Subscription 790/year or 190/quarter

The literature on narcissism has exploded

ESSAY: In 2021, there were 1000 publications on narcissism. Narcissism describes a new social normality. This 'self-realization ideology' has now ended up in selfishness and neoliberalism. But what can account for different degrees of narcissism – is it innate character traits, socialization or cultural background?

Who takes care of the salmon?

ISLAND:Salmon farming is an expanding industry that is fed by several Norwegian investors, and Iceland's biodiversity is in the pot. In scenic Iceland, there is a bitter battle between the farming industry and local activists. The open cages are a ticking bomb for both the environment and animal welfare.

When the truth becomes threatening

JULIAN ASSANGE: Aftenposten had learned from Julian Assange and sucked what they could from his WikiLeaks data universe, and millions of secrets, before quickly throwing him under the bus. Assange created the whistleblowers' perpetuum mobile, WikiLeaks, an unlimited infinity machine of truth where truth whistleblowers all over the world were given the opportunity to reach out – and lift the blankets that hide the lies of power, their war crimes, corruption, tax fraud, hidden bank accounts, fortunes and conspiracies. What now?

'Put peace before victory'

MEMORIAL WORDS: Johan Galtung. Could the 21st century see the abolition of war – just as slavery was abolished in the 19th century and colonialism in the 20th?

What changed Sweden's attitude towards NATO?

ESSAY: Russia's war and the scare campaign that it will be extended to other countries turns out to be just a cover for a policy that, in the long term, intends to tie Sweden more strongly to the US's military geostrategy – primarily through NATO. We take a closer look at one of the people primarily responsible for this development – ​​Defense Minister Pål Jonson.

Death – more or less real

THE REALITY: We perceive reality very differently. Let me therefore suggest three areas where reality is real, strong and direct for all of us. But also what a new translated book by Pier Paolo Pasolini says about the film's contact with reality.
PHILOSOPHY: In the book The Poetics of Reason, Stefán Snævarr goes against a too strict concept of rationality: To live rationally is not only to find the best means to realize one's goals, but also to make life meaningful and coherent. Parts of this work should enter all disciplines concerned with models, metaphors and narratives.
FEMICID: Murders of women do not only occur structurally and not only based on misogynistic motives – they are also largely trivialized or go unpunished.
MEMORIES: Nostalgia has been made into a commercial product that makes the past a constant and pressing presence. Do we really belong in a past tense? Memories are today produced, preserved and managed by commercial actors, by cultural products – which, to say it with Marx, are fetishized. Pop cultural products of the past are recycled, made into collectibles and picture books for the coffee table, sold as retro designs.
THE CLIMATE CRISIS: This book makes all other climate literature seem dangerously anthropocentric. We obviously haven't been very good at monitoring the earthly paradise.
INTELLIGENCE: In the United States, 18 different U.S. agencies at the government level are engaged in intelligence activities. In 1996 there were 6 million decisions to declassify material – by 2016 this had grown to 55 million!
GERMANY: How 'war-ready' should a country be? With a number of top positions in international politics, crisis management and security, security expert Carlo Masala is regarded as an undeniable authority in the field.
ECOLOGY: Ove Jacobsen has created an overview of 55 different green thinkers. In the book we can read that we must move from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric perspective – so that solidarity, cooperation and compassion include all forms of life.
LIBERALISM: Globally and in the West, liberalism is on the retreat. In the West, liberalism has been replaced by an intolerant hyperliberalism, where citizens have problems living side by side with those who think differently.
COMMUNITY: What happens when there is further pressure on falling profit rates brought on by cheaper products for consumers, triggered by greater competition? And with a kind of intensified state control of virtually all socio-economic aspects of life?
ECOLOGY: A tangle of interconnected life. Developments in ecology and technology herald a new Copernican revolution: Language, the bastion of supposed human superiority, also belongs to nature and machines. Can an expanded definition of intelligence improve our relationship with other beings?
SOLIDARITY: For a recipe for an ecological revolution, the subject that can constitute the active social force that can move society towards a radically different future is missing. Radical futurisms are here a new thinking for what may come.
SHAME: The Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg has noble motives for her outbursts against the establishment, but she is also part of a modern trend where shame and shaming have become part of everyday politics and the often dystopian debate on social media. This book takes a closer look at shame.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: In this book, Robert Leib worries that our trust in artificial intelligence could backfire on us. 'Sophie' is a collective consciousness, one 'among many'.
USA: What does it mean to be an American? Who are they, how did they get to where they are today, where have they left cultural traces? Here we see the voices of the civil rights movement that inspired the hippies in the 70s, the champions of gay rights and feminists for several generations.
SUSTAINABLE: A new movement within agriculture that draws on so-called regenerative principles works to increase the humus content, the microbiological life in the soil and cultivate the soil's ability to bind CO2.
SICILY: The poet Joachim Sartorius has written a feather-light book about the magic in the Sicilian city of Syracuse.
JOURNALISM: Gay Talese unfolds in great detail his journalistic method, which most writers could learn a part from. He hates interviewing celebrities.
HIKING: Sylvain Tesson meets us with a harsh critique of everything modern and a tribute to the sublime simplicity of hiking. We rediscover how the local has lived hidden in the age of the global. This is a strong criticism of modernity and the authorities' eagerness to get the country on the modern bandwagon.
ŽIŽEK: Mad World is basically 'Pandemic-3: The Aftermath'. Slavoj Žižek wrote many chronicles, commentaries and film reviews during the covid-19 pandemic. This is his third collection of texts.
ETHNICITY: Maimonides is considered one of the most important Jewish thinkers ever. In his time, the relationship between the Muslim, the Arab and the Jewish was mutually enriching. Rather than viewing the relationship between Jews and Arabs in a polarized way, Maimonides' example shows that their enmity is redundant and intellectually debilitating. The conflict is not about religion, because Judaism and Islam have far too many central similarities.
AFRICA: Disruption opens up for the capitalists a new display of power and new income: People, society and nature are reduced to raw material. The author Achille Mbembe's horizon is always the widest possible – the cosmic, earth-historical and planetary. Africa, despite all harrowing problems, is being called forth as a vibrant world center that still has powers in reserve, a teeming wildlife and a wealth of cultures.
SUBJECTS: Hartmut Rosa points out that today's late modern people react to the flood of information without "developing a stable understanding of what is relevant, of direction and prioritization". But does the well-educated academic here become an ideologue with religion as a weapon against an increasingly purpose-rational world where the economy colonizes the social?
POWER: Is it possible to explain why the resurgence of free market ideas has resulted in persistent unemployment, rising inequality and financial crises? According to Philip Ther, the corona pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine have led to the end of an era – the world as imagined after 1989.
RUSSIA: Mikhail Khodorkovsky discusses Russia's future after Putin and advocates revolution, democracy and fair distribution of resources. It is about achieving a new, open and fair country that can reclaim its place in the international community...

