“Writers are being made to carry the weight of politicians.”
Tag: Europe
Why Play at Orientalism?
Games like Crusader Kings III build feudalism into their code, and in so doing assert the supremacy of the modern global North.
Energy “Realism” Is Climate Fatalism
Americans may not want to hear this, but it might be best if the US is not the country leading the world through the climate crisis.
Precarity and Struggle: Kafka, Roth, Kraus
In their writings, Kafka, Roth, and Kraus rejected the ideology of rootedness that was rapidly encroaching upon early 20th-century European consciousness.
Minorities and Myths: Antisemitism in Europe after 1919
Why were Jews not free from antisemitism anywhere in interwar Europe, even in places—like the USSR—where it was officially condemned?
J. M. Keynes and the Visible Hands
In 1919, those crafting the fate of postwar Europe wanted their designs to be hidden from view. Fortunately, Keynes had other plans.
How Versailles Still Haunts the World
Middle Eastern borders, democratic defeats, the US War on Terror: all this flows from the Treaty of Versailles, now just over a century old.
Who Killed Nordic Noir?
Scandinavian crime novels once showed how society failed its citizens. Today, the genre innovates differently—by depicting more violence.
Global Inequality and the Corona Shock
COVID-19 is the first truly comprehensive crisis of the Anthropocene era, affecting virtually everyone on the planet.
A Man in Brussels
Storytelling about the European Union tends to be done by those aggressively disinterested in its survival. Isn’t that a problem?
Intellectual Alchemists
What distinguishes the American from the European intellectual? Does that matter?
Whose England? Whose Brexit?
A subplot running through Jonathan Coe’s most recent novel, Middle England, involves a feud between two garish children’s clowns that culminates in a ...
Charlotte Salomon’s Triumphant “No”
Charlotte Salomon’s short life was haunted—by the rise of the Nazis, who ultimately took her life, but also by her family’s history of severe mental illness ...
In Search of No. 70, Adalbertstrasse, Berlin
Bonanza Coffee Roasters is located in a quiet courtyard, tucked away from the hustle of the neighborhood of Kreuzberg in such a way that I completely miss ...
Kafka: The Impossible Biography
The prospect of a new Kafka biography is like an invitation to a party that is bound to be entertaining but may end badly. Situating Kafka’s writing ...
Soccer for Intellectuals
Baseball has Roger Angell. Boxing has A. J. Liebling. Yet soccer, puzzlingly, has no writer of such caliber, no one who has managed to find in the sport a comparably inexhaustible source of literary ...
More Orwell
No political event in memory has been as shocking and bewildering as Donald Trump’s election. It doesn’t seem to belong to our history, the history we had and thought we would go on having. How to ...
The Book That Made Me: Multilingual
Speaking German alongside Spanish seemed as natural as placing scones next to the teapot on the table at teatime …
The Street and the World: Rua do Benformoso, Lisbon
A short walk from Lisbon’s central Baixa district—where tourists flock …
Neoliberalism Misunderstood
Philipp Ther’s lively new book offers a prime case in point for why the term “neoliberalism” is essential to understanding the last 30-odd years ...