Interesting, if personally unsurprising. I see large and growing manga shelves wherever I go book shopping here in Toronto, too.

Young adults are a growing market in publishing: Walk into a bookstore in a European city on a Friday or Saturday afternoon and you can find teenagers crowded in front of a wall of the comic books – a sight nearly non-existent a few years ago.

On Duesseldorf's Immermannstrasse, an avenue lined with shops catering to the city's Japanese population, is a scene that could come straight from Harajuku, where Tokyo's youth congregate – except the butcher around the corner sells sausages.

German teenagers dressed as Japanese goth rock stars, with multicoloured hair and heavy eyeliner, mingle with Japanese schoolchildren in a bookstore on the street, giggling as they step into “purikura” photo booths that shoot instant snapshots that people decorate themselves and print as stickers.

“They have something special,” said Berenike Schmoldt, whose fascination with manga has turned the German teenager into a full-blown Japanophile at 17, during a Friday expedition with her friends. “I spend hours every week reading them.”

Already fluent in basic Japanese, she is making her fourth visit to Japan this month to soak up the culture, eat her favourite dish of ‘yakisoba' fried noodles, and read manga.

It's a scene replicated in Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris and Rome: local bookshops have expanded their manga sections and feature hundreds of French, Dutch and Italian titles. Often without the credit cards to shop online, these teenagers visit the stores as part of their social life.

“It is something that is much more than a fad,” said Paul Gravett, a publisher and expert on comics in Europe.

“The term ‘manga' is becoming a global word.”

Inuit Panda Scarlet Carwash, a very worthwhile blog to read on music and film and like pop cultural events, has a couple of interesting posts on East German rock music (1, 2). Yes, this certainly did exist.

As you know, East Germany was formed in the Soviet occupation zone in eastern Germany. The early years of the DDR* coincided with the birth of rock and roll in the USA and this strange new music's appearance in Europe. At first, the East German state shunned this new music. Rock and roll was seen as the degenerate outpourings of late capitalism, a sure sign that the USA had fallen into decadence and was on the brink of socialist revolution.

Despite the best efforts of the regime, however, the youth of East Germany became more and more interested in the new American music. Rather than leave them to the tender mercies of West German broadcasting and the likes of Radio Free Europe, the DDR's rulers sought to co-opt rock and roll by allowing East German rock bands to come into being. Ideologues also discovered that rock and roll was not an alien import, but an authentic development of proletarian culture. They came close to implying that it was a development of East German proletarian culture, as though the first rock and rollers hailed from darkest Saxony rather than the American south.

Some days ago, Crooked Timber's Harry Farrell posted a link to a colour film taken in London in 1927. I can go him one better: see the Roundhay Garden Scene, taken in 1888.



It's brief and two seconds long and the plot development--as a YouTube commenter notes--isn't much, but still, it is.

A question to everyone: How much earlier do you think that movies, moving pictures, whatever, could have been taken? Was the technology doomed to emerge as late as the 1880s, or do you think that it could have come before?

When I disembarked from the Eglinton subway station to street level this morning, on at least two of the streetcorners, people dressed in the brown uniforms of UPS workers were holding papers high.

“Free National Post from UPS!” they cried in their own slightly different ways.

I took a copy on the southwestern streetcorner. How could I not resist free reading material?

Crossing the street north, I came upon another UPS worker in the middle of a crowd of a dozen people. “Free Natilonal Post!” he cried out.

No one took him up on his offer. After a moment, he just shrugged and moved on.

Calling this a vanity post would be correct in multiple senses. First, though, let's do the appropriate thing and start with here's David Bowie's 1980 single "Fashion".



As life continues, I've becoming increasingly interested in developing a personal sense of style: clothing particularly, appearance more generally. There's the example of my friends here in Toronto, which is always valuable and appreciated. I also quite enjoy Russell Smith's 2005 Men's Style, and not only because he's a fellow Queen's University alumnus. But I'm also a very big fan of the principle of parallax. Also, I quite like textual records.

So. How did you do it? How do you do it?

This is worth noting, not least because the thesis that the study disproved runs completely against my own experiences.

Contrary to popular belief, technology is not leading to social isolation and Americans who use the Internet and mobile phones have larger and more diverse social networks, according to a new study.

