A brief interlude of beauty and sorrow, courtesy of Fulbrighter Kimberly Zarecor.  

Slovakia’s first winter election creates all sorts of new possibilities. Several weeks ago the Slovak National Party tested the limits with a new billboard guaranteed to raise eyebrows: The most surprising thing about this, however, is not its characterization of the EU stabilization (benefiting Greece, and Spain and Portugal and Italy) as the work of [...]

I’ve wanted to post this for some time but did not dare to do so until I knew it would work out. Now it has and I can reveal the identity of the guest in yesterday’s Democracy class: But before you say, “what a bad Photoshop job!” you should know that I would never stoop [...]

he New York Times broke tradition yesterday and published an article about Slovakia without a picture of a horse and cart: A history of Slovakia according to The New York Times Slovakia 2009 Slovakia 2011 The article in question starts with a nice reference to a recent ad for Zlaty Bazant which contains the line “Wanting [...]

Those who would criticize American art as sterile and commercialized have obviously not familiarized themselves with the art of Congressional district boundary drawing which, like certain kinds of locust, flourishes once every decade (sometimes more often in Texas), feeding on census data and political desire.  And this year local Michigan artists have done their state [...]

I didn’t think that I would need to be the one to do this, but somebody needs to do make a visual comment on what passes for party building on the Czech left.  So I guess it’s up to me and Adobe Photoshop. We saw this kind of love story in 2010, the two partners coming [...]

Congratuations to MF Dnes for publishing one of the most sinister images of a politician I’ve ever seen.  (“No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.”)  It is also, in its way, one of the most beautiful.  Click on the image to see Milos Zeman’s hard-earned lines and crags. Unfortunately, I think the text contains [...]

This is the way the world ends, not with a b-a-n-g but with an -n-i-a. At least that’s the way a good share of the world’s country names end. Having used fictional country data to make “maps” of the beginnings and endings of non-existent countries, it was an obvious next step to try it with [...]

Earlier this year I decided leave Elbonia.  Elbonia served me well during over a decade of exams about hypothetical Eastern European countries that allowed me to test whether my students could apply their abstract knowledge to new and unfamiliar cases.  But after a decade of references to the Dilbert cartoons in which I first encountered [...]

Some might say that I am ill-equipped to judge local news since my experience of it news comes twice a year when my family stays at a particular hotel that insists on keeping it on during breakfast hours. But if lack of experience with politics can become the chief qualification for political candidates, then perhaps [...]