I enjoy it precisely because, although Europe shares a fair bit of culture, these works are not the product of a homogenized Mid-Atlantic or "common European" culture, but an expression of the particular culture, xplace, and time in which they was made.
All of this is not to say that TV cannot be used as a powerful tool for social engineering. It can and it is. Television and Hollywood have, in concert with the education system, caused enormous changes in society. It's just harder to accomplish without first demoralizing and robbing someone of his identity first. Solve et coagula.
The "rootless" line by the way is itself an absurd dogwhistle of antisemites amounting to "They are not trustworthy because we repeatedly robbed and kicked them out - ergo they must have deserved it!" Along with all of the feudalist anti-merchant and anti-banking cliches to assure literal serfs that military dictators. While whitewashing all of the considerable hatred and conflict. You unironically repeat ancient self-serving lies of long dead strongmen and yet you think we're the ones confused and manipulated?
Almost every time I read an article from The Economist I see that many of their arguments are founded on false premises which are (usually) trivial to fact-check. I really don't get why this publication gets posted here on HN so often.
I have only ever seen the short (1/2 to 1 page in the printed version) opinion pieces shared here. I think most publications could be judged unfairly by reading the only those parts. Usually the magazine is themed on one subject for the week and publishes a range of angles on the same thing. Again sharing one part of it rather destroys the beauty of it. I think that is why I can't get on with the digital editions.
I was a subscriber to the paper edition, but it is supposed to arrive Saturday morning in the mail, but often didn't. I found thay if it arrived on Monday I was only finding time to flick through it.
The Economist actually interestingly runs a forecasting competition that does just that. I expect you have to pay more for those intelligence reports.
They admit their mistakes openly: https://medium.economist.com/mistakes-weve-drawn-a-few-8cdd8...
The articles that are posted here are usually from the Leaders section, which are in effect opinion pieces. For every Leader article there's also a more in-depth article. If your only experience with the Economist is through their Leaders I can see how you would come away with the idea that all their articles are biased and lack detail.
Almost every other thing I've read from them is 1) total horseshit or, worse, 2) deeply right-wing conservative propaganda veiled behind a thin veneer of "we have a study that we cite!"
That said, their culture section can be sloppy. After noticing numerous errors in topics I care about and being disappointed in multiple book recommendations, I think I'd sooner try a cooking recipe from PC Gamer than accept their entertainment opinions at face value.
They get posted here as often as any other shoddy trash. But their crap seems to "stick" more at the frontpage than the others (probably because of better writing skills).
Re: Italian music, I still have a couple of Ornella Vanoni and Mina CDs in my car, it’s the only thing that I listen while on road-trips (am Romanian).
Many of these were loved in Latin America as well. Lucky Luke and Asterix are my personal favorites, though there's a special place for Corto Maltese (Hugo Pratt is revered in my country) and I also liked Manara for erotic comics.
To this day I consider European comics way superior to American comics, where superheroes tended to dominate. Yes, I do love Sandman and Robert Crumb, of course.
When I talk about Donald Duck with Americans they don’t get it, but when I talk with other Europeans there is a long and fun conversation ahead.
I always think it is cute when a work of art travels from the place of origin and shines in a different part of the world in this way.
The UK withdrew from the Erasmus scheme as part of Brexit seemingly for no other reason than to discourage cultural integration.
I think it was because of two reasons. First, the sort of people who go on Erasmus and Interrail tend to be the sort of people who could have afforded it anyway - it is a subsidy for the well to do.
And secondly, far fewer people go from the UK to other countries, than come from other countries to come here, so it is a financial drain.
You could argue that it was a good idea for soft power reasons for the UK to do, but it doesn't seem to have built up a lot of European good will so far and perhaps the government has reasoned that the money is better spent elsewhere.
Only if you subscribe to the zero sum idea that there is a fixed pot of money which must be shared out between competing claims on it. Unfortunately our current and recent governments have propagated that notion for their own gain.
It neglects the fact that foreign students in the UK spend money in the UK economy thereby propping up jobs and economic activity. When my daughter did a year studying abroad in Germany the funding she got was nowhere near enough to cover her rent and other costs. So something like 10 grand of British money ended up getting spent in the German economy to keep her going.
Absolutely not in my experience. They don't tend to be super poor, they are college demographics. But among social classes that do go to college, it actually enables people who could not pay for it. These programs are a way how students for whome it would be expensive go abroad for few months.
The missing tuition support is really harsh, especially if Turing is for the US
I don't see this working in all honesty.
From watching it in the 90's as a child, I don't remember it being near as crazy as today, and they started in the 1950's
It's not impossible to meet Hollywood's financial power, also its artistic power... Germany alone for example has producers (Constantin Film), studios (Bavaria, Babelsberg), VFX shops (Scanline, Stargate, Pixomondo) or tech rental (ARRI), and not to mention all the locations which many US blockbusters regularly use.
The core difference America has and what makes Hollywood so dominant is that everything except locations is pretty much concentrated in Hollywood (with Vancouver and Toronto offshoots in Canada), whereas in Europe everything is splintered - Germany alone has Cologne, Berlin and Munich. That makes it harder for all parties involved in a production (please don't get me started on the disgrace that is high-speed internet connectivity here) and, crucially, we don't have the informal "network effects" resulting from having everyone drink at the same bars in one town.
