Tag
Europe
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Style and Politics: On “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America”
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America may have its longest life as a particularly vivid example of the ways in which bad faith will always manifest in terrible prose.
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Lotte Eisner Needs to Fly
Early in Werner Herzog’s 2006 film Rescue Dawn, German-born American fighter pilot Dieter Dengler (played by Christian Bale), shot down and held captive by the Vietcong, is given the choice to put his signature to a statement denouncing the war and the “corrupt American political establishment” in exchange for an early release. Dengler refuses, telling…
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Gallantry, Ishiguro-Style
Quaintness is history defanged, a past we render harmless by declaring it naive. It’s a form of retrospection somewhere between a sneer in the rearview mirror and longing’s backward glance, one modernity reserves for the ideals—and idealists—of a bygone age. Arthurian England has often received this aesthetic markdown on last season’s ethical attire. It’s an…
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The Audre Lorde Archive: Kreuzberg, Berlin
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. 1. The Chocolate Factory Women’s Center. The Schokoladenfabrik. In the basement, the Hamam, a women’s-only Turkish bathhouse. On the second floor, furniture-building workshops take place. 2. Walking there each morning, I begin to recognize young families by their…
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Reading Charlie Hebdo across the Atlantic
Like many French citizens, I have never purchased a copy of Charlie Hebdo, the provocative satirical newspaper whose cartoonists were tragically massacred by jihadists earlier this year. A struggling publication with a limited readership, Charlie Hebdo has received extensive attention lately due to its willingness to publish caricatures of the prophet Muhammad that some people…
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Far Outside and Deep Within:More Novels on World War II
Even in the paroxysm of publishing around the centennial of the First World War last year, novels about the Second World War dominated, as they usually do, historical fiction about the 20th century. In honor of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in 2015, I binge-read a slew of books published…
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“It’s When There Are a Lot of Them That There Are Problems”
The sorrow and outrage provoked by the attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were underwritten by an all-too-familiar grand narrative: These were not the cowardly misdeeds of a group of disaffected and delusional youth; this was another instantiation of a primeval war of civilizations extending far beyond the Île-de-France. Accordingly, grandiose statements about…
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The History and Philosophy of Adventure
We often think of adventure—it’s hard to avoid, saturated as the culture is with film, television, and books that place it at their center. But what adventure is, what it means to pursue it, and what its pursuit means to us have all changed significantly over time. In these two essays, which we publish in…
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Morality and the Italian Civil War: An Interview with Stanislao Pugliese
After more than 20 years, Claudio Pavone’s A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance, recognized as a masterpiece of Italian historiography, has been translated into English. Stanislao Pugliese, professor of history at Hofstra University, edited this 700-page magnum opus and added a detailed introduction, making available for the first time to the American…
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The Piketty Effect: Part 2
Back in November, we began our first collaboration with the French online journal La Vie des Idées, to examine what we call “The Piketty Effect.” Our first pair of essays, by American sociologist Erik Olin Wright and French economist Nicolas Frémeaux, address the questions of class that remain inchoate in Piketty’s work and detail how…
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Sketches of Spain 1: A Vegan Bunny in Barcelona
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Via Laietana, one of the biggest streets in Barcelona, a city where making or participating in grafitti warrants a 2,000 Euro fine, runs all the way to the sea. Just the other night, several young people dressed in…
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Invasion of the Funny Animals
“Funny Animals” is a genre of comics that is, like most things in comics, inappropriately named. Just as “comics” are quite often not comic and “graphic novels” are rarely novels, comics featuring anthropomorphic animals are only occasionally funny …
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Eating Galettes in Rennes
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. The sky above Rennes spits gentle rain. In French we call this crachin, from the verb cracher, meaning to spit. Brittany is harsh. It has the pointed chin of a witch, jabbing out into the Atlantic Ocean on…
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The Art of Extraction: An Interview with Jean-Claude Carrière
Acclaimed French screenwriter and novelist Jean-Claude Carrière has had a career spanning more than 50 years and 90 writing credits, including the adapted screenplay for 1979’s The Tin Drum, which won both the Palme d’Or and Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for that year, and many films directed by Luis Buñuel. One of…
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Knausgaard’s Novel Degree Zero
Proustian epiphanies happen all the time, particularly to children, and they don’t necessarily add up to much.
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The Market and the Fest
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. In the rural villages of southern Germany, the rain rolls in breakers down the hills, curving along the little streets, stretching its path in tiny rivulets, dampening window box gardens. The villagers are so efficient: on the highways…
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The Road to the Holy Mountain
Twenty years ago, I stumbled upon one of the most unusual places on earth. A young student of logic, I was attending a workshop in Thessaloniki with extra time to spare, and the teacher suggested that I go to Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain. He would organize a pilgrim’s pass since the peninsula was an…
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The Correctionists
One of the most widespread diseases is diagnosis. —Karl Kraus For an American audience, the first reaction to the publication of Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project is presumably: who is Karl Kraus? A quick survey reveals only a handful of English-language translations of this Viennese author, who lived from 1874 to 1936. Even academics with…
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Russia Is No More
The future of Europe recedes far into the past, into a medieval world where Russia no longer exists—at least according to Vladimir Sorokin’s latest sci-fi marvel, Telluria (published in Russian in 2013, not yet translated into English). Sorokin, the bad boy of Russian letters, is one of the country’s most talked-about writers. His trademark blend…
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Reading Social Democracy in Translation
It wasn’t so long ago that Scandinavia seemed very far away from London and New York. But steady doses of Dogme films and Ikea furniture over the last decades have prepared the way for a swell in the Anglo-American uptake of Danish television, Nordic noir, high-end Scandinavian design, and more. Such is the increased traffic…
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Is She the Future of Germany?
Olga Grjasnowa’s novel Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (recently translated by Other Press as All Russians Love Birch Trees) was published to considerable acclaim in Germany in 2012. The book was widely celebrated for its almost documentary ability to describe the vicissitudes of a younger generation of Germans, many of multiethnic backgrounds. Belonging…