Our ill-fated fate (ANTI-ODIPUS AND ECOLOGY)

PHILOSOPHY: Can a way of thinking where becoming, growth and change are fundamental, open up new and more ecologically fruitful understandings of and attitudes towards the world? For Deleuze and Guattari, desire does not begin with lack and is not desire for what we do not have. Through a focus on desire as connection and connection – an understanding of identity and subjectivity as fundamentally linked to the intermediate that the connection constitutes. What they bring out by pointing this out is how Oedipal desire and capitalism are linked to each other, and to the constitution of a particular form of personal identity or subjectivity. But in this essay by Kristin Sampson, Anti-Oedipus is also linked to the pre-Socratic Hesiod, to something completely pre-Oedipal. MODERN TIMES gives the reader here a philosophical deep dive for thought.

The glow of utopia

PHILOSOPHY: the problem with a hopeful optimism is that it does not take the current climate crisis seriously enough and ends up accepting the state of affairs. But is there a hope and a utopia that hides a creative and critical force? MODERN TIMES takes a closer look at German Ernst Bloch's philosophy of hope. For the German Ernst Bloch, one must rediscover the fire in our concrete experience that anticipates possible futures in the real here and now.

Revisiting the real machine room

NOW: Barely 50 years after the publication of Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the work has not lost its relevance according to the Norwegian magazine AGORA's new theme issue. Anti-Oedipus has rather proved to be a prophetic and highly applicable conceptual toolbox for the examination of a financial and information capitalist contemporary. In this essay, reference is also made to the book's claim that there is no economy or politics that is not permeated to the highest degree by desire. And what about the fascist where someone is led to desire their own oppression as if it meant salvation?

A love affair with the fabric of life

FOOD: This book can be described like this: «A celebration of stories, poetry and art that explores the culture of food in a time of converging ecological crises – from the devouring agricultural machine to the regenerative fermenting jar.»

The art of moving

WITH HUMAN DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL: The Norwegian documentaries Ibelin and Ukjent landskap, both of which have made a strong international impression, tell moving stories about special individuals – but at the same time provide enriching perspectives on our social life. Both films give heartwarming portrayals of a person who is no longer alive, but who has left a strong imprint.

"You can end up with the only peace being the graveyard peace."

MODERN TIMES CONVERSATIONS: We talk to the former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn, the man who could have become Prime Minister of Great Britain, about current issues – such as military rearmament, Ukraine, Israel, climate justice and work, security, democracy, citizens' councils, and not least a hope for the future.

Minorities and mild anarchism

MODERN TIMES CONVERSATIONS: This time we met a fearless activist and anarchist. After a long life, he summarized a thoughtfulness in the areas of anarchism, minorities, fear/violence – and love. Audun Engh was ill when the conversation took place, and died a few months later.

Bilderberg under the cover of Watergate

POWER: Millions of people's lives are affected by what is cooked up in such a nest of robbers as the Bilderberg League – but nothing comes out about the decisions. Just a summary: "The energy crisis and security issues were the most important topics of conversation" – people don't need to know more.

Therefore, the Middle East became a powder keg

50 YEARS AGO: Why has the Middle East been a powder keg for 25 years? What is the background for the irreconcilable attitude between Israel and the Arab states? And what happened to the Palestinian Arabs when the state of Israel was established?

MODERN TIMES: Elisabeth Hoff (WHO)