Anders Dunk

USA: The explosive power of the atomic bomb has seduced and dazzled politicians for over 80 years. With the atomic bomb came a victim mentality, invoking an 'urgent necessity' – but this was exaggerated and used to trivialize human suffering and ecological destruction. As an example of the tests we struggle with today, the contamination that will affect humans and other life forms in Great Bear Lake for at least 800 years to come.

BIOWEAPONS: The combination of astonishing historical facts and compelling analyses of science policy makes medical professor Stig S. Frøland's book on biological warfare a compelling reading experience. For example, good death microbes should have high mortality, preferably be paralyzing, have a high infectiousness, be easy to produce and suitable for creating fear.

THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN: MODERN TIMES brings here, on the occasion of the death of the social anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a longer essay about his latest book Det Umistelige – a book that is both down-to-earth and full of promise. His life's work is a perfect illustration of the principle of 'individuation': You can only become yourself by relating to a 'we' – by interacting with the collective.

ECOLOGY: Must the limitations of democracy bear the responsibility for our collective climate defeat? What crime does the Norwegian state commit, for example, when it allows the mining company Nordic Mining to dump the toxic substance SIBX in the Førdefjord? in Odin Lysaker's theory of democracy, love and care become political, and ecology existential.

THE GLOBE: The two world wars forced humanity to seek peace and brought about the League of Nations and the United Nations. The pandemic and climate change have shown us that we need a planetary governance, and a planetary politics – but can we achieve this without a despotic world government?

PORTRAIT in 100: Paul Feyerabend has often been portrayed as science's greatest critic, even its enemy, a cognitive anarchist who constantly attacked rationality. It is 100 years since the rabulist was born. Feyerabend gave us a new image of science as imperfect and impossible to perfect in a rigorous method. And in the extension of Feyerabend's arguments, Arne Næss thought there was every reason to be careful about intervening in foreign cultures – just as we should also be careful about intervening in soil or other ecosystems.

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.

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.