By Sam Ben-Meir* NEW YORK | 16 July 2026 (IDN) – Few literary works have generated as many competing interpretations as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Psychoanalytic critics have found an Oedipal drama. Existentialists have found a meditation on freedom and death. Feminist critics have found a tragedy of patriarchal domination. The feminist reading has become particularly influential in […]
We Should Question US “Soft Power”
By Jonathan Power LUND, Sweden | 15 July 2026 (IDN) – Is the world being captured by what the late Harvard academic, Joseph Nye, has termed American “Soft Power”? President Donald Trump says he’s pushing for this. The debate about American influence on the world at large is not new. Charles Dickens, the great British […]
Russia’s Power Is Not Weapons, It’s Culture
By Jonathan Power LUND, Sweden | 8 July 2026 (IDN) — Observers say that what drives President Vladimir Putin is to make Russia respected. But perhaps Putin underestimates how much power Russia already has. He has overlooked which trumpets to blow. It is not his “hang tough” policies in military affairs. It is Russia’s culture. […]
In Search of More ‘Participatory’, ‘Deliberative’, and ‘Egalitarian’ Forms of Democracy
By Jan Servaes BRUSSELS | 8 July 2026 (IDN) — For the average global citizen, the level of democracy today has regressed to that of 1978. This means that all the democratic gains of the so-called ‘third wave of democratization’—which began with Portugal’s Carnation Revolution in 1974—have either vanished or been significantly eroded. This is […]
From Utopia to Branding: What Happened to the Fairy Tale?
By Sam Ben-Meir* NEW YORK | 3 July 2026 (IDN) — Never has fantasy been more commercially successful. Yet it is not obvious that it has become more imaginative. Long before the rise of the modern novel, fairy tales provided generations of listeners and readers with images of transformation, justice, adventure, and hope. They offered something […]
Recognition Without Redemption: La Strada, Seventy Years On
By Sam Ben-Meir* NEW YORK | 26 June 2026 (IDN) — Seventy years after its release, La Strada (1956) remains among the most unsettling achievements in the history of cinema. Its endurance has little to do with nostalgia, neorealist pedigree, or even the magnetism of Giulietta Masina’s performance—though all of these matter. What gives the […]
How Books Can Save Democracy
By Jan Servaes MIAMI | 12 June 2026 (IDN) — It is well known that American democracy is in crisis. American society is more polarised than ever before. “We are being strategically driven apart by disinformation – the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth,” argues Barbara McQuade, a professor at the University of Michigan […]
Skyward Haven: A Thoughtful Novel for an Uncertain Age
By Jaya Ramachandran NEW YORK | 7 June 2026 (IDN) — Every generation produces books that capture the anxieties of its time. Some do so through realism, others through satire, and still others through speculative imagination. Skyward Haven belongs firmly in the latter category. Yet unlike many works of speculative fiction that rely on dramatic […]
Has the Democratic Party Lost Its Way Regarding Russia and China?
By Jan Servaes MIAMI | 6 May 2026 (IDN) — Anyone visiting a reputable U.S. bookstore today in search of an analysis of the position the United States occupies on the global stage under President Trump will immediately spot the hefty 534-page tome: Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder by Michael McFaul. […]
The Animal That Therefore I Am: The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Genesis Façade
By Sam Ben-Meir* NEW YORK | 2 June 2026 (IDN) — Approaching the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one encounters not heroes, founders, or allegories of civilizational ascent, but animals—four of them—standing upright against the stone authority of the façade. A squirrel, a coyote, a deer, and a hawk occupy the Genesis Facade, not as emblems, […]