literature
An agricultural cluster – a state-of-the-art industrial complex
MAD: The problem is access to food. Everyone must eat to live. If we are to eat, we must buy. To buy, we must work. We eat, digest, and shit.
The dictatorship of virtue
CHINA: China's Communist Party boasts today that it is able to recognize any of the country's 1.4 billion citizens within seconds. Europe must find alternatives to the growing polarization between China and the United States – between a state-monitoring dictatorship and the ruthless self-expression of liberal individualism. Maybe some kind of anarchist social order?
Protest can cost you your life
HONDURAS: Nina Lakhani's dangerous search for the truth behind the murder of environmental activist Berta Cáceres ends up in more questions than answers.
The cultural binder
NOVEL: DeLillo stages a kind of general, paranoid state, a suspicion that has global reach.
Creative destruction
GARBAGE: Norway is not equipped for textile sorting. Although we sort rubbish, we are nowhere near places in Japan that can recycle in 34 different categories. The goal is that the municipalities are not left with any waste – and without garbage trucks!
The control of society and the unruly
LATE MOTHERS: People today are gaining more and more control over their surroundings – but are losing touch with the world. Where is the limit for measurements, quality assurances, quantifications and bureaucratic routines?
To what extent do you have to know in advance what you are looking for?
MEDIA: Profiling, information control, behavior-regulating nudges and the sale of personal data should prove to be the reality, rather than the realization of the internet as a publicist network.
The healing power of the community
RITUALS: The compulsion of neoliberalism to be on, to communicate, to make visible, to be busy, creates, according to Byung-Chui Han, reflex, narcissism, depression and an aggressive psychological emptiness.
The relationship between art and the political
CONTEMPORARY ART: Today's patrons use shameless art as a giant advertising pillar. And what can art do when politicians lie?
The dissatisfaction, the frustration, the inconsolability, the hopelessness and the mistrust
USA: The philosopher Espen Hammer gives in a new book a crystal clear analysis of US policy. This is a country where the annual value of lobbying is estimated at well over NOK 40 billion.
Is renewable energy enough when the planet's total energy requirement is 15 TW
ENERGY: We already have enough technologies to initiate a full transition to renewable energy sources. According to David Elliott, solar power also has a potential of a staggering 20 terrawatt – more than the world's total energy consumption
Living in the true sense of the word
ARCHITECTURE: Christian Norberg-Schultz's emphasis on local art has helped shape generations of architects. Can we build better than we do today?
Everything is the fault of others
MASS MEDIA: Where the advertisement gave a feeling of well-being, desire and pleasure, the new media consumption gives the feeling of paranoia, anger and mistrust. Hate seller. Also on Capitol Hill.
On the dark side of truth
MEDIA: The struggle for truth – and thus for documentary – has become brutal. A new book analyzes how truth claims and digital culture shape our political realities.
A planet we ourselves have brought into radical imbalance
EARTH: Anthropocene means more than writing about ecology, environmental history or global warming. How about the greenhouse effect heating the ocean at such a speed that it is equivalent to pouring a billion boiling teacups into the ocean every second?
To salvage what is salvaged can
TECHNOLOGY: Are artificial intelligence and drones good news for nature and the protection of the planet's ecosystems?
Acting alcoholics
MUSICIAN BIOGRAPHY: A blissful mixture of sins of omission, narcotic excesses and bloated but fragile self-images – interspersed with violence?
Healing in the natural
INNOVATORS: The anarchist collective project Monte Verità was a groundbreaking, vibrant center with inspiration for ideas that are heard even today.
From eco-nightmares to historical relief
EARTH OF THE EARTH: In a groundbreaking new collective novel, we can read about how the climate crisis is escalating and a new ecological world order is emerging.
Why there is so much dissatisfaction in the West, and what we can do about it
Professor Paul Collier is a heavyweight. He is often mentioned in the same category as economists Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs and was once singled out as one of the heroes of the then Minister for Development Aid Erik Solheim.
Is there any reason to rejoice over the coronary vaccine?
COVID-19: How far are the authorities willing to go to get the population to listen, follow health advice and take the coronary vaccine? In Norway and Sweden, the vaccine is voluntary, while Danes may be forced to take it. There is currently no real skepticism from the public sector about the vaccine – vaccination is recommended.
Increasing reality apathy and blunting
Criticism of modernity: The neoliberal "happiness dispositive's" imperative of happiness regards pain as a failure, a weakness. The pain has become dumb, and consequently speechless and meaningless. But is the consequence that the neoliberal paradigm of freedom is disintegrating?
The will to life
LIVSGNIST: First comes poverty and hardship, the diseases, the struggle to save lives. Then comes the sorrows of love, jealousy, envy, hatred, anxiety, greed, and greed for goods and gold.
Caste – a universal system of inequality, abuse of power and humiliation
RANK: In India it is the surname, in the USA it is the skin color which determines whether one is at the top or bottom of the caste system's ladder
Norwegian shadow pages
COMMUNISTS: The author writes the story of the stigmatized in a Norway that cultivated the victory story and the Labor Party's sweeping flags, while hunting for the Communists.