After being forced to leave Croatia in 1992 following her criticism of the nationalist regime, the writer and feminist Slavenka Drakulić set out to explain her homeland to a western public. She will be remembered for the moral wisdom and humanity running throughout her work.
Talking with atheists and religious minorities explodes the myth of a homogenous Islamic Republic of Iran. But secular views remain otherwise concealed – some parents hiding their convictions even from children, who may not understand the need to lie for their safety.
Contemporary India cinema depicts everyday lives improvizing ways to overcome a divided society. A Hindu wearing a burqa to meet her Muslim lover becomes symbolic of personal contact surpassing fears of authority – a theme reflective of other cultures where religion and tradition take divisive roles.
Darwin may have convincingly described the origin of species, but he was careful to avoid theorizing on life itself. Bold contemporaries meanwhile publicly pitted spontaneous generation, inspired by ‘the recipe for mice‘, with exhaustive experiments on broth. While Pasteur’s persistence was rewarded, the origin of life remains mysterious to this day.
Winner of the prestigious Yuri Shevelov Prize for ‘Hemingway Knows Nothing’ at age twenty-five, Ukrainian soldier and writer Artur Dron’s relationships with literature and religion have already been tested to the max. In an interview with cultural journal ‘The Ukrainians’, he shares his honest reflections on defining moments that strip back the superfluous.
Which world power’s energy ‘strategy’ will determine our planetary future? Will America’s fossil fuel isolationism be the defining factor, exacerbated by its incoherent war in the Middle East, tipping global oil supplies into chaos? Or will China’s new-level efficiency in rolling out affordable renewable energy products set the bar?
Precarity inflames tensions in Kenya. Youth-led demonstrations from 2024 and 2025 rallied against government corruption, hiked living costs and police brutality. With more than two thirds under 30, commentators portray young Africans as either a threat or a neoliberal dividend. But people-centred, environmental aspirations could be the proffered new wave.
After Orbán’s defeat, Andrej Babiš remains the only member of the Patriots for Europe group with real power. But the Czech leader appears unwilling to succeed Orbán as figurehead of European illiberalism. Whoever emerges to fill the gap, Orbánism remains a political force.
Language in translation calls for all manner of adjustment from one culture to another. Georgian, from the unique family of Kartvelian languages, presents all manner of challenges and advantages: namely non-gendered grammar, single-word sentences and a tense especially for gossiping.
From Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin to Rachel Carson, Murray Bookchin and André Gorz: the anarchist tradition understands ecology not as top-down conservation, but as practice of cohabitation.
For the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, the essence of bullshit was not the intention to deceive but ‘indifference to how things really are’. But does that make bullshit worse than lies? Are we not all, sometimes, bullshitters?
Since 2020’s ‘revolution with a female face’, Lukashenka has ramped up his neo-Soviet family policy while continuing to persecute women disobedient to his regime.
Despite a transatlantic exchange of far-right ideology, material interests are what bind the international of nationalists. Why transatlantic patterns in far-right strategy do not add up to a rightwing populist tide.
Starving ethnic Ukrainians and Moldovans, fleeing 1930s collectivisation, became controversial refugees in Romania – if, that is, they survived Soviet riverside gunfire. The international press and politicians expressed outrage – until the Nazi regime became a greater threat, leaving Holodomor sufferers overshadowed by distant enthusiasm for Stalin’s Five-Year Plan.
Putting food on tables throughout Estonia’s Soviet era into nascent capitalism relied heavily on self-provisioning. Collectivisation’s ideological petro-chemical drive made retro modernity a repeated necessity. A family-orientated culture of small-scale farming became the staple of migratory generations and national productivity.
Originally an expression of minority awareness, the term ‘woke’ has been forced into a cultural corner. The European far right’s instrumentalization of difference as a threat to national identity leaves immigrants, Romani, Muslims, LGBTQIA+ people in an increasingly vulnerable position. How could this entrenched culture war be infused with democratic vitality?