"All the evidence points in one direction," said Keith Hampton, lead author of the report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project released Wednesday. "People's social worlds are enhanced by new communication technologies.

"It is a mistake to believe that Internet use and mobile phones plunge people into a spiral of isolation," said Hampton, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

The authors said key findings of the study -- "Social Isolation and New Technology" -- "challenge previous research and commonplace fears about the harmful social impact of new technology."

"There is a tendency by critics to blame technology first when social change occurs," Hampton said.

"This is the first research that actually explores the connection between technology use and social isolation and we find the opposite.

"It turns out that those who use the Internet and mobile phones have notable social advantages," Hampton said. "People use the technology to stay in touch and share information in ways that keep them socially active and connected to their communities."

The study found that six percent of Americans can be described as socially isolated -- lacking anyone to discuss important matters with or who they consider to be "especially significant" in their life.

That figure has hardly changed since 1985, it said.

The study examined people's discussion networks -- those with whom they discuss important matters -- and core networks -- their closest and most significant confidants.

It found that on average, the size of people's discussion networks is 12 percent larger among mobile phone users, nine percent larger for those who share photos online, and nine percent bigger for those who use instant messaging.

The diversity of people's core networks tends to be 25 percent larger for mobile phone users, 15 percent larger for basic Internet users, and even larger for frequent Internet users, those who use instant messaging, and those who share digital photos online.

The Pew report mentioned is available here. Hampton et al. abstract their findings as follows.

. Sociologists Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Matthew Brashears suggest that new technologies, such as the internet and mobile phone, may play a role in advancing this trend. Specifically, they argue that the type of social ties supported by these technologies are relatively weak and geographically dispersed, not the strong, often locally-based ties that tend to be a part of peoples’ core discussion network. They depicted the rise of internet and mobile phones as one of the major trends that pulls people away from traditional social settings, neighborhoods, voluntary associations, and public spaces that have been associated with large and diverse core networks.

The survey results reported here were undertaken to explore issues that have not been probed directly in that study and other related research on social isolation: the role of the internet and mobile phone in people’s core social networks.

This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.

This Globe and Mail article says something interesting, not least about a culture planner's missed assumption.

Imagine this dilemma: You're Israel's highest-ranking public relations expert. The world's news coverage, which shapes public opinion, is at best neutral and more typically hostile to Israel.

Is there a way to change the subject – to associate Israel with something besides tanks and checkpoints? A country afflicted with warts, perhaps, but also rich in culture and high-tech innovations? Other nations and cities have successfully engaged in similar rebranding exercises. Could Israel? And if so, where should it begin?

That was the strategic exercise Amir Gissin undertook three years ago, as director of public affairs at the Israeli Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem.

Three years later, he's Israel's consul-general for Toronto – the city he chose as the pilot project for rebranding.

That Toronto is now Ground Zero of the Middle East's global propaganda war is not surprising. One of the most important cities on the continent, it's a microcosmic blend of American and European influences, as well as the country's multicultural, financial and media centre, with three large university campuses and a robust Jewish community.

Toronto was an ideal choice for other reasons: It's home to some of Israel's harshest critics – among them, the Canadian Union of Public Employees and the United Church of Canada, both of which have championed the Palestinian-led Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, and a noisy coterie of left-wingers in academia and the arts, many of whom, including Naomi Klein, are Jewish.

And the city boasts a growing Muslim population of 350,000, twice the number of Jews. “The Muslims on Toronto campuses are more politically active than was their parents' generation,” notes Ryerson University professor Judy Rebick, a frequent critic of Israeli policies. “There's lots of energy. Remember, they grew up here. They're Canadian. They feel a sense of entitlement as citizens. They're more savvy.”

The thing is, if you rebrand a country the rebranding is triggered by a radical change. Spain was able to transform its international reputation from that of "repressive fascist society" to "thriving post-modern multicultural territory" because Spain actually made that transition from Franco, while Estonia's image likewise shifted from "poor Soviet successor state" to "E-Stonia" because it similarly made that transition from Soviet Socialist Republic. Neither of those identity transformations would have been possible if Spain was run by barely-rebranded Francoists, or Estonia a Belarus-style Communist state. It's even possible for country's brands to deteriorate: witness Serbia, at one point the thriving multicultural nucleus of a decent enough Yugoslavia federation, over the 1990s transformed into a petty state run by gangsters and ethnic cleansers.

