Engelsberg ideas
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Catherine of Siena, saint and stateswoman
Best known as a saint and mystic, Catherine of Siena was also an influential political thinker who sought to reshape civic life in the Italian city states.
Star Wars and the dawning techno-empire
A neglected storyline in ‘Star Wars: The Clone Wars’ offers a glimpse of our future: imperial, technologically advanced and undemocratic.
Anne Carson’s roaming imagination
The new Nobel laureate has made a virtue of crossing boundaries and expanding the reach of the lyric sensibility.
The Kremlin’s problem with plague is nothing new
Russia’s rulers have long met outbreaks of disease with secrecy, at catastrophic cost to their own citizens. The official response to a plague researcher’s death in Siberia follows the same pattern.
Ukraine’s experiment with foreign reformers
Kyiv’s unorthodox approach to reforming its public institutions has been to bring in experts from outside. But they will only have an impact if given the right powers.
Why settled Vikings deserve our attention
Though the Vikings are famous for their long sea journeys, most of them lived settled lives as farmers. The archaeologist Neil Price believes their stories are just as interesting.
France’s riots: revolution without utopia
France’s riots may carry echoes of 1789 and 1968, and of a long tradition of taking to the streets, but they are also the product of a stranger, more troubling side of contemporary France.
Eva Marie Saint’s stolen glances
Her performance as Eve Kendall in ‘North by Northwest’, Alfred Hitchcock’s unique, surreal masterpiece, will never be forgotten.
Tolkien for the unconverted
DJ Taylor's meditation on the author of 'The Lord of the Rings' is incisive and thoughtful, even for those left cold by Middle-earth.
Will AI really turn us into paperclips?
Thought experiments such as Nick Bostrom's 'paperclip maximiser' tell us less about artificial intelligence than about our own intuitions and fears.
Moscow is watching Latvia. Is Washington?
A record victory for Latvia’s pro-Ukraine prime minister was accompanied by a surge for populist parties in the country’s lowest-ever general election turnout.
Renoir’s endless promenade
No painter took the passing pleasures of Parisian life more seriously than Renoir.
Britain and Germany: Europe’s original special relationship
Jan Rüger’s erudite study makes a compelling case for seeing the bond between Britain and Germany as a driving force in European history.
Why AI translation is no substitute for learning a language
AI-powered earbuds that translate in real time are remarkable tools. But doing the hard work of learning a new language – especially one far removed from your own – offers something more: a liberating new way of seeing the world.
Is Latin America’s pink tide ebbing in Brazil?
The Brazilian election is being viewed as a referendum on Donald Trump’s ability to reel in Latin America’s largest economy and last major left-wing holdout.
Watching Steve Reich watch Steve Reich
As Steve Reich turns 90, a chance encounter with the composer shows why his genre-hopping music holds such enduring appeal.
Losing faith in New Atheism: ‘The God Delusion’ 20 years on
Richard Dawkins’s bestseller defined New Atheism, an intellectual fashion whose conclusions look increasingly irrelevant.
Valentine Lawford, the hidden hand behind Britain’s wartime diplomacy
The socialite and civil servant was a devoted assistant to three very different foreign secretaries during the Second World War and its aftermath.
Vasily Grossman’s account of humanity’s darkest hours
Essential reading, viewing, and listening from the EI editors. Vasily Grossman, best known for his Tolstoyan novel Life and Fate, served as a correspondent for the Red Army’s daily newspaper, Red Star, after being deemed unfit for military service following the German invasion of the Soviet Union. A host of his reports are collected in From the Front Line: Stalingrad-Treblinka-Berlin, 1941–45. As the title suggests, it is not easy reading.
Hezbollah’s Venezuelan money machine
Drug trafficking, money laundering and a compliant regime have sustained Hezbollah's presence in Venezuela for two decades. Since Maduro's fall, that haven is no longer secure.
Ergun Çağatay, bridge to the vast Turkic world
In capturing the threads of shared culture and profound differences among a far-flung people, the photojournalist Ergun Çağatay shed light on what it means to be Turkic.
Britain’s information war against Nazi Germany
During the Second World War, Britain learnt that a propaganda campaign can only be won with accurate and credible reporting.
