Even if you like Mads Brügger’s documentaries, chances are you hate him. The characters he plays in his “non-fiction films”—a Communist theater director in The Red Chapel and, more recently, a corrupt diamond smuggler in The Ambassador—are manipulative and brash, pushing his subjects into greater levels of absurdity and maybe even hurting people. But are […]
1. This high-stakes knockout format might not be so bad after all. Qualifying groups are long, turgid affairs, especially the European ones, international football’s equivalent of the snoozetastic-but-moneyspinning Champions League group stages. Knockout football puts the big names at risk, as they should be. This past weekend was joyous.
Jean-Bedél Bokassa was the self-crowned emperor of the Central African Republic (CAR) until his ousting in 1979. He fathered 62 children and threw himself a coronation, based on that of Napoleon, that cost the equivalent of his country’s entire GDP. But Bokassa, who died in 1996, was formally rehabilitated this week by the CAR’s current […]
