortunes of the New York Yankees. You can see the interview below.

The New York Times is reporting that the military junta in Burma has shut down the country’s Internet. After nearly a month of protests—avidly covered and documented by native Burmese on the web—the regime cracked down hard on the Buddhist monks and their supporters. Many deaths already have been recorded, and some reports suggest an extremely bloody end to Burma’s push for democratic reform.

During the run-up to this massacre, Burmese bloggers provided photographs, commentary, and even YouTube clips from inside the maelstrom. Stirring photographs of monks clad in orange, and riveting hand-held footage of soldiers firing on protesters, gave the events a harrowing immediacy for Internet-users. The Internet blackout terminated this discourse, blocking the atrocities to come from cyberspace and the outside world.

Censoring the Internet has become a major component of totalitarian control, not just in Burma, but in despotic regimes the world over. The Chinese government devotes significant resources to purging their data flow of dissident material. (At the School of Informatics at Indiana University’s homepage, you can play with a brilliant search tool that compares typical Google searches with Google.cn.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, contentions presents an interview with theater director Jack O’Brien. Mr. O’Brien won the Tony Award this year for Best Director for his work on Tom Stoppard’s critically acclaimed play The Coast of Utopia, which received high marks from Terry Teachout in the April 2007 issue of COMMENTARY.

Mr. O’Brien made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in April, with Puccini’s il trittico. He has won two other Tony Awards for directing (Hairspray, Henry IV) and is the Artistic Director at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, California. His current project is a musical adaptation of the Steven Spielberg film, Catch Me if You Can.

Ruth R. Wisse is a longtime COMMENTARY contributor (and a contentions blogger) and the Martin Peretz professor of Yiddish Literature at Harvard. Her newest book, Jews and Power, was reviewed in the September issue of COMMENTARY by the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens. He wrote:

Jews and Power can . . . serve as a basis for pondering the broader self-doubt, often cloaked in pretensions of superior morality, that today infects much of the liberal democratic West. For providing that lesson, and for doing so with passion, eloquence, and peerless intellectual verve, Ruth Wisse deserves all honor and gratitude.

Last week, Wisse sat with contentions to discuss her new book. She then appeared before a standing-room only audience at Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side for a reading and book signing. You can watch the interview below.

Today, Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism becomes available at bookstores everywhere. Drawing on Podhoretz’s seminal essays in COMMENTARY, World War IV addresses the most serious topic of our time—the battle against global Islamist terror—with its author’s customary force, wit, clarity, and courage. See below for our interview with Podhoretz about his book.

In our second interview with him, Terry Teachout talks about “Selling Classical Music” (his article in the September issue of COMMENTARY), the status of “middlebrow” culture, the recent musical Xanadu, bossa nova crooner Luciana Souza, and more.

Last week we sat down for an interview with Max Boot, a regular contributor to this blog and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Boot talks about “How Not to Get Out of Iraq” (his article in the September issue of COMMENTARY), General Petraeus’s September report, the war in Iraq, and more.

The video can be seen here.

On the list of Queen Elizabeth II’s Birthday Honours was a knighthood for the Indian-born novelist and essayist Salman Rushdie. Rushdie said he was “thrilled and humbled to receive this great honour.”

The announcement drew the ire of extremists who have dogged Rushdie since the publication of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses. The Iranian foreign ministry has decried the knighting of this “hated apostate,” while protests have broken out in Malaysia, Kashmir, Pakistan, and London.

COMMENTARY is featuring, in our Today from the Archive section, pieces from Daniel Pipes, Midge Decter, and Hillel Halkin on the subject of Sir Salman, his novels, and the meaning of his literary achievement.