Does Israel have many positive assets which could be used in a rebranding campaign? Certainly. Will these assets be particularly meaningful if Israel's more negative traits--say, discriminatory marriage laws, the social exclusion inflicted on Arabs within and without Israel proper, the militarism--don't disappear? (You know that the previous is a rhetorical question, right?)

This Saturday just past at Torontoist, Kevin Plummer wrote an interesting article about what things were like in Toronto and for Torontonians during the Second World War.

On September 10, 1939, Prime Minister Mackenzie King officially declared war on Germany. Toronto was impacted by the war almost immediately. Drawn by patriotism, adventure-seeking, or just the lure of a job after nearly a decade of the Great Depression, thousands of young Torontonians spilled into recruiting stations and from there into manning depots. In Bill McNeil's Voices of a War Remembered (Doubleday Canada Limited, 1991), Torontonian Ella Trow recalled how every family was touched by the Second World War. "My brothers and my husband went into the services," she wrote, "and most of my friends were in the same boat."

By the fall of 1942, Mike Filey wrote in his Sun column of March 25, 2001, military vehicles were as common a sight on city streets as servicemen in uniforms. Training exercises and mock battles were staged in Riverdale and Eglinton parks. From boats moored in Humber Bay, an attacking Canadian force stormed entrenched "enemy" positions on Sunnyside Beach. Blackouts were expected, if infrequent, training exercises. On a set day but at a surprise time air-raid sirens would blare, signalling for the lights to go out in a four-hundred-square-mile area from Bronte to Highland Creek, preparing locals for the possibility of an attack on North American soil. In May 1942, a blackout drill, Filey recounts, was given added drama because a German POW, recently escaped from a camp in Bowmanville, was thought to be "prowling the darkened city streets." The Star reported that police were called when a transient taking shelter in a Brampton barn was thought to be the prisoner.

Civilian life was thrown into turmoil as well, as industrial manufacturing converted to wartime industries and ramped up production, providing new employment opportunities for women. In some ways the city's transformation brought citizens closer together as a community, cooperating on fundraising drives and other initiatives. Some people, however, saw fault in the transformation. "I don't believe that the Toronto I grew up in," Trow wrote, "existed at all once the war started. In my mind, the changes were not for the good." The massive influx of industrial workers and their families created a housing shortage and, to Trow, the people on the now-crowded streets grew less considerate. For better or worse, the Second World War altered the patterns of daily life for almost all Torontonians.

Everything from sex and romance to to home economics to popular culture was transformed. Go, read.

National Novel Writing Month just begun, now really having moved on from being a domestic American phenomenon to something worldwide, is a topic that is preoccupying a few of my Facebook friends and more of my LiveJournal friends. One's not taking part because he's actually in the process of writing a novel, another's unsure about how to proceed, while others have cheerfully taken to displaying the bars showing how many words of the target fifty thousand they've written.

Me? I may take part, may not, much depends.

And you? Will you be writing? Do you want to write? Do you think the idea futile, or even silly?

Discuss.

I got this from Antonia Zerbisias at Facebook. It looks like the National Post, the right-wing national newspaper founded by Conrad Black and consistently a money-loser, is finally reaching its end thanks to the implosion of national media conglomerate CanWest.

The National Post, the flagship daily newspaper of Canada's beleaguered Canwest Global Communications (CGS.TO), will likely be forced to close after Friday if it isn't transferred to a new holding company, Canwest said in a court filing.

Creditors of the company have indicated they are no longer prepared to fund continuing losses at the Post, which employs 277 people, Canwest said.

The creditor group "will not continue to support funding the National Post Company in the long or short term past Oct. 30, 2009," Canwest said in a court report released on Thursday.

Canwest said the Post has no other sources of funding its "ongoing losses." A failure to transfer the newspaper into a different holding company by Oct. 30 "would likely result in the forced cessation of its operations and commencement of liquidation proceedings in respect of the National Post Company."

Canwest said earlier this week it has reached a deal to move the Post into a new subsidiary of Canwest Publishing Inc, but the move needs court approval. A hearing is set for Friday.

"The National Post Company has been unprofitable since its inception, recording annual losses as high as approximately C$60 million in 2001," Canwest said.

