Why was the distinguishing mark of female genitalia erased from NASA’s 1970s image travelling outer space? And will compromised depictions of life on Earth avoid sexist, racist and anthropocentric simplifications by 2036?
Articles
Imperial Russia saw the nation as the sea into which all the other Slavic cultures flowed. The idea persists today not only in Russia’s attitude towards its neighbourhood, but also in the way eastern Europe is studied in the West. A Ukraine scholar pleas for institutional reform.
France risks becoming ungovernable. While Macron’s autocratic style is much to blame for the current impasse, the fundamental problem lies in the development of the parties and party elites.
Neither here nor there
Brazilian migrant slavery in Portugal
João Cabral de Melo Neto’s 1955 verse drama ‘Death and Life of Severino’ accompanies Brazilian migrants in Portugal. Having fled violent crime, they seek freedom yet commonly find a life of servitude and institutional violence, where only art provides solace from poverty and hunger.
Recommended topics
While book publishing is an ailing industry, children’s books are booming. But political attacks and censorship are also threatening this thriving sector.
Being diagnosed with ADHD can be a relief for those who have struggled long and hard to adopt constraining social norms. For neurodivergent women, masking can lead to poor mental health, substance abuse and hyper-sexuality. Vox Feminae takes a first-hand dive into positive coping mechanisms for the inattentive and/or hyperactive.
Instrumentalizing summer camps
From the Soviet Union to Russia’s war against Ukraine
Ex-USSR youth pioneer camps – once heavily supervised yet remembered surprisingly positively – have become sites of trauma, where Ukrainian children are being deported en masse, incarcerated and re-educated. The complex legacy that Russia is exploiting encompasses infrastructure, ideology and personal memory, raising questions about the role of individuals in implementing state policy.
“Come Together” is founded on the principles of partnership and peer-to-peer learning among individuals within community media organizations situated in six different countries. Instead of generating entirely new knowledge, the initiative aims to unearth and leverage the existing wisdom residing within these organizations to foster innovative approaches.
Eurozine review
Liberty on the line
Index on Censorship 2/2025
Free speech in the US: how book bans are targeting independent thought; why Trump’s assault on education imitates Erdoğan’s; what the closure of Radio Free Asia means for the region’s information space; and how American liberals can learn from Soviet dissidents.
Philosophy and the bomb
Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 8/2025
Karl Jaspers, Günther Anders and the nuclear dichotomy; how Israel’s allies have abandoned the Iranian opposition; and EU asylum policy ten years on from ‘Wir schaffen das’.
Crises past and present
Vikerkaar 6/2025
Vikerkaar on why grey rhinos are riskier than black swans when it comes to epochal crises; how the Estonian government averted a crisis of state by crushing fascism in 1934; and why Estonia’s AI enthusiasm may provoke a crisis of education.
Focal points
The European Parliament elections on 9 June are a referendum on EU policy since 2019. Will voters give Europe the green light for further progress, or pull the brakes? A new Eurozine series measures the political atmosphere in the EU and its neighbourhoods at this crucial moment.
Food and water systems under pressure: as the end of abundance becomes an everyday experience in Europe, we are thinking more closely about how our food reaches the table.
Post-revolutionary Ukrainian society displays a unique mix of hope, enthusiasm, social creativity, collective trauma of war, radicalism and disillusionment. With the Maidan becoming history, the focal point ‘Ukraine in European Dialogue’ explores the new challenges facing the young democracy, its place in Europe, and the lessons it might offer for the future of the European project.
Some observers, recalling the disasters of the 1920s and 30s, are suggesting that an anti-democratic counterrevolution on a global scale has begun. But is the writing really on the wall? Or does declinism prevent us from recognizing moments of democratic renewal?
Eurozine Network
Eurozine monitors upcoming funding opportunities on the international level relevant to cultural journalists, such as translation funds, mobility grants and project funding.