“What progress we are making! In the middle ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.” Late in May 1938, an 82-year old Sigmund Freud and his family were in Vienna eagerly awaiting the final details to be sorted before they could leave their country for good. There was no… Read More “I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone” – Sigmund Freud, 1938
One of Adolf Hitler’s most cherished dreams was to build the largest monument ever created. With the guidance of “the chief architect of the Reich” Albert Speer, he planned to remake Berlin around what he saw as the future core of the Germanic empire: the People’s Hall (Volkshalle), a dome that was to be 290… Read More Gastón Gordillo: Nazi Architecture As Affective Weapon
A few days into lockdown, a Facebook notification suggested I join the local Mutual Aid, a community group that helps and provides companionship to the most vulnerable. I thought, fantastic, a focus, and clicked through to the WhatsApp group, desperate for distraction. But the group seemed inactive; there were very few messages. Days and weeks passed… Read More Daniella Isaacs: What my lockdown calls to an old man taught me about laughter, life – and myself
In 1980, hysteria died. That was the year it was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) handbook and ceased to be considered a medical condition. But we need only look around us to see that hysteria has never been more alive – just consider the run on toilet paper at the beginning of the… Read More Marc Schuilenburg: Welcome to the age of hysteria
Three letters: NRA. Beginning in the 1970s, the National Rifle Association transformed itself from a shooting sports organization into a political lobbying arm of the Republican Party. How did we get from a little NRA indoor firing range with .22 target rifles to an entire convention hall filled with weapons of war and nostalgia for… Read More America's gun madness: How guns went from tools to ideology to identity. By LUCIAN TRUSCOTT
NB: Fedor Stepun was a Russian writer, editor, professor, political commentator. In 1922, he. along with over 200 non-communist intellectuals perceived as hostile to the Bolshevik regime. was arrested and ordered to leave the USSR within a week. They included the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, and scores of other academicians, writers, artists, editors of journals etc. DS… Read More Fedor Stepun, 1884-1965
You see, it is just like our Russia. Those devils or demons coming out of the sick and entering into the swine – they are all the festering sores, all the poisonous vapors, all the filth, all the demons and the petty devils accumulated for centuries and centuries in our great, dear, sick Russia…. But… Read More Joyce Carol Oates: Tragic Rites in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed
At the end of last summer, Le Débat, France’s most prestigious intellectual review, accompanied its 40th-anniversary issue with a wholly unexpected announcement: It would cease publication forthwith. Le Débat and its three or four thousand loyal readers had maintained an allegiance to the political left since the Cold War — but the meaning of “left”… Read More Christopher Caldwell: Is This the End of French Intellectual Life?
As an American living in India, I often find myself confused about what to say or think in these sorts of situations. I can recognize that Rihanna probably has no context for the farmers’ protests, other than what she’s read online. Shit–I’ve spent half my life in India, and I’m still not as politically savvy… Read More Reflections of an American living in India…
It was the grown-ups’ turn for presents. Tradition was to do a swap-or-steal gift exchange. I watched as my brother-in-law, a usually mild-mannered man, picked a gift and then shook it at the camera in our direction, a taunting glint in his eye. I looked closer. Whoever had wrapped it had meticulously taped a $2020… Read More Shrestha Singh: I’m A First-Generation Indian American Woman. I Married Into A Family Of Trump Supporters
