Articles

Loneliness is a growing health crisis, and gender norms make men more vulnerable to digitized isolation. An ever-more frictionless online experience erodes young people’s capacity to tolerate frustration and establish lasting ties.

Engineered flooding displaces communities, eradicating the landmarks of family histories. When little remains, narratives about who controls water provide telling pointers – feature films raise complex questions about industrialization, linguistic minorities, and matriarchy versus youthful masculinity.

Since the Belavezha Accords were signed in 1991, revanchist politicians and cultural commentators in Russia have lamented the former Soviet Union’s disintegration. Revisiting provocative statements and legislative scheming from the 1990s shows how incremental manoeuvres paved the way for Putin’s colonialist drive disguised as integration.

Forget aliens. Astrobiologists, in search of life on other planets, need first establish what constitutes life on Earth. Should definitions stretch to ‘degrees of life’ – the ‘more’ and ‘less’ alive – like decomposition and viruses? And how many ‘Earth twins’ would it take before enough evolutionary beginnings might reveal life’s mysteries?

A constrained mother tongue is resilient in recalled memory. Those who no longer speak Belarusian tenderly piece together often painful cultural threads, processing trauma to keep their ‘mova’ alive.

The outbreak of the Lebanese civil war fifty years ago inaugurated an era of nation-state collapse in the Arab world. In failing to mediate, the international community carries responsibility for the sense of impotence felt in societies in which violence dominated everything but resolved nothing.

The nexus of radical inequality, social atomization and male victimhood has been exploited before. But why now, on such a scale? To understand the appeal of the far right today we need to examine the origins of the fascist myth of primordial male kinship.

‘The Syrian tragedy cannot be summed up simply as the murder of hundreds of thousands of human beings; it also involved the denial of any meaning to the extreme suffering of the Syrian people.’

Cultural humanitarian aid risks diminishing the complexity of creative work to ethnic kitsch: well-meaning initiatives rate nationality over content. And when the work does receive critical attention, only art that portrays trauma cuts it. Soon thereafter, Western interest fades. Could answers for meaningfully decolonizing Ukraine lie with other formerly colonized communities?

Polish writers are taking publishers to court over bestseller profits. In a book market hindered by dwindling readership and distribution cartels, the writer’s position is the most precarious. If the state supports farmers, priests and entrepreneurs, why not writers? Could reading, the cultural salve in Ukraine, be equally beneficial in Poland?

Should sexual relationships, with all their complications, really be a benchmark of societal acceptance? Vox Feminae investigates the history of asexuality and aromanticism: pathologized by psychologists and medical professionals, even at times minoritized within LGBTQIA+ communities.

European railways are often praised for their comprehensive continental coverage, yet it frequently falls short of meeting the evolving needs of the public. This episode of Standard Time discusses public investment and corruption, and how railway systems could transform.

The Serbian student movement symbolizes a generational shift and national renewal. For the first time in years, people are seeing a future for themselves and their children.

Veganism is rising in countries with the most meat-heavy diets, especially amongst the young. How did this change come about? Standard Time dives deep into the meat-free diet and how an agricultural transition could benefit farmers.

The decisive sex-change moment in movies, revealing a dramatic transformation, is far from reality. Transgender people face not only long assessment and surgery waiting lists but also bureaucratic hurdles when reassigning legal gender across countries, undermining their well-being and safety at a delicate time of becoming themselves.

With geopolitical deadlock and the widening of the conflict, prospects of an end to Israel’s destruction of Gaza are as distant as ever. But momentum for a ceasefire, and even statehood, would likely be stronger were Palestinian political factions not themselves still divided.