"The ABC of the Revolution"
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...
Anti-materialism and anti-consumerism
POETRY: The social criticism of poet Angkarn Kalayanapong can be so caustic that he is said to repel Thai readers, where he rages against Western influence, against prostitution, destruction of nature, substandard urban planning, greed and corruption.
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.
Gaza: Right to defend itself?
AVERAGE: What about Gaza and the media? WikiLeaks was early on an important source for revelations about Israel. The dream of driving all non-Jews out of ancient Palestine governed Israel's policy long before there was a Hamas.
How is peace created?
PEACE WORK: War is contempt for life came at a time when peace thinking and oppositional thoughts are in worse shape than they have been for a long time.
The war
FRED: Linn Stalsberg identifies in his new book that accepting war as a human normal state is one of the great danger signals today. We have become accustomed to the idea that war is a necessity, and that war can be morally required on top of that. At the same time, religion is often used cynically as a tool to promote a warlike development – this extends from Pope Urban to Putin and Netanyahu to Hamas.
Ukraine: Unprovoked invasion?
AVERAGE: What about Ukraine and the media? Here, as with Assange, the point is that we must be assured that the authorities manage the truth.
Being in the opposing position
ŽIŽEK: Despite the fact that he has been a public intellectual for at least 30 years, there has never before been such a multifaceted and nuanced discussion of Slavoj Žižek's thinking as the one we see in the current anthology. But does Žižek recognize the revolutionary potential of desire?
Doesn't the ground hurt, brother?
ANIMALS: Ethically speaking, we are way overtime with our treatment of the non-human animals. Many of these have emotions such as fear, pity and sadness. We shouldn't eat animals, but what if we get sick from not doing so?
Personal and impressionistic war pictures
NORWEGIAN GAME FILM: 83-year-old Knut Erik Jensen is back with Longing for the present. A film that does not fit neatly into the ranks of modern Norwegian blockbusters about the Second World War.
Criticism as a role-playing game?
LITERATURE: The informal contexts where one could try and fail without having to stand up for every careless word have shrunk. In Eirik Vassenden's 229-page book about the critic, there are no fewer than 317 question marks. We also ask: Do literary scholars necessarily have any advantage when it comes to human knowledge, life experience or social understanding?
The Other – as a suffering being?
PHILOSOPHY: Wolfram Eilenberger describes here the struggle four philosophers – Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand and Simone Weil fought to become independent people. The book succeeds well in putting them in context with the current events they got involved in and at the same time tried to get out of.
To bring thinking as close to life as possible
NIETZSCHE: Once it was faith in a God or a political party, today it is faith in work, consumption and the economy – that is, myself. According to Gilles Deleuze, what can one learn from Nietzsche?
The nature/human web
ANTHROPOCEN: The combined effects of our environmental impact have become a force on a par with volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, ice ages, floods and droughts. Can the 'anthropocene' as a concept, time phase and reality be interpreted at the intersection between (natural) science and politics today?
The animals in our world of fables and symbols
NATURE:How the world has looked from the animals' point of view – how mammals, reptiles, insects, birds and fish have reacted to us – has been absent from our imaginary world. When nature seemed threatening, it had to be fought.
Have we as a civilization now perhaps met ourselves at the door?
IDENTITY: Do we all have a form of doppelganger that expresses our most extreme thoughts and attitudes? In this book, Naomi Klein takes a special stand with her own people group: the Jews.
In our blind spot
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Sci-fi could help us see our own times, but now we are sci-fi. Computer screens are icons of our time. Inga Strümke just received the Brage prize for this year's non-fiction book.
"Her hands were a road / of breathing trees"
POETRY: Kosmos' baby by Gunnar Wærness, and Collection by Erling Kittelsen are two books that have a similarity in how they extend away from the personal (author) self and borrow voices from the environment. The latter makes fun of the cultural tourist and New Age consumer who attends evening classes in Sufism one month and shamanic drumming the next.
The global cloud capitalism
CAPITALISM: 'Techno-feudalism' is a global expansion with an all-consuming, limitless development of non-material phenomena. Here, social democracy can no longer make any difference, according to Yanis Varoufakis in this book.
Rehabilitation of the Marcos dynasty
PHILLIPINES: Economist JC Punongbayan debunks many of the myths that allowed the Marcos dynasty to retake the presidential palace in the Philippines 50 years after former dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. – a regime at least as brutal as Pinochet's Chile. For example, systematic use of disappearances, political executions, and widespread torture of activists and dissidents.
Samangan province has 438 inhabitants, spread over 000 communities that are without water, electricity...
AFGHANISTAN: We bring here Francesca Borri's reportage from Dara-i-Suf in Afghanistan – a land of families and alliances of families.
About appreciating life
PHILOSOPHY: In this book, cosmic gratitude is related to the attitude of humility.
Because we live in the age of the demanded, the scorned, the translated, the misunderstood, the violated and the oppressed.
Recent art activist projects
activism: The growing part of contemporary art intervenes in ongoing political debates and uses the relative autonomy of art as a starting point for art activist interventions outside the art space.
2–3 things I now know about Jørgen Leth
OLD AGE: To be in life. Really be. It is Danish Jørgen Leth's contribution to the rest of us. And this book cements that way of being in life. But, our reviewer asks: «Are we humans never satisfied?»