First posted January 26, 2017 Three forces carved the landscape of my life. Two of them crushed half the world. The third was very small and weak and, actually, invisible. It was a shy little bird hidden in my rib cage an inch or two above my stomach. Sometimes in the most unexpected moments the… Read More Heda Margolius Kovaly (1919-2010) : Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968
He and I had quarreled. A quarrel doesn’t matter – even if those who quarrel never see each other again – just another way of living together without losing sight of one another in the narrow little world that is allotted us. It didn’t. keep me from thinking of him, from feeling that his eyes… Read More Jean-Paul Sartre: Tribute to Albert Camus (February 1960)
First posted March 27, 2012 ‘Do you know’, Napoleon once said to Fontanes, ‘what astounds me most about the world? The impotence of force to establish anything. There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind. In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind’ Conquerors, you see, are sometimes… Read More Albert Camus: The Almond Trees (1940)
First posted December 10, 2012 From the Socialist Register, 1974 Dear Edward Thompson Why I am not very happy about this public correspondence is because your letter deals as much (at least) with personal attitudes as with ideas. However I have no personal accounts to settle either with Communist ideology or with the year 1956;… Read More My Correct Views on Everything: Leszek Kolakowski’s correspondence with E. P. Thompson (1974)
First posted December 05, 2016 In honour of Adam Zagajewski being awarded the 2016 Jean Améry Prize for European essay writing, Eurozine publishes Zagajewski’s defence of ardour. That is, true ardour, which doesn’t divide but unifies; and leads neither to fanaticism nor to fundamentalism. We’re left with the impression that the present day favours only… Read More Adam Zagajewski: A defence of ardour
Albert Camus speech at Uppsala University; on December 14, 1957, four days after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. In Create Dangerously: The Power and Responsibility of the Artist; he argued “To create today means to create dangerously. Every publication is a deliberate act, and that act makes us vulnerable to the passions of a… Read More Albert Camus: Create Dangerously (1957)
By CELIA VIGGO WEXLER I don’t understand the adulation that some Italian-Americans continue to bestow on Christopher Columbus, who, as history demonstrates, was less a hero than a thug, exploiting and enslaving indigenous peoples. But the real culprit behind the subjugation of non-European peoples across the globe wasn’t an individual, or even a monarch. It was the… Read More Columbus was a thug. But the church was the big problem
There Are Places In The World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness By Carlo Rovelli Reviewed by Pratik Kanjilal “To hear a cultivated person of today joking almost boastfully that they are completely ignorant about science is as depressing as hearing a scientist bragging that they have never read a poem,” writes the Italian… Read More A mind without borders
Andrew Roth in Moscow and Pjotr Sauer The victims were ordinary Ukrainians: those who died at the busy intersection of Volodymyrska and Shevchenko streets in Kyiv, at a downtown playground, or the hundreds of thousands now in homes without light, water and heat in cities across the country due to a barrage of Russian cruise missiles. But… Read More Genocidal maniac Putin launches mass strikes on Ukraine
Donald Trump has had the urge to crush many things, including the last election. So I must admit I found it eerily amusing that, when the FBI entered his estate at Mar-a-Lago recently, they did so under a warrant authorized by the Espionage Act of 1917. History certainly has a strange way of returning in our world and also… Read More Adam Hochschild: The Crushing of American Socialism
