https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHy9FOblt7Y Several years ago, we brought you a transcription and a couple of audio interpretations of the oldest known song in the world, discovered in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit and dating back to the 14th century B.C.E.. Likely...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw Given the dominance YouTube has achieved over large swathes of world culture, we’d all expect to remember the first video we watched there. Yet many or most of us don’t: rather, we simply realized, one day in the mid-to-late...
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...
