CULTURE

Titled ‘Land of the Free?’, Index on Censorship’s summer issue explores how the fundamental freedoms enshrined in the US Constitution – freedom of religion, speech, the press, protest and petition – are being dismantled by the current Trump administration. Alongside...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaOY2btD670 In Toron­to, 7,000 singers par­tic­i­pat­ed in Choir Choir Choir’s trib­ute to Ozzy Osbourne, all tak­ing part in a giant sing-along of “Para­noid.”  The first sin­gle on Black Sab­bath’s sec­ond album (1970), “Para­noid” reached #4 in the UK mar­ket and...

In June 2024, after European elections that were a clear rejection of his party Renaissance, French President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the National Assembly in an act that only cemented his defeat. The centrist coalition Ensemble, in which Renaissance is the...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3IIRiSTc3g As the found­ing myth has it, the city of Rome was estab­lished by a man named Romu­lus, one of two orphaned twin broth­ers raised by a she-wolf on the banks of the Tiber riv­er. The leg­end of Romu­lus and...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJLH7JAsBHA A paint­ing is not thought out and set­tled in advance. While it is being done, it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it’s fin­ished, it goes on chang­ing, accord­ing to the state of mind of who­ev­er is look­ing...

Lis­ten­ing to music, espe­cial­ly live music, can be a reli­gious expe­ri­ence. These days, most of us say that fig­u­ra­tive­ly, but for medieval monks, it was the lit­er­al truth. Every aspect of life in a monastery was meant to get you...

It gets dark before din­ner now in my part of the world, a recipe for sea­son­al depres­sion. Vin­cent van Gogh wrote about such low feel­ings with deep insight. “One feels as if one were lying bound hand and foot at...

The image just above is an ani­mat­ed GIF, a for­mat by now old­er than most peo­ple on the inter­net. Those of us who were surf­ing the World Wide Web in its ear­li­est years will remem­ber all those lit­tle dig­ging, jack­ham­mer­ing...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvFl6UBZLv4 Hin­duism, Judaism, Bud­dhism, Chris­tian­i­ty, Islam.… Claims to ancient ori­gin and ulti­mate author­i­ty notwith­stand­ing, the world’s five major reli­gions are all of recent vin­tage com­pared to the cou­ple hun­dred thou­sand years or more of human exis­tence on the plan­et. Dur­ing...

On 18 February 2025, Ukraine marked three years since the start of Russia’s mass deportations of Ukrainian children, a crime of genocide, according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The date is significant, as it precedes the...