What the world is reading

All good things must come to an end, and downloading free music is hardly likely to be an exception. The alarming fall in sale of music CDs and the consequent loss of revenue (down from $15 billion to $10 billion) is making executives of the music industry consider levying a tax on Internet Service Providers, while Steve Jobs is engaged in working out his own equation with the industry, in a way that guarantees near monopoly for Apple’s ipod/itunes market. You might still pay a tax on music, Reihan Salam argues in Slate, but to the government, who can then ensure that the proceeds go to artists’ in proportion to their popularity.

Coming In From The Cold, Newsweek

War Games, The New Yorker

A video game, based on a kind of modernist chess developed by Marxist philosopher and filmmaker Guy Debord in 1977, attracted its share of controversy when it was displayed at Columbia’s Buell Center. ‘Le Jeu de Guerre’, as the board game is called, is a strategy game, with elaborately laid out arsenals, fortresses, artillery, mountains and cavalry. The online edition, Kriegspiel, however, made Debord’s widow furious. “The seeming irony of a revolutionary Marxist pursuing copyright claims against a free video game” did not strike her, writes Ben McGrath in The New Yorker.

From Nazi Bunker To Artistic Haven, Der Spiegel

The redemptive passage of time has left its mark on the five-storey Nazi era concrete bunker in Berlin, now a haven for a private collection of contemporary art. In the 1950s, this Albert Speer-designed structure stored imported fruit from Cuba, writes R Jay Magill, Jr in Der Spiegel, while the 1990s made it the site of sado-masochistic rave parties. Now it houses esoteric contemporaneous art collected by advertising entrepreneur Christian...