I remember when I was on Any Questions. Of course, I was just another civilian in the audience, not actually on the panel – which included Sadiq Khan and UKIP’s Patrick O’Flynn. My own contribution to the programme was shouting “Liar!” at Chris Grayling as he held forth on privatisation. This was 2013. (More…)
During my residence in Constantinople I had the good fortune to be present at some very entertaining festivities. The most magnificent of these took place on the 23d of April, the anniversary of Mahomet’s death. (More…)
Amid the anti-migration rhetoric of the incoming Trump administration, Preethi Nallu meets resettled families in the midwestern city of St. Louis, whose communities have helped resuscitate areas of their new hometown. (More…)
Verso has recently published a collection of Lewis Lapham’s essays under the title Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy. If a book more apposite to our current situation has been published in the last 18 months I am unaware of it. (More…)
Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. Here are twenty lessons from the twentieth century, adapted to the circumstances of today: (More…)
Many people see the death of Fidel Castro as the end of an era. Yet the Castroite legacy is alive in one form. Cuba has played a key role lending support to national liberation movements around the world. One major site of struggle during this period was Southern Africa. (More…)
Following the recent controversy over Syrians returned from Greece to Turkey, journalist Apostolis Fotiadis examines why it is so hard to hold the European agency Frontex to account for violations of refugees’ rights. (More…)
The new U.S. president wants his Syrian counterpart to stay. Journalist Annia Ciezadlo explains what that’s going to mean for the nearly half of Syrian civilians who are stranded by war. (More…)
Amongst all the frenzied accounting over whom to blame/credit for Donald Trump’s victory, one group has escaped notice – the metalheads. Indeed, there is no evidence that metalheads voted for (or against) Trump (if they voted at all) in greater numbers than anyone else. (More…)
The vast majority of the Protestants of Germany belonged to one of the 28 Landeskirchen (Lutheran, Reformed or Uniate), of which the largest was the Church of the Old Prussian Union, with 18 million members. The Landeskirchen were independent members of the German Evangelical Church Union, founded in 1922. (More…)
The perfect Christian state is not the so-called Christian state – which acknowledges Christianity as its basis, as the state religion, and, therefore, adopts an exclusive attitude towards other religions. On the contrary, the perfect Christian state is the atheistic state, the democratic state, the state which relegates religion to a place among the other elements of civil society. (More…)
At the end of September, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump spent an evening on an all-out Twitter war against former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. The liberal press widely assailed Trump’s late-night fixation as proof of his absurdities and inherent misogyny. (More…)