By Sam Ben-Meir* NEW YORK | 9 October 2026 (IDN) — Manchester’s Currier Museum is currently presenting Personal Mythologies: Picasso in the 1940s and 50s—a small exhibition consisting of three paintings, two of which are on loan through October: L’Homme au béret basque (1946) and The Two Children (1954). The third, belonging to the Currier collection, is the […]
The Third Man and the Ruins of Modernity
By Sam Ben-Meir* NEW YORK | 2 October 2026 (IDN) — Carol Reed’s The Third Man, recently screened at the Park Theatre in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, is routinely described as one of the greatest films noirs ever made. It is certainly that. But to call it a film noir tells us remarkably little about what makes […]
Ben Okri—a Great Novelist and an Immigrant—Hits Out
By Jonathan Power LUND, Sweden | 2 September 2026 (IDN) — “In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road, and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.” This must be one of the best opening lines ever penned […]
From the Evil Genius to the Digital Leviathan
By Sam Ben-Meir* NEW YORK | 1 September 2026 (IDN) — Philosophy is often imagined as a discipline that builds—constructing systems, securing knowledge, clarifying truth. But its deepest power may lie elsewhere. Philosophy does not merely build; it destroys. It unsettles, destabilises, and, at its most powerful, pulls the ground out from beneath us. Nowhere […]
A Nuclear Bomb Took My Arms Before I Was Born. We Must Not Let It Take Our Future
By Karipbek Kuyukov* ASTANA | 28 August 2026 (IDN) — I paint with a brush held between my teeth or my toes. I was born without arms in 1968 about 100 kilometres from the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in eastern Kazakhstan. My parents’ generation watched mushroom clouds rise over the steppe without being told what […]
Substitute Sounds for Noise
By Jonathan Power LUND, Sweden | 26 August 2026 (IDN) –Everyone has their favourite sounds- a ball on a cricket bat on a summer’s afternoon, birds singing, waves breaking on the beach, the coffee pot perking on the stove, children playing Scooby-Doo. Mine are the quiet sounds of the English Lake District- William Wordsworth’s: “A […]
The Impossible Homecoming: Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey and the Trauma of War
By Sam Ben-Meir* NEW YORK | 17 August 2026 (IDN) — Emily Wilson begins her celebrated translation of Homer’s Odyssey with an imperative that has become almost as famous as the poem itself: “Tell me about a complicated man.” Christopher Nolan has acknowledged the importance of that formulation to his own adaptation of Homer. Yet in […]
The Ugliness of the West: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and the Ideological Closure of Capitalism
By Sam Ben-Meir NEW YORK | 6 August 2026 (IDN) — John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy endures not simply as the anti–James Bond film but as something rarer: a diagnosis of Western civilization at the moment it began losing faith in itself. Where the James Bond franchise offered a fantasy of Western vitality—technological mastery, […]
The Oppenheimer and Odyssey Films, the Nuclear Bombing of Japan and the Lies Told
By Jonathan Power Editor’s Note: This commentary was first published three years ago. It is being republished because British-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan has recently released The Odyssey to widespread acclaim, while also attracting criticism over its historical inaccuracies. In this essay, Jonathan Power revisits what he believes Nolan missed—or chose to avoid—in his Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer, which chronicles […]
A Radically New History of The Ancient World
Challenging Modern Chauvinism By Jan Servaes BRUSSELS | 29 July 2026 (IDN) — In *How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History*, Josephine Quinn argues that Western civilisation emerged from long-standing cultural exchanges between Africa, Asia, and Europe—rather than being merely a product of Greece and Rome—as we were traditionally taught in school. […]