How wine conquered the globe
From the crude wines of the ancient world to the refined commercial product of the 21st century, the story of wine has always been intimately bound with that of human civilisation.
Japan and South Korea must master transactional diplomacy
At a time when the United States is retrenching its military commitments in East Asia, Seoul and Tokyo must learn to compete for Washington’s support within a rebalanced alliance system.
The wrong prescription for liberal democracy’s ills
Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu’s call for a ‘working-class liberalism’ fails to address the underlying cause of liberal democracy’s woes: a lack of productivity.
Robert Molesworth, denouncer of Danish tyranny
The Irish-born Whig's time as envoy formed his view of Denmark as a lost cause, but a cautionary tale for the English: of how a country descends into absolutism.
Truman’s impossible atomic calculus
Historian James M. Scott describes America’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in harrowing detail, while highlighting Japan’s obduracy, even when faced with the prospect of total annihilation.
What if the Baltic states had resisted Stalin?
Finland's Winter War has become a national legend, while the Baltic states' surrender to Stalin in 1940 is remembered as a humiliation. But the story of Baltic submission is a myth.
The rise and fall of Rome’s first family
Essential reading, viewing, and listening from the EI editors. It has been 50 years since I, Claudius, the BBC’s acclaimed adaptation of Robert Graves’ novels of Roman elite intrigue and excess, first aired.
Coltrane, the acceptable face of the avant-garde
John Coltrane was a spiritual searcher whose shimmering, joyful music pushed jazz to its limits.
SMRs: a short history of a nuclear pipe dream
Small modular reactors (SMRs) were first conceived for military use and deployed on polar bases. Seventy years on, their record remains dismal.
The Middle East’s coalitions of convenience
The Mecca Agreement could work as part of a web of narrower, overlapping alliances better suited to the region than any grand alliance.
The absurd theatre of Russia’s choice-free election
The only anti-war party was struck off the ballot and online votes were counted by mysterious means. In Russia's latest exercise in democracy, the ruling party's landslide was never in doubt.
How the Middle East boiled over
Simon Sebag Montefiore's wildly ambitious history of the region since 1900 is a richly illustrated guide to the law of unintended consequences.
Proust’s quarrel with ‘accessible’ art
For Proust, serious art assumes its audience can acquire capacities it does not yet possess.
Concord’s second revolution
Transcendentalism, the visionary philosophy championed by figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, is the yin of the American Revolution.
The grandeur of Verona’s open-air opera
Opera in Verona's ancient amphitheatre, open to the night sky, is a spectacle to be savoured.
How Sweden’s Social Democrats survived in the capital of capital
The once-dominant centre-left party has just recorded its worst result in more than a century, but its relative endurance owes much to a pragmatic accommodation with markets.
The wisdom of not knowing
The physicist Carlo Rovelli has written one book to make you feel better, and another to make you feel much worse.
Mourning the old Israel: Fauda after 7 October
Essential reading, viewing, and listening from the EI editors. The latest series of Fauda is driven by the theme of tha’r, the Arabic for ‘blood revenge’ – here, revenge for 7 October. The cast and crew of the hit Israeli drama, whose five series focus on the fates of a group of undercover counter-terror operatives, were directly involved – Lior Raz, who plays the main character, Doron, helped rescue families from Sderot in the days after the attack.
The case for climate realism in an age of soaring energy demand
The conventional narrative assumes economies can grow while using less energy. The opposite is happening. It is time for climate realism.
Aristotle: a biography without a life
Philip Freeman's brisk life of Aristotle confirms how little the surviving record can tell us about the workings of the philosopher's mind.
The BRICS+: rebels without a common cause
The BRICS+ summit in New Delhi revealed an enlarged forum pulled in three directions by China, Russia and India.
The AI trade is too big not to fail
More than $3.1 trillion has gone into American AI, much of it financed by debt pinned to unproven revenues. The industry may find that the only road to its prosperity runs through a crisis.
Tennis and the decline of Russian soft power
They would have been celebrating heartily in the Kremlin. This year’s US Open women’s finalists were from Moscow and from Minsk. The men’s champion was an ethnic Russian, a Sasha, no less, who got there by defeating a Muscovite in the semi-final. It would seem as though the Soviet and then Russian sports machine had been paying off handsomely.