Articles

IN NEW YORK, RENZI MANIA OR RENZI REMORSE?, New Yorker, September 27, 2014

Matteo Renzi, the Prime Minister of Italy, quite self-consciously made Silicon Valley the first stop of his first official American visit: “not New York, not Washington, not Boston,” Renzi pointed out, somewhat undiplomatically, to his audience at the Council on Foreign Relations, in New York, a decidedly more staid group than the ones that he…

CAN THE FRENCH TALK ABOUT RACE?, New Yorker, July 11, 2014

Quietly, the French Ministry of Higher Education last month signed off on implementing a law that had been passed nearly a year earlier but had been gathering dust within the bureaucracy. Many in the ministry had hoped that it would die a quiet and unnoticed death. Following a model developed in Texas and California, the…

THE POPE EXCOMMUNICATES THE MAFIA, FINALLY, New Yorker, June 24, 2014

In some ways, it is surprising that Pope Francis made news by travelling to Calabria and excommunicating members of the Mafia. He went to a town where members of a local Mafia group, known as the ’Ndrangheta, had murdered a three-year-old boy, together with his grandfather, and burned their bodies, in a case tied up…

WILL LE PEN LEARN FROM AN ITALIAN COMEDIAN’S MISTAKES?, New Yorker, May 27, 2014

The extraordinary success of Marine Le Pen’s National Front, in France, and of other right-wing, populist parties has, with good reason, been the main story of last weekend’s European Parliamentary elections. Running on an anti-euro, anti-immigration platform, Le Pen won a historic twenty-five per cent of the vote, handily outpolling France’s main conservative party, the…

The Return of Berlusconi — end of reform? La Repubblica, July 23, 2014

MERCOLEDÌ, 23 LUGLIO 2014 Pagina 29 – COMMENTI LA VOGLIA DI ESSERE DIVERSI ALEXANDER STILLE APPENA arrivata la sentenza di assoluzione, Silvio Berlusconi comincia di nuovo con le vecchie abitudini: domande di grazia, nuove leggi ad personam, eccezioni alle norme per permettergli di ricandidarsi. Avete notato che l’Italia è diventato un paese un po’…