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• The European Review of Books2026-10-08✓ Read

  Election, Latvian-style

  On the morning of 3 October, a friend I hadn’t heard from in a long time called. The question was right there again: who to vote for? I had already cast my vote early. But as she was about to make her way from Amsterdam to The Hague, where her closest Latvian polling station was,

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• The European Review of Books2026-10-03✓ Read

  Vignetting is like playing TIME’S UP

  I love to play TIME’S UP*, especially the third round when we have to rely only on gestures, mimics and sounds to make our team guess the answers. Your body instinctively performs the images that flash in front of your eyes. It’s random, short, exhilarating, iconic**. Right now I am busy drawing the vignettes for the

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• The European Review of Books2026-10-01✓ Read

  The bar across the street

  Last week, I went every morning for breakfast to the perfect bar. You stood at the counter for your shot of coffee; the other customers all greeted the owner by name. Nobody was on a laptop; nobody was even on their phone. Behind the bar were shelves displaying tobacco, lottery tickets, bottles of whisky and

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• The European Review of Books2026-10-01✓ Read

  Shepherds of Europe!

  They’d put me on a float. It was midnight. A tractor hauled me and some twenty-five villagers into the woods. We were going to cut down a tree. I’d had a fine dinner with, among others, the village matriarch: the best meat for miles around, served at half past ten. Always after ten here: at

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• The European Review of Books2026-10-01✓ Read

  The Spectacle of AI taking over the world

  A group of French scientists sees OpenAI unjustly claiming it has solved the mathematic Navier-Stokes problem and rings the alarm bell. A handful of Tech moguls is establishing a private monopoly over cognition and knowledge. « Reality considered partially unfolds in its own general unity as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization

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• The European Review of Books2026-09-24✓ Read

  Gone woke

  Sitting at the border of Oostende’s North Sea coast is a Napoleon-era hippodrome – normally home to horses and 90’s nostalgia bands from the surrounding Flemish countryside – except for one weekend in September, when the hippodrome is transformed into a bipolar festival: half party, half socialist thought exchange. ManiFiesta has been balancing that tightrope for quite

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• The European Review of Books2026-09-24✓ Read

  Interview with Sofia Wadensjö Karén

  Across Europe radical voices are growing and cultivated in bubbles. Left, right, surprising new populist combinations: public broadcasters try to guard neutrality amidst this playfield. In Sweden, no less exposed to the fragmentation of society, elections just took place. We asked the Program Director of Swedish national radio how she covered elections in this climate.

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• The European Review of Books2026-09-17✓ Read

  Beyond Bedlam

  In August 1843, the English painter Richard Dadd stabbed his father to death. The Egyptian sun god Osirus told him to. Dadd, an ambitious and accomplished young artist, had returned from a Grand Tour of the Eastern Mediterranean in a high state of psychosis. After killing his father, he escaped to France intending to assassinate the Emperor of Austria. Instead, he was caught and spent the remaining 42 years of his life in English asylums, first in the notorious Bethlem (popularly known as Bedlam) and then in Broadmoor.

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