Ten Years After the Summer of 2016
Memory has a way of preserving ambient light while quietly stripping away the context that gave it meaning.(...)
The Scene of a Novel
If you walk down Nádor utca in Budapest today, the grand, light-filled glass and limestone atrium of 15 Nádor still stands.(...)
Lessons for a Post-Brexit Nation
Ten years after Brexit, the UK remains institutionally adrift.(...)
Russia After the Arab Spring
In 2015, I moved to Moscow to spend a year teaching human rights. I lasted five months. As my former students from that time are arrested for protesting the Ukrainian war, here are some reflections on what I learned about the evil of Putin and the kindness of Russians.(...)
Utopia by the Sea
The Russians have struck Odesa again, this time mere hours after reaching a deal with the Ukrainians. Though spared the worst of the war, an attack on Odesa is an attack on the best of Ukrainian and Russophone culture alike.(...)
The Manchester Museum Makes Amends
It was long overdue. But the repatriation of Aboriginal Australian artefacts from the Manchester Museum is a significant step forward in redressing Britain’s violent past. (...)
The Deyan Enev Interview
It’s Not About America
Greenland briefly bubbled up into the global consciousness this summer when Donald Trump’s offer to purchase the country was quickly dismissed as “absurd” by Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. (...)
Susan Sontag’s War
When Zdravko Grebo, a legal scholar at the University of Sarajevo, died this year, it seemed to many Sarajevans the end of an era: the last of his generation, of dissident, socialist anti-fundamentalist Bosnian thinkers who embodied the best of Yugoslav dynamism and spoke to the hope – as Sarajevo has often stood for – that Europe can carve out a space between totalitarianism and late capitalism alike.(...)