If anyone, be it a billionaire or a government, in Europe were to fund a "cinema town" modeled after Hollywood, inter-European infighting would kill the project before it even had a chance at getting started. We can't even get our heavy industry companies merged so that they're sizable enough to fight against Chinese and US companies - how are we supposed to successfully do that for a industry that doesn't have much economic relevance?
I enjoy the European shows on Amazon and Netflix, much more so than the tiring Hollywood garbage.
Netflix does bring a decent budget for more Hollywood competitive production value to shows that feel distinctively less "US", which is a good thing for Europe, or at least provides a distribution platform to increase revenue for local shows.
Of course many of those shows also are produced for selling to a global audience, and French or some other local productions are more valuable for a European culture.
But the contribution is not zero or negative.
German shows were especially horrible (no, really, horrible) until very recently.
I quite like the article and found it interesting. I'm a Brit and you have to realize British publications like the Economist tend to take the piss out of Europe a bit, especially the Eurovision song contest.
Well, you're British and this is a British publication targeting you :-)
In the past Italy sent its B team - and TBH san remo has much better strike rate for good songs.
The main point of watching (UK perspective) is for the cometary, The late Terry Wogan and now Graham Norton ) and to see how few points the UK gets
What do you mean by that? There were of course borders, and they were certainly enforced.
Until the late 18th century travellers were more likely to be monitored at the district or parish level. During the French revolutionary wars the Jacobins began to issue foreign travellers with a carte de sureté on arrival at the French border, but these early ‘passports’ were dependent on the ideological affiliations of the holder rather than their nationality and subsequently fell into disuse after the Napoleonic Wars.
For much of the 19th century border control was sporadic and often non-existent, as millions of people migrated from Europe to the New World or within Europe itself without any passports or documentation. In 1942 the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig recalled the amazement of young people when he told them he had travelled across the world without a passport before the First World War.
The situation had started to change following the global economic slump in 1873, when governments began to introduce immigration controls based on nationality and ethnicity for the first time. In 1882 the US government passed the first Chinese Exclusion Act in response to racist ‘Yellow Peril’ lobbying from California politicians. In 1885 Bismarck ordered the expulsion of 40,000 Polish workers from Germany to prevent the ‘Polonization’ of Prussia. In 1897 the South African colony of Natal introduced a language test for immigrants, which barred entry to anyone who could not fill out an application form in English – a test that was specifically intended to eliminate ‘coolie’ labour from India. The ‘Natal formula’ was also introduced in Australia in order to keep out Chinese migrant workers.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/beyond-...
Both in the social scene (upper-middle classes and above travelling around Europe), and in the explicit and implicit exchange of influences and ideas between philosophers, writers, poets, musicians, painters, and so on.
Opera, music, art, literature etc
I thought OP was referring to the fact European upper noble families were all blood related and shared the same interests.
They sit around in their special sphere saying things like “The Economist is pretentious, market-driven, and stupid, like Eurovision.”
Then they say “Yeah bro, high five!” like Borat.
I’m not sure what you mean by “more than” pop culture.
There is good art and bad art in all genres, which are just mediums of cultural communication that reach different audiences.
I didn’t understand the reductionist criticism of The Economist, which I have found to publish numerous examples of good criticism and bad criticism, about a range of topics, mostly to do with economics, and occasionally culture.
I don’t think culture is The Economist’s forte. They probably don’t either, except when cultural platforms have measurable economic consequences.
Basically that aside from there being "good art and bad art in all genres" there are is also more substantial and less substantial forms and artistic cultures.
"Streaming subtitled box sets" are not "the new Eurovision", and Eurovision itself meant and means squat when it comes to "common European culture". (If anything Eurovision is something most of us watch for laughs, and more often than not we take sides and vote for countries we already knew and liked for other cultural and historical reasons).
We have had and have a quite good understanding of other European states and their cultures, even more so when they share the same borders (as it's often the case in Europe - to have 2, 3 or more countries sharing your borders and have millenia of interaction with them and their culture, plus "shared" areas of mixed culture, e.g. Strasbourg).
It's not the lack of Netflix's European programming or watching each other's shows that prevented a "common European culture".
Not to mention, we have had something like that, both in the high-brow sphere (for centuries), but also in the pop-culture.
E.g. non-artsy Italian and French cinema from Alain Delon to Bud Spenser was big all-over Europe until the 80s when Hollywood dominated with emphasis on impossible to meet big productions and vfx. European pop music frequently travelled all over Europe, from Al Bano to Roussos and from Nina Hagen to Kraftwerk. Comics too, French, English, Italian, Belgian, Spanish (to namedrop some that were published and loved all over Europe: Asterix, Tin Tin, Mortadelo y Filemon, Lucky Luke, Blek, Judge Dredd, the Smurfs, Manara, Corto Maltese, and so on).
And as somebody mentioned, Interrail and Erasmus have been going strong for 3 to 4 decades now or more... (I've done the first, and have had many friends doing both the first and the second.).