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Category: Current Preoccupations
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Looting and desire
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France is now officially a country of malcontents. To make sense of the chaos of conflicting interests and threats, I read and listened to dozens of interpretations, but none added…
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Sensible and sensibility
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Jane Austen is my alpha and my omega, so last weekend, I went to see the new Sense and Sensibility adaptation directed by Georgia Oakley, with Daisy Edgar-Jones as Elinor Dashwood and…
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Folie
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Parting (2025) Sebastian Haffner (W&N, translated by Michael Hofmann) We need to talk about it because a) Haffner is a first-rate writer; b) there’s been hardly any coverage, but believe…
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Election, Latvian-style
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On the morning of 3 October, a friend I hadn’t heard from in a long time called. The question was right there again: who to vote for? I had already…
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Vignetting is like playing TIME’S UP
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I love to play TIME’S UP*, especially the third round when we have to rely only on gestures, mimics and sounds to make our team guess the answers. Your body…
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The bar across the street
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Last week, I went every morning for breakfast to the perfect bar. You stood at the counter for your shot of coffee; the other customers all greeted the owner by…
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Shepherds of Europe!
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They’d put me on a float. It was midnight. A tractor hauled me and some twenty-five villagers into the woods. We were going to cut down a tree. I’d had…
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Gone woke
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Sitting at the border of Oostende’s North Sea coast is a Napoleon-era hippodrome – normally home to horses and 90’s nostalgia bands from the surrounding Flemish countryside – except for one…
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Interview with Sofia Wadensjö Karén
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Across Europe radical voices are growing and cultivated in bubbles. Left, right, surprising new populist combinations: public broadcasters try to guard neutrality amidst this playfield. In Sweden, no less exposed…
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Beyond Bedlam
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In August 1843, the English painter Richard Dadd stabbed his father to death. The Egyptian sun god Osirus told him to. Dadd, an ambitious and accomplished young artist, had returned…
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Project a black planet: the art and culture of pan-Africa
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Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, born in London in 1977, is one of the best British artists alive today. Enigmatic, mischievous, troubling, her work comprises rich, densely scrabbled Old Master-like oil portraits of…
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To what extent are we part of Mark Zuckerberg?
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I started reading « The future is for everyone; the path to a positive AI future », an essay by Mark Zuckerberg, the intellectual equal of Elon Musk, « We are fortunate…