Europe Woke Up in a Different World

William Ophuls and the Limits of Human Ambition

Few books become more relevant with age. Most are products of their time, shaped by the concerns and assumptions of the era in which they were written. William Catton's Overshoot , first published in...

One of the Oldest Living Traditions of the Meuse Valley A photo essay from Eijsden, Limburg, The Netherlands

At first glance, it is easy to overlook: three slender legs, ending in small human feet, forming a simple stand. But this object — now in the Museo de Huelva — comes from the Roman mining region of Ri...

Based on: “America Is Heading Towards Collapse!” (YouTube)

Why Do So Many Virologists Favour Spillover?

The ceramic tile (original and restored with AI) depicting the legend of Don Martín at the castle of Burgalimar (Baños de la Encina, Spain).

Step into Museum van Bommel van Dam and you sense immediately that this is not a typical museum. The collection feels personal—less like a carefully constructed overview of art history, and more like ...

In the Catalan town of Vic, history does not sit quietly in museums. It walks the streets. During the annual Festa Major and other civic celebrations, towering figures— gegants —move through the medie...

What makes the current discussion around the Andes hantavirus so unsettling is not just its lethality, but the combination of several characteristics that together create a potentially dangerous epide...

Long before Rome dominated the Mediterranean, trade was already connecting distant regions in a structured and sustained way. On the Atlantic edge of Iberia, Huelva emerged as one of those early conta...

Ivan Krastev on a World Without a Story

In the quiet landscape of Burgundy, the town of Cluny looks almost ordinary today. A few impressive ruins hint at something larger, but it takes imagination to grasp what once stood here. Around the y...

For years, discussions about artificial intelligence focused on familiar themes: chatbots writing emails, AI creating images, or computers helping students with homework. Most people saw AI as a usefu...

Three people are dead. Several others became seriously ill within days. Doctors in different countries are now tracing passengers who shared dining rooms, lecture halls and cabins aboard a cruise ship...

Imagine a speech so powerful that within months, tens of thousands of people leave their homes, sell what they own, and begin a journey across continents — toward a war most of them do not fully under...

The story of Jeffrey Epstein is, first and foremost, a story of abuse. Young women were manipulated, exploited and harmed, and that fact should remain at the centre; nothing in what follows diminishes...

For many Europeans, food still feels predictable. You go to the supermarket, and everything is there. Prices have gone up in recent years, but the system still seems to work. That sense of stability ...

Travel today through southern and eastern Spain—from Cádiz to Cartagena , and along the coast near Alicante —and you are moving through landscapes that once played a central role in one of the gre...

Standing on the cliffs of the Costa Blanca today, the old stone watchtowers look quiet and almost decorative. Many hikers pass them without realizing that they once formed part of a carefully designed...

Populism and the loss of shared context

A Story from the Sea At the edge of the Camargue, where land fades into marsh and sea, stands a church that looks like a fortress. It is here that local tradition places a striking beginning. The st...

Hannah Arendt (1906 - 1975) is often seen as a thinker of the past, shaped by the rise of totalitarian regimes in 20th-century Europe, especially Nazi Germany. But her work is not just about that t...

If you descend into one of the old wine cellars of Valdepeñas, you may find yourself walking through a silent forest of giant clay vessels. These monumental jars, called tinajas , once formed the hea...

Power, Desire, and the Abuse of Freedom

D'Artagnan was killed during the Siege of Maastricht in 1673 and later immortalised in the stories of Alexandre Dumas.

At the start of the war, the language was familiar: targets destroyed, capabilities reduced, pressure increasing. It is the language of progress — and ultimately, of victory. But very quickly, a more...

In the adventures of Tintin (1929 - 1976), villains rarely appear as villains. They wear good suits, run international companies, and speak the language of progress and opportunity. At first glance,...

When we travel slowly across Europe — as many culture lovers do — we begin to notice something curious. Landscapes change, languages shift, cuisines evolve. Yet certain patterns return: hilltop settle...

In the quiet countryside of Extremadura , far from Spain’s main tourist routes, lies one of the most intriguing archaeological sites of the Iberian Peninsula: Cancho Roano . At first glance the pla...

In a time when public debate often assumes the worst about human nature, the Dutch historian and writer Rutger Bregman has built a career around a strikingly different idea: most people are fundamenta...

When we travel across Europe, it is almost impossible not to notice the presence of religion. Cathedrals shape skylines. Small shrines mark old roads. Processions still move through villages where peo...

In a quiet display case in the Museo de Málaga lies something unexpectedly familiar: a necklace made entirely of small seashells. At first glance it looks almost modern — the kind of necklace you mi...

In 1973, the British evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith published a book that would quietly reshape how scientists think about conflict: Evolution and the Theory of Games . Maynard Smith, w...