For the year ended Aug. 31, the newspaper is projected to have suffered a net loss of C$9.3 million ($8.7 million).

It looks like my earlier observation about the Post's unpopularity was quite correct in the medium term. Certainly I've seen plenty of copies of the National Post at newsstands long after the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, sometimes even the New York Times, are sold out.

I will actually miss it if it goes under. Yes, at its worst it could be rather unthinkingly, reflexively right-wing, but as James Bow observed in his post, notwithstanding a fair amount of creativity in its arts and letters section it began its career rather counter-productively.

It seems irrational for me to have such ill will towards a newspaper, and it is irrational, but the National Post started out on the wrong foot with me when Conrad Black set it up specifically to go after what he perceived as a leftist-liberal bent in Canadian media and politics. I realize that Black’s stance harkens back to the old days of newspapers when they were started out as the publication arm of various political parties, but I did not feel that this approach had a place in this day and age. And in the various persecution complex of some conservatives, they would often point to the financial success of Fox News and the Post as proof that their way of thinking was the right way of thinking because, when that way of thinking was brought out and sold on streetcorners, people picked it up.

But today, not so much.

It just shows to conservatives that, if Canadians are too liberal for their taste, the fault rests not with the politicians or any media bias, but with the Canadians themselves. It’s not enough to put out a newspaper and tell us what to think and expect that we’ll think the “right” way, in your opinion (as Black tried to do); instead, you’ve got to engage us ‘liberal’ Canadians personally, in an honest debate — a debate that you enter into with an open mind. That’s the only way to bring real, lasting change about.

The marketplace decided. Ah, what might have been had Conrad Black, well, not been Conrad Black!

Listening to CBC Radio One's long-running interview show As It Happens Wednesday night, I was surprised to learn about the case of the copyright-violating Scottish singing clerk.

Sandra Burt, 56, who works at A&T Food store in Clackmannanshire, was warned she could be fined for her singing by the Performing Right Society (PRS).

However the organisation that collects royalties on behalf of the music industry has now reversed its stance.

They have sent Mrs Burt a bouquet of flowers and letter of apology.

Mrs Burt, who describes herself as a Rolling Stones fan, said that despite the initial warning from the PRS, she had been unable to stop herself singing at work.

"They would need to put a plaster over my mouth to get me to stop, I can't help it

The village store where Mrs Burt works was contacted by the PRS earlier this year to warn them that a licence was needed to play a radio within earshot of customers.

When the shop owner decided to get rid of the radio as a result, Mrs Burt said she began singing as she worked.

She told the BBC news website: "I would start to sing to myself when I was stacking the shelves just to keep me happy because it was very quiet without the radio.

"When I heard that the PRS said I would be prosecuted for not having a performance licence, I thought it was a joke and started laughing.

"I was then told I could be fined thousands of pounds. But I couldn't stop myself singing.

One blog commenter went on to observe that the song "Happy Birthday To You" is actually held under copyright despite serious doubt that the agency claiming the song may not have the rights to do so.

Other people have gone into much greater detail about the controversy over intellectual property than me. Some, perhaps most famously Lawrence Lessig in his book Remix, argue that intellectual property laws as currently constituted sharply limit the ability of people to recycle and recombine different elements of culture that are themselves products of past recycling and recombinations, threatening a culture's vitality and capacity for innovation. Others argue that intellectual property laws help protect the producers of cultural goods, ensuring that they'll receive proper credit and compensation for their works, and in so doing creating an environment where up-and-coming writers and musicians and artists and other such people won't be afraid of penury.

Where do you stand on this issue? As a consumer, what do you do? If you are a producer of cultural goods, what's your stance on the matter? Does it matter to you that different countries have different stances on the issue? Et cetera.

Mohammed Adam's "In Canada, church clings to relevancy as congregations dwindle" is one of the more recent news articles taking a look at the collapse of traditional organized religion in Canada.

For 41 years, the Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes church was like a second home to George Laplante.

The Catholic church, which dates to 1873, was his spiritual foundation; the congregation, an extended family.

Now, Mr. Laplante, 68, is facing a harsh truth.

"It is sad, it is too bad, but that's the reality of life," he says of news that his Ottawa church will close by the end of this year. "The parishioners who go there cannot keep it going. Our church is fairly old. It is a big monument to look after. There's not enough of us to sustain it."

