Whether billionaires or bankrupts, Americans who pursue excess risk isolation: the national obsession with amassing dollars leaves tycoons alienated and destitute socialites pitied. D. H. Lawrence’s short story of fanatical money-making points to the hallucination of riches bringing love and happiness.
Articles
While civilizational rhetoric in the West reflects a sense of threat, globally it is recognition-seeking. Common to all civilizationalisms, however, is a blurring of the distinction between authoritarianism and democracy.
As propagandists of a patriarchal order, tradwives perpetrate harm. But harm is being enacted on tradwives too. So why do some feminists see tradwifery as self-empowerment?
The glorification of storytelling to define who we are or save the planet induces aversion in some: philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the obsession ‘story-selling’. Do digitally packaged stories restrict how we perceive our often rambling, fragmentary lives? Could alternatives be found in open, porous and incomplete narratives, even when confronting death?
Recommended topics
The guarded approach of this year’s Berlin Biennale towards expressions of pro-Palestinian solidarity left artists and art public alike with the sense that what is currently permissible in Germany’s cultural sector is not enough.
Democracy in the US is under threat from within. Racial nationalism – a throwback to unresolved tensions from the American Civil War – has found new impetus under Trump, forcing civic nationalism into a corner. Will the immutable longevity of the American Constitution be its paradoxical undoing? And how might the US recover from its emerging dictatorship?
Russian art museums and galleries, navigating Putin’s censorship, either conform or risk closure. Dissenting cultural workers are sacked, artists arrested. Pro-war propaganda is both sardonically replacing exhibitions once celebrating Soviet Ukraine in Russia and eradicating Ukrainian culture in the occupied territories.
“Come Together” is founded on the principles of partnership and peer-to-peer learning among individuals within community media organizations situated in six different countries. Instead of generating entirely new knowledge, the initiative aims to unearth and leverage the existing wisdom residing within these organizations to foster innovative approaches.
Eurozine review
Truth, trust & tricksters
Index on Censorship 3/2025
How AI is changing the nature of censorship; artificial intelligence versus historical truth; revisiting the UK government’s response to 7/7; missing Palestinians from this year’s Berlin Biennale.
Bankrupt
Wespennest 189 (2025)
Bankruptcy in nineteenth-century parables of capitalism; billionaires, bankruptcy and the American obsession with money; and why the refusal to accept the end makes life worse.
Spending time with the dead
Ord&Bild 2-3/2025
Parables of violence; memories of dictatorship; perversions of memory: Ord&Bild samples contemporary Latin American literature and photography.
Focal points
Post-revolutionary Ukrainian society displays a unique mix of hope, enthusiasm, social creativity, collective trauma of war, radicalism and disillusionment. With the Maidan becoming history, the focal point ‘Ukraine in European Dialogue’ explores the new challenges facing the young democracy, its place in Europe, and the lessons it might offer for the future of the European project.
Inspired by a lecture that Clifford Geertz delivered in 1995 at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, this focal point engages with ‘deep diversity’, ‘a sense of dispersion, of particularity, of complexity and of uncenteredness’ rather than unified world order. It follows the launch of a research programme of the same name at the institute in January 2023.
Food and water systems under pressure: as the end of abundance becomes an everyday experience in Europe, we are thinking more closely about how our food reaches the table.
Some observers, recalling the disasters of the 1920s and 30s, are suggesting that an anti-democratic counterrevolution on a global scale has begun. But is the writing really on the wall? Or does declinism prevent us from recognizing moments of democratic renewal?
Eurozine Network
Eurozine monitors upcoming funding opportunities on the international level relevant to cultural journalists, such as translation funds, mobility grants and project funding.