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Private citizen?

Here are two more media examples:

1. As a foreigner living in Berlin, you can easily be embarrassed by your German friends who will berate you for not separating your rubbish.

There are at least five types of rubbish bin in the courtyards of apartment buildings and inside people’s houses. Luckily, the bins are colour-coded, to avoid any confusion - a yellow bin for packaging (old milk cartons etc), a blue bin for paper and cardboard, bins for glass (separated into ones for clear, brown and green glass) a “Bio” bin designed for left-over food and plant waste. Finally, there is a black bin for the rest of the rubbish (or for those people who do not bother to sort out their rubbish).

In theory, people are obliged under German law to take any “special rubbish,” such as batteries or chemicals, to a recycling centre. If you fail to do this, it could be considered an “administrative offence”, although in practice prosecutions are rare.

The separation of rubbish is not compulsory for the private citizen, but according to surveys, around 90% of Germans are willing to sort out their rubbish.

- Recycling around the world, BBC.co.uk, June 25, 2005.

2. Battles between magazine editors bloody the annals of literary history. In “The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century” (Knopf; $35), Alan Brinkley, the Columbia historian, dismisses the legendary feud between Luce and Ross as short-lived and silly, but it lasted for a quarter century, there have been sillier, and Ross, at least, took it about as seriously as he took anything. Brinkley’s wonderfully insightful and judicious biography is more than the story of a life; it’s a political history of modernity. Luce was one of the most influential journalists of the twentieth century. Time was the first news magazine. Fortune, which he launched in 1930, made business writing smarter. “The March of Time,” broadcast on the radio from 1931 to 1945 and shown in theatres, as newsreels, beginning in 1935, paved the way for television news. Life, started in 1936, brought photojournalism into the nation’s living rooms. “The American people are by far the best-informed people in the history of the world,” Luce wrote in his essay “The American Century,” in 1941, when Americans were getting much of that information from him and, mainly, from his magazines, which Ross couldn’t stomach, and whose significance he refused to concede. “Who reads Fortune?” Ross once asked. “Dentists.”