Articles

Why was the distinguishing mark of female genitalia erased from NASA’s 1970s image travelling outer space? And will compromised depictions of life on Earth avoid sexist, racist and anthropocentric simplifications by 2036?

Imperial Russia saw the nation as the sea into which all the other Slavic cultures flowed. The idea persists today not only in Russia’s attitude towards its neighbourhood, but also in the way eastern Europe is studied in the West. A Ukraine scholar pleas for institutional reform.

While book publishing is an ailing industry, children’s books are booming. But political attacks and censorship are also threatening this thriving sector.

João Cabral de Melo Neto’s 1955 verse drama ‘Death and Life of Severino’ accompanies Brazilian migrants in Portugal. Having fled violent crime, they seek freedom yet commonly find a life of servitude and institutional violence, where only art provides solace from poverty and hunger.

France risks becoming ungovernable. While Macron’s autocratic style is much to blame for the current impasse, the fundamental problem lies in the development of the parties and party elites.

Ex-USSR youth pioneer camps – once heavily supervised yet remembered surprisingly positively – have become sites of trauma, where Ukrainian children are being deported en masse, incarcerated and re-educated. The complex legacy that Russia is exploiting encompasses infrastructure, ideology and personal memory, raising questions about the role of individuals in implementing state policy.

Being diagnosed with ADHD can be a relief for those who have struggled long and hard to adopt constraining social norms. For neurodivergent women, masking can lead to poor mental health, substance abuse and hyper-sexuality. Vox Feminae takes a first-hand dive into positive coping mechanisms for the inattentive and/or hyperactive.

When Belarusian society rose up five years ago, the century-old hopes of the national liberation movement seemed close to realization. What remains of those hopes today, particularly for the hundreds of thousands of Belarusians forced into exile by the state’s brutal reaction?

Starling murmurations are more than a hypnotic sight. Studies of their decentralized organization provide insights into life’s equilibrium between order and chaos. Thermodynamics seen through a chemist’s lens suggests intriguing parallels to human brain activity and herd mentality.

Assaults on academic freedoms in the US mirror those happening in Turkey for the past decade. Erdoğan’s silence about clampdowns on pro-Palestinian speech at US universities, even when Turkish scholars are directly affected, is particularly telling.

The Courts have acquiesced, the populace is compliant and the Democratic Party is splintered. Without any way to make their opposition felt, Trump’s opponents’ only hope is that the economy will cause MAGA voters to rethink.

Internal colonialism continues to characterize relations between England and the rest of the United Kingdom. Nowhere is this more evident than in the British Government’s treatment of Northern Ireland, where lesions caused by lingering political indeterminacy have been further exposed by Brexit.

While secularism brings significant advantages, it can be pushed to harmful extremes and in some cases used to disguise racism. But religion, too, is not exempt from that.

Elected in 2022 on a wave of popular hope, Colombia’s leftwing leader Gustavo Petro has failed to negotiate peace with the country’s armed groups and embarked on a ruinous tariff war with Donald Trump. A portrait of the president hampered by his own revolutionary nostalgia.

While Lula has managed to stabilize the Brazilian economy and restore some key social programs, these gains remain fragile under the weight of fiscal conservatism, an uncooperative legislature, and a political environment saturated by disinformation. Were the right not in disarray, his position would be much weaker.

Loneliness is a growing health crisis, and gender norms make men more vulnerable to digitized isolation. An ever-more frictionless online experience erodes young people’s capacity to tolerate frustration and establish lasting ties.