In Russian the word for ‘border’, granitsa, carries a range of meanings which blur its definition as a territorial and administrative demarcation line. They include boundary, borderland, limit, margin, confine, threshold, littoral and frontier. The first syllable, gran’, translated as...
July marks the 30th anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica, which saw more than 8,000 men and boys massacred by Bosnian Serb forces. But what exactly will The Netherlands be commemorating? In The Dutch Review of Books, Guido Snel argues...
We live in the era of polycrisis, where ‘the horsemen of the apocalypse have to be dealt with together’. The June issue of Vikerkaar looks at crises ranging from the disruption of education by AI to national security anxieties in...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhvoInEsCI0 One of the most propulsive forces in our social and economic lives is the rate at which emerging technology transforms every sphere of human labor. Despite the political leverage obtained by fearmongering about immigrants and foreigners, it’s the robots who are...
The decisive sex-change moment in movies, revealing a dramatic transformation, is far from reality. Transgender people face not only long assessment and surgery waiting lists but also bureaucratic hurdles when reassigning legal gender across countries, undermining their well-being and safety...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDBybzbVzZ0 Most Dylanologists disagree about which is the single greatest song in Bob Dylan’s catalog, but few would deny “Blind Willie McTell” a place high in the running. It may come as a surprise — or, to those with a...
Funny how not that long ago coloring books were considered the exclusive domain of children. How times have changed. If you are the sort of adult who unwinds with a big box of Crayolas and pages of mandalas or outlines of...
Since the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023, Israel has been waging what is widely considered by legal experts, politicians and activists to be a genocidal war in Gaza. Official statistics estimate that 55,000 Palestinians have been killed and over...
Photo courtesy of Washington State University. It’s become fashionable, in recent years, to observe that we live in an increasingly beige-and-gray world from which all color is being drained. Whether or not that’s really the case, all of us still...
The story of coffee goes back to the 13th century, when it came out of Ethiopia, then spread to Egypt and Yemen. It reached the Middle East, Turkey, and Persia during the 16th century, and then Europe during the early...
