The lies that never die

ECOLOGY: We need such voices as Holly Jean Buck, who criticizes wishful thinking – precisely to help bring forward a hopeful, serious and long-lasting climate fight, beyond all easy optimism.

COVID19: SARS in 2003, bird flu in 2005, MERS in 2012, Ebola in 2014, combined with the financial crisis, massive refugee flows, and revolutions in the Middle East and Greta Thunberg's shrill doomsday voice, had largely immunized the population against something as abstract as Covid19.

WORK: Precarious working life is perhaps alluring with its freedom and flexibility. But with the precarious also comes the uncontrollable, the unpredictability and the lack of rights. Precarious work has become widespread in a subject such as journalism. Nevertheless, I am still tempted by the flexible tasks, by the sense of variability, freedom almost.

INSULATION: Acute loneliness affects both winners and losers. Daniel Schreiber visits a wealth of hermit literature – such as Thoreau's Walden and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. But what does social withdrawal mean today – whether it is the occupational or pandemic condition?

ESSAY: Today, the extreme state is different than in the post-war period, when Sartre and Heidegger wrote about anxiety and authenticity. The existential threat today lies primarily in an uncertain planetary future.

CAPITALISM: Is not the struggle now about the right not to be exploited, but the right to be allowed to participate? There is much that is valuable in Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen's short book about the possible return of fascism in today's world – but it is weak in terms of empirical documentation.

FASCISM: This does not necessarily manifest itself through mass spectacles and revolutionary fractures, and it is not a primarily European phenomenon. But like a product of political crises in the modern capitalist states.

CAPITALISM: The West's 'thin' fascism, which Bolt analyzes, is there especially because there is currently nothing else. Which does not rule out that it will one day grow as "thick" as Russian and Chinese fascism.

ECOLOGY: Penguins' newly launched green series presents old and new books that change the way we think and talk about the living earth. You are in the age of mass extinction, but the philosopher Martin Heidegger brings us here on the trail of what we need.

ISRAEL: Two Swedish authors portray the people of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a large reportage book.

CANADA: With the discovery of children's graves in Canada, the Canadians are arguably making the Irish rank as "the world's best Catholics". Children from First Nations were outright stolen, imprisoned in isolation, forced into a foreign culture, a foreign language, subjected to sexual abuse and general neglect.

CARBON FASCISM: Climate change facilitates economic speculation and political positioning. Against corruption, we must prepare not only for a state of emergency, but for a climate war against declared enemies, writes Marc Alizart.