CHRONICLE: Science has made rapid progress in producing a vaccine against Covid-19. But can vaccine programs be based on active consent and autonomous choice by citizens? And does scientific rationality now go hand in hand with creative forms of irrationality?
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.
Obituary: David Graeber died recently. MODERN TIMES chooses for once to bring an obituary – here over the anarchist who wanted to change our usual notions of what is possible and impossible, right and wrong, normal and strange.
CONTROL: Today, millions of racialized bodies have become redundant in relation to capital's metabolism and enrolled in a digitally mediated nexus of exclusion, control, and destruction technologies. MODERN TIMES here goes into the theme via author Achille Mbembe in three articles.
CONSUMPTION AND CORRUPTION: We haven't heard much about Luanda Leaks in Norway. Perhaps because it is embarrassing that Statoil paid NOK 420 million to a non-existent research center owned by Angola's state oil company Sonangol, where Isabel dos Santos was the director until she was fired in November 2017?
THE PROTESTS IN THE USA: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, LA, Louisville, New York, Miami, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Oregon, Richmond, Salt Lake City, Seattle and Washington. A response to the structural violence the poor are facing.
WOMEN OF EUROPE: In our interview series with European women, Sweden's former Foreign and Vice Prime Minister Margot Wallström is the latest. She believes that we are currently living in a world of autocrats, where Nordic welfare values have poor conditions.
CROWN: Will a far more favorable ideological virus spread and hopefully infect us, the virus that makes us think of another society, beyond the nation-state, a society that realizes itself as global solidarity and cooperation?
Migrant: How hospitable can one be expected to be? Those who do not belong anywhere become poets, because they have to invent a new form of world citizenship, writes Alain Badiou.
MIDDLE CLASS: Current in these corona times is whether Reckwitz's analysis opens up a restructuring of the economy back to a "real economy" – from the cultural capitalism in which the goods promise consumers symbolic, narrative, aesthetic and ethical experiences.
Agamben: The archeology of religion, art, politics, and capitalism is not a search for any kind of origin – but a search for a foundation that tears past notions to their roots.
ACCELERATIONISM: For the children of the new millennium, conservatism is a dead ideology. And above neoliberalism, a new communist realism is now taking shape among young Britons.
CHALLENGES OF EUROPE: The Brexit chaos seems to culminate in the British leaving the EU – now that the election of Boris Johnson has been postponed. Brexit is the price the British have to pay for not having had an honest discussion about immigration, multiculturalism and the British Empire. But are Britain's problems unique?
PROTEST: Morgan Adamson's Enduring Images brings new life to the 1960s revolutionary film and reminds us of the need to fight the prevailing forms of representation.
BIOPOLITIK: Does the public notion of order necessitate extreme violence against specific population groups (natives, blacks, Muslims etc.)? May 5000 poor and lost migrants meet by a wall and mobilize 15000 soldiers?