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.
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’.
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.
Thirty years on from the Srebrenica massacre, how The Netherlands has failed to acknowledge the ‘moral truth’ of the victims. Also: perspectives on the fascism debate; and why society needs a conversation about dying.
Borders and boundaries in the Soviet order: How the rhetoric of borderlessness hid imperial practices. Also: filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky and the metaphysics of oil; and Andrei Sinyavsky’s literature of delinquency.
In Wespennest: On the definition of hyper-complex systems; why keeping it simple is not always good political communication; how complexity became the hallmark of the musical avant-garde; and how new genres and platforms are making our interaction with literature more complex than ever.
springerin looks back on 30 years of art and cultural criticism: including Boris Buden on the benevolent westernizer; Yvonne Volkart on altered artistic landscapes; Süreyyya Evren on spaces of conflict; and Hans-Christian Dany on illusions of subjectivity.
Ord&Bild revisits the Fogelstad Citizen School for Women and its role in the Swedish women’s movement. With articles on prominent alumni, including working-class feminist writer Moa Martinson; modernist artist and sculptor Siri Derkert; and pedagogue and civil rights campaigner Karin Stenberg.
In Varlık: how northern cultural hegemony is being challenged by Bollywood, Korean television dramas, K-pop and Nollywood; also, post-emotional human relationships and the aesthetics of uncertainty.
In La Revue nouvelle: Why peace in Lebanon requires understanding Hezbollah; which way the Iranian regime will turn; and whether more international law means greater lawfulness.
In rekto:verso: what the body of the action hero says about relations of power; why yoga’s discourse of accessibility rings hollow; and whether fitness practitioners should really be reading Mishima.
Esprit revisits the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty: including Guillaume Le Blanc on ‘incarnation’; Corine Pelluchon on eco-phenomenology; and Judith Revel on Merleau-Ponty, ‘the eternal runner-up’.
Osteuropa at 100: Manfred Sapper on the history of the journal from Weimar to the present; Gerd Koenen on a century of German–Russian projections; Katharina Raabe on eastern European literature in translation; Dorothea Redepenning on the bilateral politics of classical.
How disenchantment with government has fuelled necropolitics; statue mania in the age of empire; and a conversation about censorship, self-censorship and Palestine.
The Taliban’s persecution of musicians in Afghanistan; how performing the wrong songs became deadly in Turkey; a fresh wave of repressions against popular music in Cuba; and the stigmatization of drill in the UK.
Problematic tech philosophies: How ‘effective altruism’ and ‘longtermism’ have permeated the highest echelons of academia and government; the ethical concerns surrounding brain-computer interfaces; and enduring obsessions with the blood transfusion.