Europe’s complicity has not only sustained the genocide of Palestinians, but also triggered a crisis of political legitimacy. If any political or moral credibility is to be salvaged, a different movement from below is needed.

In Japan and Germany, post-mortem cleaners have become unlikely interpreters of social breakdown. Four researchers from the Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology consider the causes of and approaches to lonely death in advanced capitalist societies. What is owed to the dead, and by whom?

“But history / Is not without a malicious sense of humor, / And commerce is cleverer than it gets credit for.” Ryan Ruby plucks at the strings that stretch from there to here, from our skulls to our screens, in three poems on looking and not looking, doing and not doing.

What began with attacks on Aleppo’s Kurdish neighbourhoods in January was only a starting symptom of a greater shift: in Syria and the entire region. In what form can Kurdish self-administration, as it is lived in Rojava’s regime of survival, have a future here?

“People unhappy with a state can call for a change in government, or in its regime, or they can call for the state’s eradication altogether”—this typology applies to Jewish criticism of Israel as well. Is the claim that such criticism is grounded in Jewish tradition really warranted?

“Wars produce ever new reasons for continuing them, among them the war crimes inevitably committed by or attributed to the enemy. Since the event of a war is uncertain, there is always hope or fear that luck will turn; being irrational may, in this sense, be the rational choice.”

How it feels to watch Kristoffer Borgli’s twisted rom-com The Drama, starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, about an almost-canceled wedding when you’ve actually canceled your own.