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ASLE TOJE Daytona 500 is the highlight of the Nascar racing season. A glorification of bravery, speed and engine noise. Outside the stadium aspiring preachers stand ready with megaphones. The people waiting In line are warned against the dangers of liquor and sex. There is much talk of cheeses – which strikes me as odd,…
What the loss of a Chief of Staff means for the Brexit negotiations. The Brexit negotiation, whatever else it is, is a political drama of the score-settling type. So let’s imagine it, focusing on a crucial subset of the dramatis personae, as if it were a play about a game whose congealing theme is: What…
How a nation that loved ruins was itself reduced to rubble—and in its own ashes discovered new, impossible ideals. A life in a discarded shoe box. A while back, as I was struggling with a text at the Public Library in the hamlet of Bengtsfors, Sweden, I came across the donated remains from a childless…
The refugee crisis may not break the EU, but it will upend the postwar European political order. Each age has its own fears. Much like the specter of climate change haunts the imagination of many today, and the arms race kept people sleepless in the 1980s, the ‘population bomb’ was the doomsday scenario of choice…
Hailed as a prophet and reviled as a racist, Jean Raspail novelized Europe’s immigration crisis—forty years before it happened. George Orwell, which is to say Eric Arthur Blair, said and wrote many memorable things. One of them goes as follows: “Saints should always be judged guilty until proved innocent.” Flipping the ideal of justice enabled…
When the terrorists once again struck France on November 13, the country has shown a different, more authoritarian side than in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo outrage. The strategy of terrorism, as has often (but not often enough) been remarked, it to trick stronger powers into doing counterproductive things. The terrorist attacks of November 13 in…