Letters from Robben Island

Philosophy undoubtedly has something to do with the experience of silence – that much is clear. What’s not at all clear, however...

Question: Looking back on your life in 2018, what do you see?

I’ve no photograph of my great-grandfather’s brother, Peter Simon, the Hungarian tailor who was imprisoned by Cossacks and sent to a Siberian prison-camp.

Here is a world in disorder,” the chorus chant in an unfinished play that Bertolt Brecht started in 1926, “Who is then ready / To put it in order?” The answer was Rosa Luxemburg...

Informed by an ethos of transnationalism, Elizabeth Leake’s text aims to blur regional and global histories of the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands...

The English writer Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark (1876) is an exceptionally difficult read. In it, a crew of improbable characters boards a ship to hunt a Snark...

Is there any way to intervene usefully or meaningfully in public debate, in what the extremely online Twitter users are with gleeful irony calling the ‘discourse’ of the present moment?

The political ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are going through significant transformations. Both wings are becoming more polarised and radical...

In late summer and early autumn of 1765, Rousseau was on the run. He was always fleeing some sort of persecution: at times very real, and legal; at others perhaps more perceived, and highly personal.

There are epochs of history which their enemies call rude and which their friends call simple. My difficulty is that they seem to me not simple, but subtle.

‘There’s some unattractive social snobbery in their suggestion’

Middle-class families protest at their exclusion from grammar schools.” Not your usual headline, but news nonetheless of a petition signed by thousands of parents objecting...

‘A novel of mine lurking a mere foot above the head of the vice-president of the United States?’

During the flurry of George H.W. Bush’s death, funeral and canonisation, it was impossible to escape the photograph of George and Barbara Bush at their house in Maine...

Even the best of us, in our tender years, were at some moments cruel to other children. But did you also instruct those you bullied to transform...

Let me tell you about a color that began as a fabled drink. It tasted harsh and punishing, like medicine. It began as a mythic elixir...

What are the holidays without an extra cup of holiday cheer? Whether you’re throwing a holiday party or just looking to make a weeknight more bearable, everyone should have a few seasonal cocktails in their arsenal.

Pinballing

Entropy’s Bestests

Continuing with our series of “Best of 2018″ lists curated by the entire Entropy community, we present some of our favorite selections...

This is the 14th year that the Year in Reading series has run at The Millions. It’s the third year that I’ve blearily written the introduction to kick off the series the night before it’s set to begin

Animal Spirits at the Nueva Burdalesa Bakery by Jessica Sequeira

A few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world. I lived in the tiny room of a pension on B----- street. Funds were running low.

I was eighteen years old when I was introduced to the fascinating world of Alasdair Gray. I read Poor Things (1992) in the second year of my undergraduate degree at the University of Glasgow,

It’s easiest to start from the impulse to problematize the position of the flâneur. The ugly word privilege hovers around it, and we turn to questions that we know the answer to, “Who, exactly, is allowed to wander, like so?”

‘Poem of Philosophical and Parental Conundrums Written In An Election Year’

From the backseat, Jude saying, Mama, I HATE Republicans, and the way he says HATE, saying it the way only a seven-year-old can.

That Diana and the Amazons speak ‘hundreds’ of languages is believable, given their situation and seeming enlightenment; that English becomes their go-to choice for daily chats off the Greek coast, less so.

On the ancient river, seagull rock crests out of the waters. An outcrop within its sight is thorned by a few young silhouettes, taking turns plunging into the river some feet below. Riverboats and water taxis, white river cruise-ships weave short and cyclical tours between the two shores.

Colin Raff: Variations on a Brandenburg Salamander

In the spring of 1793, the entomologist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Herbst, as a means to supplement his lectures at the newly founded Berliner Tierarzneischule