Berfrois

Goodbye, Hello

Goodbye, Hello

Thank you for reading Berfrois (2009-2022)!

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Animal Trials by B. Alexandra Szerlip

Animal Trials by B. Alexandra Szerlip

Before writing off animal trials as irrational acts of an ignorant and superstitious past, consider some recent examples...

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Capital Discourse

Capital Discourse

Now that the Americans have also shown themselves capable of committing to a Maoist-like species of cultural revolution, how much more intensely might we expect their French counterparts to get wrapped up in this new frenzy?

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Elucidating Esbjerg

Elucidating Esbjerg

Esbjerg is a seaport town in Denmark. In the story, it’s presented as an obscure place...

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Transgender Rights in Hong Kong

Transgender Rights in Hong Kong

Chan is among a growing number of young people speaking out about gender identity and fighting for inclusion in Hong Kong, where LGBTQ+ issues remain largely taboo...

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German Africans or Germans Abroad?

German Africans or Germans Abroad?

Those in the African colonies, had created a new national identity for themselves as German Africans (Deutsch Afrikaners), rejecting the label of Germans abroad (Auslandsdeutsche) that the metropole used...

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Stoop Space

Stoop Space

If your apartment is too small and familiar to have people over, and your parks and commons are threadbare and inhospitable by incompetence or intent, you go out to restaurants. Here you find public privacy and urbane intimacy...

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Filming the GDR

Filming the GDR

It was not just in liberal consumer societies that families recorded vacations and rites of passage. Home cameras and projectors were also available in socialist societies like the German Democratic Republic...

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Is God a cosmologist?

Is God a cosmologist?

Does the universe have a beginning in time? If so, is it an argument for theism?

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The Appearance of Goodness

The Appearance of Goodness

There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness...

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The industrial revolution was the turning point in global history…

The industrial revolution was the turning point in global history…

In the bigger picture, the economic history of Britain since the mid 19th century is, inevitably, a history of relative economic decline...

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Bibi to Bennett: Berfrois Interviews John Lyndon

Bibi to Bennett: Berfrois Interviews John Lyndon

How will the ousting of Benjamin Netanyahu affect the future of Israeli politics?

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Oscar Mardell: Brutal Cure

Oscar Mardell: Brutal Cure

New Zealand has an innovative legacy of concrete construction dating back to the 1850s...

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Understudied Dimensions of Japan’s Imperial Project

Understudied Dimensions of Japan’s Imperial Project

Although it continued to live on in the memories of its former victims or enemies, in Japan itself memories of empire were excised from the public imagination through selective commemoration and emphasis on the victimhood of ordinary people...

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Pine

Pine

Well I grew up in the New Zealand of country pubs and sheep and macrocarpas; and beyond it, we were told, was a planet structured around the British Empire turning into the Commonwealth turning into... something else...

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Douglas Penick on Su Shi and Beeple

Douglas Penick on Su Shi and Beeple

Su Shi’s work speaks beyond time and place and returns us to our shared life, our shared uncertainty, our shared search...

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L.M. Montgomery’s Journals

L.M. Montgomery’s Journals

Through all those years of journal entries, Lucy Maud Montgomery was always intelligent, often funny and never boring. I wanted to know what she’d say next...

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Marian Janssen on Carolyn Kizer

Marian Janssen on Carolyn Kizer

Carolyn Kizer, feminist poet and founding editor of Poetry Northwest, became the first Program Director for Literature at the National Endowment for the Arts in 1966...

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Asian American Buddhism: Nancy Chu Interviews Chenxing Han

Asian American Buddhism: Nancy Chu Interviews Chenxing Han

May We Gather: A National Buddhist Memorial Ceremony for Asian American Ancestors ended with the Buddhist leaders processing in pairs out of the temple while holding one of two long white threads emanating from the Buddha statue on the altar...

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