July 2026

The Screams in the Basement of Aesthetics

On Art, Silence, and Moral Complicity

The Hippie by the Lake

Ethnologist Heike Behrend is researching a German provincial prophet who ran a commercial "Garden of Paradise" in the Altmark region in the early 20th century

“As Long as I Dream in Arabic, I Will Write in Arabic”

A conversation with Lebanese writer Iman Humaydan about her latest novel, Lebanon, memory, patriarchy, migration – and why literature is stronger than a manifesto

Writing Against Forgetting

Lebanese writer Iman Humaydan speaks about her novel 'Songs for Darkness', the memory of war, women’s lives, migration, and why literature can preserve what history and politics often erase.

The fish rots from the head down

Today’s financial elite are ultra-rich. The term refers to the ultimate level of wealth, beyond anything that can be tangibly grasped. In “The Haves and Have-Yachts”, Evan Osnos brings us news from another world.

The End of the Odyssey

If only Christopher Nolan had listened to James Joyce. Instead, he transforms Homer’s fluid, ambiguous 'Odyssey' into a rigid monument of masculine pathos, plot-driven drama, and sensory overload.

The New Republic of Fear...

The Queer Body and the Boundaries of Citizenship in Iraq

Presence

Is humanity an unsolvable enigma? A critical reflection on the limits of the human sciences, the impossibility of fully understanding the other, and the crisis in our understanding of humanity

A Taste of Home, A Language of Belonging

Award-winning Ghanaian writer Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri on grief, belonging, Black imagination, literary life in Ghana, and why writing began with unfinished drawings

The Topography of the Repressed

What does waste tell us about our world? An exhibition in Dortmund traces the global journey of waste, highlighting the connections between the economy, waste, and recycling, and looks at the consequences for people and the environment