La maman et la putain sont de retour, par Mona Chollet. On a pu avoir l’impression, au cours des derniers mois, que certaines cinéastes françaises s’étaient donné pour mission de montrer aux jeunes filles des classes moyennes et populaires comment conjurer le sort qu’elles redoutent : des études inutiles, ou pas d’études du tout, suivies d’une longue vie de travail ingrat pour un salaire dérisoire.
Il ne s’agissait évidemment pas de les encourager à faire une lecture critique de leur situation : il y a des riches et des pauvres, il y en a toujours eu, il y en aura toujours ; c’est une donnée stable dans l’histoire de l’humanité.
Op-ed: Seth MacFarlane Isn't The Problem. The host wasn't being a chauvinist on Oscar night.
He was calling out Hollywood's long-ingrained chauvinism. I always watch the Oscars. As a devotee of the movies, I like to guess the winners, see the awards given out, hear the acceptance speeches, see what kind of politics are in play. I also like the women. The Banality of Seth MacFarlane's Sexism and Racism at the Oscars - Spencer Kornhaber. The host's feeble wisecracking may have been meant to provoke, but provoke what?
Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP The best moment of Seth MacFarlane's Oscars hosting gig may have come late in the night when, in announcing Meryl Streep, he said "our next presenter needs no introduction" ... and then just walked away. If only he'd kept his mouth shut more frequently. That's not to say the Family Guy and Ted creator made for an out-and-out terrible host. His lack of nervousness, his throwbacky radio-broadcaster voice, and his clean looks added up to a charisma score greater than zero, which is more than could have been said for James Franco. Seth MacFarlane and the Oscars' Hostile, Ugly, Sexist Night. Watching the Oscars last night meant sitting through a series of crudely sexist antics led by a scrubby, self-satisfied Seth MacFarlane.
That would be tedious enough. But the evening’s misogyny involved a specific hostility to women in the workplace, which raises broader questions than whether the Academy can possibly get Tina Fey and Amy Poehler to host next year. George Packer: The Political Isolation of the American South. The New Year’s Day vote in Congress that brought a temporary truce to the fiscal wars showed the Republicans to be far more divided than the Democrats, and the division broke along regional lines.
House Republicans from the Far West and from the Northeast favored the Senate’s compromise bill by large margins, and Midwesterners were split; but in the South, Republican opposition was overwhelming, 81–12, accounting for more than half of the total Republican “no” votes. In other words, Republicans outside the South have begun to turn pink, following the political tendencies of the country as a whole, but Southern Republicans, who dominate the Party and its congressional leadership, remain deep scarlet. Reforming the French Labor Market: Who cares about the unemployed? By Radu Vranceanu, Professor of Economics at ESSEC The French labor market has all the characteristics of the South-European model.
Sartre and Camus in New York. The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. In December 1944, Albert Camus, then editor of Combat, the main newspaper of the French Resistance, made Jean-Paul Sartre an offer he couldn’t refuse: the job of American correspondent. Perhaps, in light of the perpetual tension and subsequent acrimonious split between the two men, he was glad to get him out of Paris. What is certain is that Sartre was delighted to go. He’d had enough of the austerities and hypocrisies of post-liberation France and had long fantasized about the United States.
Camus himself would make the trip soon after, only to return with a characteristically different set of political, philosophical and personal impressions. The Chrysler and Empire State buildings seemed to Sartre to be like ancient ruins. G20 : peut mieux faire ! On s’attendait au pire avec le G20 de Los Cabos. Ce ne fut pas le cas. Mais cette édition ne laissera pas de souvenir impérissable. Dès son ouverture le G20 de Los Cabos a reçu un cadeau qui lui a fait du bien : les résultats de l’élection grecque de dimanche ont provisoirement ôté une épine du pied aux Européens qui auraient été soumis à une pression encore plus forte si les élections avaient vu la victoire des adversaires de la Troïka. Le logement neuf s'enfonce dans la crise en France. La liste des « gens honnêtes » qui voulaient ficher tous les Français. Le Conseil constitutionnel a estimé que le fichier des "gens honnêtes" (sic) comprenant l'état civil, ainsi que les empreintes digitales, et la photographie numérisée, des détenteurs de la future carte nationale d'identité électronique (CNIE), « a porté au droit au respect de la vie privée une atteinte qui ne peut être regardée comme proportionnée au but poursuivi », et qu'il était « contraire à la Constitution ».
Comedy. I’m going to talk about comedy here, but it won’t be funny.
Or maybe it will be. Or maybe you can blow it out your ass and see if I give a shit, because it’s my article and you’re basically trespassing. Did you think of that? Did you think you were going to just waltz in here and be served tea and biscuits by some well-dressed article from Vienna or San Francisco, whose sole existence was centered around massaging your TV-deadened brain and telling you that you look nice in that shirt, which you very much do not?
Les Martiennes. Le portail de la modernisation de l'Etat.