Mr. Laplante has attended Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes for 41 years. "I raised my kids in that church. Now it is me and my wife. I have to get used to going to another place."

The statistics, as Adam goes on to note, are grim.

The numbers show that Canadians have been fleeing the church for decades. In the mid-1940s, about 67% of adult Canadians attended church weekly.

By 1985, the number had plunged to 30%. In 2005, the number hit 20%. In 2006, a Canwest News Service poll found that 17% of Canadians attend church at least once a week, even though about half of those surveyed said they believe in God.

More worrying for churches is the number of young Canadians who are turning their back. In a sweeping study last year by renowned Canadian sociologist Reg Bibby, 47% of the teenagers surveyed said they never go to church. Another 20% said they "hardly ever go," while 21% said they go weekly.

Experts are quick to caution that it does not mean Canadians have given up on faith.

Potworowski suggests it instead reflects a rejection of "organized religion."

Mr. Tardis agrees, but says underlying it all, is a seismic shift in mentality, spirit and values. "People now will say, ‘I am spiritual but not religious.' They will say, ‘I have my own relationship with God and that's it. They have no need or desire to live the religious experience with others, as was the case before."

Unlike today's generation, the early European immigrants, who built many of the churches, found strength and purpose in religion. Attending church on Sunday was a time-honoured tradition. They showed their faith by filling the pews and emptying their pockets.

As older generations passed on, they left behind gaps in the pews and fault lines in church foundations. Their children drifted from the church as values changed, fortunes improved and new interests took hold. Immigration patterns were also changing: A majority of new arrivals were from Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and they practised Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism -- religions that have grown exponentially.

It's not, as Adam notes, as if these religions are necessarily doing much better themselves. Non-traditional Christian sects like the Pentecostal might be doing better, or, as evidenced by their highly fluid congregations with people moving in and out, they might not be. I continue to agree, mostly, with the thesis of Norris and Inglehart's Sacred vs. Secular, that societies might be relatively irreligious compared to others not because societies with relative religious monopolies tend to discourage theological interests as someone I quoted in a 2008 post said, but rather that in relatively stable and prosperous societies there really is no need for a religion that would provide extra support in times of stress. Canada's stable and prosperous, then, hence religion's not going to do well. And no, religion does not lead to below-replacement fertility rates, as evidenced by the pairing of France and the Nordic countries against Italy and Poland, and people born into religious families don't necessarily stay religious: if not, how did societies become secular in the first place.

The only thing that I can contribute to this debate is the observation that, before I attended St. Thomas's Anglican Church in downtown Toronto back in spring to witness some friends' conversion to Anglicanism, I wouldn't have started going to attend that church fairly regularly. I'm not quite sure what I'm getting out of the experience, in addition to a sense of community and an interesting feeling of something beyond, but I can say that this new venture of mine hasn't come about as the result of despair. Norris and Inglehart were only talking about general rules, after all, and certainly would allow for exceptions. It is interesting to me, though, that I, a relatively main-line Canadian of mixed Roman Catholic and United Church heritage, is drawn to an Anglicanism presented in a moderate and intellectual and appealing style that not only appeals to me but is quite traditional. Perhaps people who want to revitalize religion in Canada shouldn't expect new sects to do any better, or even to do as well, as the same old religions which continue to colour Canada's reality even though rates of practice might be low.

Thoughts?

Interesting. I like many of the Undercover Economist's analyses, incidentally.

According to his publisher, Dan “Da Vinci Code” Brown’s latest book, The Lost Symbol, sold more copies in its first 36 hours than any other adult hardback sold in total. (A certain boy wizard is excluded by the artful qualifier, “adult”.) The sales of Brown’s book were given a boost by an unprecedented price war. According to The Bookseller, an industry magazine, Waterstone’s offered a mere 50 per cent discount – £9.49 instead of £18.99. Tesco asked £7 and Asda £5. Asda’s book buyer celebrated “fantastic” sales, despite the fact that the store is thought to be losing £4 a copy. The old joke is made real: losing money on every sale, but making it up on volume.

Lately, I've been thinking about my post from the first of this month about how the lack of dialogue between different factions contributes to the collapse of the public sphere. There are three major newspapers in Toronto--the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and the National Post--but because of the right-leaning nature of that last paper I've not linked to it on my blogroll, subscribed to it on my RSS reader, or even read it or cited its articles consistently.

