Safeguarding the dubious concept of a ‘European way of life’ has serious implications for migrants. Though indispensable for economic growth, new arrivals, who endure militarized border systems, face a future of privatized detention centres and offshore processing facilities. Could a new focus on common goals provide the necessary end to dehumanizing practices?
Private enterprises founded by diaspora Poles with seed capital from the West produced a range of consumer goods for the domestic market in the late Polish People’s Republic, blowing a ‘wind of change’ into the planned economy over a decade before the transformation.
At one point in his 1984 essay ‘Permission to narrate’, Edward Said described urging family and friends in Beirut to record what was happening during the Israeli siege, in order to tell the world ‘what it was like to be at the receiving end of Israeli “anti-terrorism”’.
Are robots replacing us? For translators, this prospect is quite realistic. Though machine translation can be useful with simple and direct text, it still has a lot to catch up on to eliminate language barriers and understand subtle meanings. Publishing across languages on today’s Standard Time episode.
It is often maintained that the slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ expresses a genocidal and antisemitic intention. But this is generally not the case. On the contrary, the slogan has historically been used to articulate a wide variety of political strategies for Palestinian liberation.
From plov to pilaf, hundreds of versions of the same charismatic dish are a testimony to civilizations and culinary memory, from Central Asia to east and south-east Europe, and across several empires.
For many, Germany’s unconditional support for Israel since 7 October confirms that its memory culture has ‘gone haywire’. But particularly when it comes to German reservations about using terms associated with the Holocaust, postcolonial criticism is often markedly one-sided.
‘Practically every home in Pankisi bears the scars of the Second Chechen War, the Abkhazian War and the Syrian War. Practically every home has ties to the Islamic State.’ In this excerpt from her book ‘Goodbye, Isis: What Remains is Future’, Kateryna Sergatskova travels to the birthplace of Tarkhan Batirashvili, aka Omar al-Shishani, the former IS ‘Minister of War’.
With Islamophobia in France, the repression of LGBTQIA+ rights in Poland, and refugees being pushed back into the sea on the Italian border, we just can’t keep up with the topics defining the European sphere! The latest episode discusses European interests and sentiment.
Biden’s State of the Union speech seems to have proved that he could survive another four years in the White House. But doubts remain whether he can defeat the man whose supporters clearly care little about actual policy.
The immediate need for environmental protection and reparation in war-torn Ukraine has entered the country’s peace plan. Legislative revisions, recognizing ecocide, and thereby advancing the rule of law globally, expand what it means to develop responsible governance of the ecosystems that sustain us.
Europeans have a hard time holding their drink, this continent is topping the drinking charts globally. Is it nature, culture, or a policy issue? We discuss alcoholism on today’s Standard Time.
How do we learn to see? And how do we learn to be seen? Scientific theories layered over centuries, as intellectual history, have shaped and directed perceptions of vision. Contemporary studies on the evolution of sight in children gauge what an increasing dominance of screen visuals is teaching us.
On both sides of the Israel–Palestine conflict, rights of free speech are being violated. Whether the silencing of critics of Hamas in Gaza or repressions against Palestinians in Israel seen to be voicing support for the Palestinian cause, the eradication of dissent will only deepen the conflict.
Last year’s overturning of Roe v. Wade took abortion laws in the US back to the nineteenth century. But despite the enormity of the setback, the moment provides pro-choice campaigners in the US with an opportunity to widen their political aims.
The city is lively but not always liveable. Urban ambience can make one feel free, but polluted air leads to asthma and lung cancer. Car drivers or cyclists, family or industrialists: who does the city belong to? We talk greening cities on today’s episode of Standard Time.