https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaHcOs7mhfU “We’re on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.” The year is 1999 and David Bowie, in shaggy hair and groovy glasses, has seen the future and it is the Internet. In this short but fascinating interview with BBC’s...
‘Russia’s Orbit: Repression, Murder, War’, Osteuropa’s second consecutive issue devoted to the situation in Russia since its attack on Ukraine just over two years ago, documents the escalatory logic driving the regime of Vladimir Putin toward ever-greater excesses of violence...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj4RBmU-PIo What do you imagine when you hear the phrase “cat piano”? Some kind of whimsical furry beast with black and white keys for teeth, maybe? A relative of My Neighbor Totoro’s cat bus? Or maybe you picture a piano that...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuNkFTGtysw Hayao Miyazaki began his career as an animator in 1963, getting in the door at Toei Animation not long before the company ceased to hire regularly. Miyazaki’s equally retirement-resistant contemporary Tetsuya Chiba, already well on his way to fame...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWBS0GX1s9o Howlin’ Wolf may well have been the greatest blues singer of the 20th century. Certainly many people have said so, but there are other measurements than mere opinion, though it’s one I happen to share. The man born Chester...
When Konrad von Megenberg published his Buch der Natur in the mid-fourteenth century, he won the distinction of having assembled the very first natural history in German. More than half a millennium later, the book still fascinates — not least...
On 2 October 2018 a team of agents dispatched by the Saudi government strangled dissident Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi after he entered the consulate building in Istanbul. The respected journalist’s body was dismembered and, according to Turkish intelligence, dissolved...
It’s easy to dismiss The Monkees. Critics and listeners have been doing it since the sixties, although the band has also come in for its share of reappraisals, particularly for their psych-rock album Head. (That’s the soundtrack from the 1968...
As the dust settles after the 2024 European elections, an air of uncertainty surrounds the European Green Deal, which aims to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. Launched in 2019, the initiative has led to dozens of new...
“The person who hurt us, hurt both of us. But it affected us differently. I isolated myself. I started taking drugs when I was twelve, maybe thirteen. But she just moved on with her life. I could never understand: how...
