Books · Society · People
Today we are so defenceless against the effects of this spiritual artillery that scarcely anyone is able to win that inner detachment which is necessary to grasp the full monstrousness of the spectacle Oswald Spengler on what is still our own day
The East · Geography · Cinema · Society · Ethnography
The Briton Katharine Round has made a documentary about Kamaishi, a town on the Pacific coast of Iwate Prefecture that was engulfed by the tsunami in March 2011. Round set up cameras in the cabs of taxis and left them running. In the frame are four drivers, Toru Konno, Yoshiji
Archaeology · Museums · Heritage · Science · Society · Paris
In Pushkin's “Autumn” the grove sheds its last leaves; in France this October it was rather shop windows and town halls that were being shaken, and since this coincided with my customary Parisian holiday, a good part of the month in the channel passed to the sound of
Art · Society · Paris
French galleries demand compensation from Art Basel Paris for the early closure of the fair The Art Basel Paris fair was held at the Grand Palais in Paris and was due to run until Sunday 25 October 2026. On the evening of 22 October the organisers informed participants that the
The Golden Age · Archive · Books · Mores · Society · Saint Petersburg
The playbill of the Bolshoi Drama Theatre announces a full repeat of the staged "Trial of Raskolnikov" on 21 November 1921 On 11 November 1921 (30 October, Old Style) it was one hundred years since the birth of Dostoevsky, and Petrograd marked the writer's jubilee. A
The East · In the Press · Geography · Society
Grant Newsham, a retired US Marine Corps officer and former diplomat, has published a column in Asia Times on the elections in the Northern Mariana Islands. The islands form a Commonwealth, that is, a US territory in the western Pacific whose inhabitants hold American citizenship. On 3 November some 50,
Faith · Society · People
Pope Leo XIV votes by post in the US midterm elections Americans hold midterm elections halfway through the four-year presidential term. They elect the entire House of Representatives, a third of the Senate, and also the governors and legislators of many states. Leo XIV, otherwise Robert Francis Prevost, holds
The East · Geography · Society · Nature
A catastrophic fire broke out in the Nömrög Strictly Protected Area in the far east of Mongolia because of a nature outing by employees of a mobile operator. The Khalkhin Gol river flows through this reserve, where in 1939 Soviet-Mongolian forces fought the Japanese army. The incident took place
The Golden Age · Art · Education · Society · People
A 64-year-old professor of photography at Oberlin College and his 56-year-old wife have been shot dead in Ohio. According to documents of the Oberlin Municipal Court, the investigation has charged the photographer's 31-year-old child from a previous marriage, Asia Nguyen-duy (born
The East · Observations · Education · Society
The US Department of Defense has added the Confucius Institutes to its list of organisations that pose a threat to the country's national security. The Confucius Institutes are cultural centres attached to foreign universities, opened and funded since 2004 by the Chinese government. They teach the Chinese language,
Science · Society · Pop Culture
An Enigma I cipher machine sold for more than £200,000 The auction house Bonhams put the machine, made for the German army around 1941, up for sale in its online auction "Espionage: Fact and Fiction". The Enigma was an electromechanical machine that turned the plain text of
The East · Faith · Society · Ethnography
Israeli border guards refused to admit the American rabbi Alissa Wise at the airport and put her on a plane back to the United States. Wise had been leading a delegation of rabbis who were travelling to the West Bank of the Jordan River to help Palestinians gather the olive