Languages’ similarities are not rooted in a special genetics for language. They follow from culture and common information-processing solutions and have their own individual evolutionary stories. Daniel Everett, How Languages Began Nothing great can be expressed in Belarusian, it...
Historians are generally wary of commemorations – fireworks that dazzle the eye only to fade in the same instant. But they are also aware that ‘round number anniversaries’ can provide a unique opportunity to think about contemporary societies in their...
Ever since Donald Trump’s victory in last year’s US presidential election, there has been frantic speculation about what it is the American Right really wants. The tendency is to look to the leadership for clues. Who belongs to the inner...
The Syrian writer, journalist and dissident Yassin al-Haj Saleh is one of the most prominent voices of the Syrian Revolution. Imprisoned as a communist by the Hafez al-Assad regime from 1980 to 1996, after his release he became an influential...
The following text is a chapter from Decolonising Art: Beyond the Obvious (2025), a publication that summarizes and documents a public programme of the same name from the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale....
Every year in Poland we ritualistically lament the country’s low-level readership, but we are yet to see the state take any meaningful action. What are the consequences of this lack of regulation, when readership is clearly not important enough for...
The student protests in Serbia have persisted for seven months, yielding widespread and diverse effects. All state universities are still blocked and primary and secondary school teachers ceased work from January to April 2025. Lawyers went on strike throughout the...
Since the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023, Israel has been waging what is widely considered by legal experts, politicians and activists to be a genocidal war in Gaza. Official statistics estimate that 55,000 Palestinians have been killed and over...
Bundesheer poster, Vienna, 30 November 2024. Image by Sarah Waring The poster needed a double take: three action-ready figures dressed in fatigues could have easily been advertising a film rather than the Armed Forces. Having never seen military propaganda on...
All people are intellectuals but not everyone in society is given the role of intellectual Antonio Gramsci Chaussée Ménilmontant barricade, Paris Commune, 18 March 1871. Image via Wikimedia Commons J.L. J.L. is a poet and lives in a house owned...
