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.

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.»

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.

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.

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?

PHOTO: Frida Kahlo was at the center of a sophisticated international circle of artists, actors, diplomats and film directors. In Mexico, she was early on a tehuana – a symbol of an empowered woman who represents a different ideal of women than that rooted in traditional marianismo. But can we also see the female stereotypes 'whore' and 'madonna' in one and the same person?

ESSAY: The Bible, according to Erwin Neutzsky-Wulff: The testaments in the Bible are related to a "peculiar mixture of Babylonian mythology, myths, and historical falsification". For him, no religion has produced as many monstrous claims as Christianity, and none has taken the same for self-evident truths to the same extent. Neutzsky-Wulff is fluent in ten languages ​​and claims that no external world is opposed to the internal. Moreover, with a so-called subjective 'I' we are prisoners in a somatic prison. Possible to understand?

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.

FOOD SAFETY: Fiction and reality in EU agricultural policy: The chemical industry and lobbying companies such as Copa-Cogeca and CropLife Europe delayed and derailed the EU's Farm to Fork strategy. In total, the lobbying contracts were worth over 50 million euros in 2020–2023. In November 2023, the SUR law (Sustainable Use Regulation) was stopped and voted down in the European plenary meeting in Strasbourg. What happened?

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?

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.

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.

PSYCHOLOGY: Is it possible to value your own time when you are struggling to make ends meet? Can the fear of an energy crisis be lessened by a fairer distribution? And can knowledge of intelligence beyond that of humans alleviate our times' uncertainty and sense of isolation?

SICILY: The poet Joachim Sartorius has written a feather-light book about the magic in the Sicilian city of Syracuse.