I greatly pruned my recommended links collection from last week because I’m a bit late in posting them.

Soft toys make people more ethical (The Economic Times/India Times)

Mocking Europe, neo-liberals, shouldn’t make you feel good (Antony Loewenstein.com)

Revolutionary Daughters (Aljazeera) – video (24 min) – shows work of two young women activists in India.

Meet the Artist: Lang Lang (BBC Music Magazine) – video and intro – click on screenshot below.

Good news is never stale, so even though I’m a few days late, I want to post about the poet who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Announced by the Nobel committee last week, the winner is Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer.

Tranströmer has been translated into more than sixty languages and has written fifteen collections of poetry, according to the Nobel website. The first was published in 1954.

In a video interview following the award announcement, Ross Shideler, UCLA professor of Comparative Literature and Scandinavian describes Tranströmer’s poems:

“They were absolutely sort of revolutionary in terms of their minimal style and language. They could suggest huge amounts in the fewest possible words. And that style of poetry spread, I think, throughout all of Europe and influenced poets from a wide range.”

Asked about the themes of Tranströmer’s work, Shideler says:

“He is a kind of everyday visionary, I suppose. It’s hard to pin him down because he starts always with the very very simple image and then extends that up to really metaphysical levels. He clearly is interested in the connection between the most trivial moment and the spiritual…”

See the full interview here (8 min).

Five of Tranströmer’s poems are available for viewing on the Nobel website here. One I especially like, however, is the one here below that I found on UK writer John Baker’s blog — link here. Titled The Tree and the Sky, it is two stanzas:

There’s a tree walking around in the rain,
it rushes past us in the pouring grey.
It has an errand. It gathers life
out of the rain like a blackbird in an orchard.

When the rain stops so does the tree.
There it is, quiet on clear nights
waiting as we do for the moment
when the snowflakes blossom in space.

You can read a bio of Tranströmer’s life on the Nobel website here.

A new era for Denmark as left takes power (Aljazeera)

Yang Lan: The generation that’s remaking China (TEDTalks) – one of China’s richest talks about the country – video

Occupy Wall Street: Actor and activist Mark Ruffalo shares his first-person account of the movement (CurrentTV) – a fresh new voice on the grassroots scene in US – video

5 motivi per cui Facebook, e gran parte dei Social Network esistenti, non sono e non potranno mai essere una democrazia! (The Social.COMunicator) -  my friend Ivan Turatti writes about a major problem with Facebook

Nobel Women’s Initiative — their new website is up and looking good

Island hopping in Galápagos: Santiago Island and Floreana Island (Guardian) – click on screenshot below for video

Impressively concise assessment of what it means to belong to a currency union — in this case the Euro — offered this week by Protesilaos Stavrou, a young European studies student from Cypress (“Should Germany leave the euro and let others crash and burn?” Aug 27, 2011).

Excerpt:

Countries in a currency union are interconnected, since they have first abolished all or most of the trade barriers between them, their economies have practically merged into a single market and their banking sector, as well as other important sectors of the economy, are organically linked. Severing a part of this “organism” will doom both the part and the whole just as if a vital organ is removed from the human body where both die.

The reason that is true is because the country that opts out will trigger a chain effect in the banking sector and in all other sectors it can influence, which will see private banks and other corporations falling one after the other just like in a domino.

Read full post here.  (Saw this link at Bloggingportal.eu)

My Rome: ’90% of this incredible city is unknown’ (Guardian) — if you love Rome or photography, you’ll enjoy this!

Gioachino Rossini – William Tell (Emi Classics) – Royal Opera House Music Director Antonio Pappano talks about conducting the famous opera

Murdoch’s Watergate? (Newsweek) -I found it fascinating to read the legendary Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein assessing the ongoing Murdoch scandal

Re-kindling Berlin’s Love for Brussels (Social Europe Journal) — if you’re interested in learning more about what’s happening in Europe now, this analysis by one of Germany’s leading public intellectuals is helpful

Italy’s Debt, Outlook, European Debt Crisis (Bloomberg) — and this short video of the former chief economist for the Italian bank UniCredit talking about the true state of Italy’s finances will tell you more than much of  the highly hysterical analysis floating around these days

Scientists finally get angry about indifference to climate change (Guardian) w/video – above

Northampton scientist discovers proof cows go moo-dy without friends (Northampton Chronicle)

Murdoch’s Fatal Flaw (New York Times)

WikiLeaks’ Brilliant MasterCard Commercial Parody (The Daily Conversation)

Women’s battle for justice (Guardian)

The Indignant (Aljazeera) – great short doc about recent protests in Spain

In search of Europe-An interview with Jacques Delors (Eurozine)

Revolutionary Cartoons: An Interview With Ahmad Nady (Jadaliyya)

Obama’s Original Sin (New York Magazine)

Summer Rerun: Geithner and Summers as Obama’s Cheney and Rumsfeld  (naked capitalism)

Google Takeout Lets You Liberate Your Data From Google (Mashable)

YouTube Unveils Slick Experimental Redesign, Codenamed Cosmic Panda (TechCrunch)

Pottermore.com: the end of traditional bookstores? (OWNI.EU) – in French, below

J. K. Rowling lance son Pottermore.com: bye bye les libraires old school? (Miscellanees.net)

James Brown’s Japanese soup commercial is the greatest commercial ever (The Feed/CBS) – I like it!