Well, that's changed now. Welcome, <a href="http://www.nationalpost.com><i>National Post</i></a>, to my blogroll.

Norman Geras' comments on the decline of handwriting as something actively practised in reguilar life stick with me. First, Umberto Eco had written about the subject in relation to his own childhood.

The tragedy began long before the computer and the cellphone.

My parents' handwriting was slightly slanted because they held the sheet at an angle, and their letters were, at least by today's standards, minor works of art. At the time, some – probably those with poor hand- writing – said that fine writing was the art of fools. It's obvious that fine handwriting does not necessarily mean fine intelligence. But it was pleasing to read notes or documents written as they should be.

My generation was schooled in good handwriting, and we spent the first months of elementary school learning to make the strokes of letters. The exercise was later held to be obtuse and repressive but it taught us to keep our wrists steady as we used our pens to form letters rounded and plump on one side and finely drawn on the other. Well, not always – because the inkwells, with which we soiled our desks, notebooks, fingers and clothing, would often produce a foul sludge that stuck to the pen and took 10 minutes of mucky contortions to clean.

The crisis began with the advent of the ballpoint pen. Early ballpoints were also very messy and if, immediately after writing, you ran your finger over the last few words, a smudge inevitably appeared. And people no longer felt much interest in writing well, since handwriting, when produced with a ballpoint, even a clean one, no longer had soul, style or personality.

It should be noted that my generation, coming well after his, assimilated the technology of the ballpoint pen well. I myself preferred, and prefer, the fine-pointed kind. Geras points out that, whatever the aesthetic pleasures, computers are so much better in composing and communicating ideas.

I had a teacher who encouraged us not to begin writing a sentence before having it fully formed in our minds. Maybe. But whatever advantages that brings, they are as nothing compared with the advantages, due to word-processing software, of being able to amend, to reshape text, to shift things around, without having to rewrite everything. If you're a very fluent writer, you may be able to get by without this. But for those of us for whom writing is more like building something, and not a purely linear process, writing by hand can slow you down too much. My pages used to get so full of crossings out, transposition marks, arrows and what not, that I'd often have to do the whole page over again; or engage in what I used to call page surgery - cutting out the OK part and sticking it to another OK part. That kind of slowness I don't miss at all.

That's right, and that's true. Still, I only can edit my extended texts well when they're printed out on paper. And now, more than a decade after my beautiful handwriting was lost in the rush to take lecture notes in university, I still looked at the calligraphy kit I've lying on a table near my desktop. It's closed, of course; I've never opened it.

The Montreal Gazette's Karla Gruodis writes about the ways in which that country's current catastrophic economic shock is reflecting and shaping that Baltic state's culture and identity, caught between the Soviet and the European unions.

Vilnius is a tense and dynamic place, a dramatic blend of sparkling new skyscrapers and crumbling Soviet-era buildings, elegant modernist homes and ramshackle wooden cottages. Some of its residents enjoy all the freedoms and comforts of modern European life, but many Lithuanians are still struggling, both economically and emotionally, to adapt to the massive changes their society has undergone.

Angele Kiausiniene, a 57-year-old teacher who participated in the Baltic Way [when two million Balts held hands to symbolize their desire for independence in 1989], expresses the frustrations felt by many people here.

"We saw Lithuania's future through rose-coloured glasses. We knew that it would be hard, but we thought that the unity we felt during the Baltic Way would be with us for decades to come." She describes herself as a patriot but says she is disappointed with the political infighting and corruption that followed independence, and understands why her sons, a 33-year-old meat packer and 24-year-old taxi driver, hope to soon join the hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians who have emigrated to Western Europe in the last 10 years in search of better wages.

Establishing an independent Lithuania turned out to be messier than anyone expected, says Gintaras Chomentauskas, a prominent Vilnius psychologist.

While the political gains the country has made are unquestionably positive, he says, the psychological cost of such rapid change has been high. Lithuania leads Europe in suicides and accidental deaths, and surveys show citizens lack faith in politicians, police and government institutions.

"A good number of objective studies show that, despite the positive changes that have taken place, a lot of people are miserable."

The past's legacies remain, it seems.