Category: issues

Never ones for prudence, the satirical French weekly’s editors have made the Prophet – holding a Je suis Charlie” sign – the cover boy for what they’re calling the Survivors’ Issue.

“Satirical French publication Charlie Hebdo could not be printed in Australia under existing restrictions on free speech … Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson [said that] the restrictions contained in section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act would ‘ensure it would be shut down’; he was supported in this position by media law experts.”

“The great myth about the art world is that it is loaded with money. It is, of course, but only at the top end. Collectors, successful dealers and some artists are rich. Yet around this elite, and servicing it, is a constellation of magazines, books, critics and websites, curators and exhibitions that is not so profitable.”

“Anticlerical French thought traces its origins to rambunctious early Catholic practices such as Carnival, in which Christian morality was temporarily and gleefully suspended, as well as to Renaissance literary representations of priests as importunate louts.”

“Even as shows such as ‘Black-ish,’ ‘Empire’ and ‘Cristela’ broaden the diversity of characters and stories on television, the opportunities for first-time female and minority directors on TV remain limited.”

“It was tasteless, that’s what they say. And perhaps it was. I’m not going to make a career out of baiting some fucking religious fanatics, you know, by insulting their prophet. I wouldn’t do that. That seems crazy. But then, after they got killed, I just had to draw that cartoon.”

“The British thought the Germans needed to be nurtured as allies against the growing power of the Soviet Union. But were such compunctions realistic? Would showing the film to postwar Germany have been a propaganda reverse for the British, serving to alienate the Germans and tip the emerging cold war in the Soviets’ favour?”

“More than a dozen technology companies, including Twitter, have relocated alongside the impoverished neighborhood, some buoyed by city tax breaks. The prospective changes to the Tenderloin — a noirish haunt of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and arguably the central city’s last working-class neighborhood — have given rise to a new nickname: the Twitterloin.”

“We like to say – we who work with pens (or pixels) – that the pen (or pixel) is mightier than the sword. Then someone brings a sword (or Kalashnikov) to test the claim, and we’re not so sure. … The truth is – for better and for worse – that, no, most of us, even in the most free of Western societies, are not Charlie.”

Andrew O’Hehir: “Charlie Hebdo is not just some random publication that made fun of Muhammad. It’s something closer to a canary in the coal mine of democracy. It’s a dissident, thorn-in-the-side paper that was once closed down by its own government, in the putative homeland of liberty and equality. It’s a paper that has doggedly sought out the outer edge of acceptable expression, a paper devoted to offending anyone and everyone and to scourging those who hold power over others.”