Cherish Pat Metheny (boomitude.com) – exquisitely performed (video above)

Alien encounters ‘within twenty years’ (Guardian)

China and Europe: Who benefits? (Aljazeera) – video of interview with three Europe-China experts. Good insight and overview.

Polish PM Donald Tusk: New EU visionary? (NoseMonkey)

It Takes a Village (Spiegel Online International)

Row over Plans to Turn Tuscan Village into Millionaires’ Paradise (Corriere della Sera) – Italian version below

E’ polemica sul borgo toscano che diventerà un’enclave per milionari (Corriere della Sera) – English version above

Emiliano Salinas: A civil response to violence (TEDtalks) – son of former Mexico president creates stir with talk about Mexico’s growing violence

Who Gives a F*ck About an Oxford Comma? Plenty of Us, Apparently. (FISHBOWLLA)

The revolution will be translated: Global Voices’ citizen-powered site experiments with English-second (Nieman Journalism Lab)

Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the hotel maid turns into a PR battle (Guardian) – don’t miss paragraph five – it’s key to the whole mess

Costs of War (Watson Institute – Brown University) – new report described as “first comprehensive accounting of the costs of the US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan”

How to. . . listen to the dawn chorus (Guardian) — if you enjoy bird song

A Book Review

That the superrich across the globe are in the process of stealing most of the world’s wealth and resources from the rest of us is by now common knowledge among those who aren’t persisting in turning a blind eye. That superrich defined is the top 1 percent approximately (or 0.01 percent more accurately).

But for those who still don’t know about this mindboggling raid on the human planet and its population, I hope you will take a look at two recent sources of information that describe the process chapter and verse.

The first, thoroughly documented and alarming, is the book “Winner-Take-All Politics” – the authors are two political science professors in American universities (Yale and UC Berkeley), Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson.

As an example of what they are writing about, here’s a 1954 quote they cite from President Dwight Eisenhower (Republican):

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H.L. Hunt…, a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

Unfortunately, as Hacker and Pierson demonstrate over and over in their book, Eisenhower was wrong about his central point. One of the two US major political parties (and the other one also to a huge extent) is persisting in doing just what he described as impossible, and that party is very much still part of political history in the making.

A second source of information about the superrich and their grand theft of all there is to have is a recent article in the UK’s Guardian – “Anxiety keeps the super-rich safe from middle-class rage” by Peter Wilby (May 18, 2011).

Excerpt:

That is the most important point about what has happened to incomes in Britain and America during the neoliberal era: the very rich are soaring ahead, leaving behind not only manual workers – now a diminishing minority – but also the middle-class masses, including doctors, teachers, academics, solicitors, architects, Whitehall civil servants and, indeed, many CEOs who don’t run FTSE 100 companies, to say nothing of the marketing, purchasing, personnel, sales and production executives below them.

Neither Hacker and Pierson in their book nor Wilby in his Guardian article play favorites with political labels. The superrich driving this ruthless and barbaric raid on the planet and their fellow human beings evidently don’t care whether you call yourself a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Socialist, Communist, Anarchist or general apolitical layabout. To paraphrase the pop song, they just want your money, honey, they don’t need your love.

Again, I highly recommend reading these two exposès. What you choose to do once you are aware of the real state of affairs is, of course, your choice. But this is not the time to stand silently by on the sidelines.

Bob Dylan recently performed his first concert in China. On the program was “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Here’s a performance from 1964 (video a bit slow to load). Lyrics here.

In Praise of Distraction (The New Yorker)

Photoshop, journalism, and forensics: Why skepticism may be the best filter for photojournalism (Nieman Journalism Lab)

Signs of Spring (The Atlantic) – photo series

Shirky: “La Rete ci cambia in meglio” (La Stampa)

American radical (Aljazeera) – documentary film, part I

Blogging for HuffPo Is Like Writing Open-Source Software (GigaOM)

The Advanced User Polity or: Why the EU is like a primeval forest (Ideas on Europe)

Italy’s Growing Multi-Media Influence Impacts Purchase Decisions (Nielsen)

Saturday interview: Aung San Suu Kyi (The Guardian)

The Rise and Fall of Information Empires – Timothy Wu (RSA.org)

“This is Economic Treason”: 500,000 March in London Protesting Public Spending Cuts and Corporate Tax Dodgers (Democracy Now) – video

The booming business of Internet censorship (Aljazeera)

Women vie for votes in Nigeria (Aljazeera) – video

The Invisible Hand explains nuclear safety (This Modern World) – political cartoon

A Word About Digital Subscriptions to The Huffington Post (Huffington Post) – funny April 1 satire