The comfort of Tyranny

A powerful leader addresses a tightly packed crowd as towering screens amplify his image—an unsettling portrait of modern authority fueled by spectacle and collective surrender

The comfort of tyranny

Why modern strongmen rise not through force alone, but through our exhaustion with freedom, complexity, and doubt

Jessy Frascarelli

11 March 2026

We talk about tyranny like it's this external force. A monster that shows up, grabs power, and destroys freedom. Some villain. Some strongman. Some bad guy we can point to. This way of thinking about it is convenient because it lets us pretend tyranny happens to us, that we're just victims who had no choice.

A fashion influencer is filmed on a rooftop terrace overlooking the skyline of Mexico City, Mexico

How influencers all started sounding the same

The story of how internet slang evolved into a standardised language of social media

Jessy Frascarelli
11 June 2026

Have you noticed how every influencer sounds exactly the same now? It's not just what they say; it's how they say it. The pauses, the tone, the way they frame emotions—it's all weirdly uniform. You hear it most in podcasts. That soft, intimate voice that sounds spontaneous but is actually completely calculated. What feels natural is actually learned behaviour.

Wolfgang Jäger and the politics of kindness

Man wearing a cowboy hat and black coat, seen from behind, Berlin, Germany

Wolfgang Jäger and the politics of kindness

An anthropology of belonging in Berlin

Jessy Frascarelli

11 May 2026

Not everyone can help others, but some people seem to carry a quiet instinct for it, like a compass that always points towards those in need. In an era where cities are growing colder and systems more faceless, Wolfgang Jäger has turned his Berlin home into something that feels increasingly rare: a place where strangers arrive afraid and leave as friends.

Jenni Fagan / “Maya Angelou taught me that I owed myself hope’

Jenni Fagan

The 

Books

 0f my 

life

Jenni Fagan: ‘Maya Angelou taught me that I owed myself hope’

The Scottish author on loving The Hobbit, fairytales, Frankenstein and the shock of A Clockwork Orange

Jenni Fagan

10 July 2026

My earliest reading memory
Fairytales. I was obsessed. I took fairytales very seriously as moral lessons. I soon knew that I’d always help any old lady cross the road, it really is always best to do so.

My favourite book growing up
The Hobbit was my favourite book while growing up. It expanded my understanding of what could be achieved in fiction. I found JRR Tolkien’s world transformative. I felt as if I knew the hobbits, and I so wanted to see the elves. I could hear the crack of fireworks as they turned into dragons that flew overhead.

The writer who changed my mind
Maya Angelou taught me that I owed myself hope. No matter how painful or difficult it was. Her work has such dignity and light. I read all of her work for years and took as many lessons from it as I could. It made me want to step up and continue to try to find a way to create a life that mattered to me.

The book that made me want to be a writer
I was reading the dictionary when I was really quite little; if I found a word I didn’t know I would always go and look it up. Strange thing for a kid to do but I fell in love with language itself.

The book I came back to
I originally found Frankenstein by Mary Shelley too claustrophobic. In recent years I have connected with Shelley in a profound way and I am now writing a modern adaptation of Frankenstein that will be published next year. She was so ahead of her time, she began sci-fi, brought to life such a powerful archetype in the Creature, and while you can see inspirations of, say, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – he used to visit and read it at her father’s house – it was an absolutely personal calling for her to write this story. I am fascinated by her engagement with gnosis, the life force, death and how all the tragedies of her young life were carefully woven together by a formidable intellect. Shelley was only a teenager when she first wrote the book; interestingly, she revisited it and made revisions over decades. Like a master painter, perhaps, who adds a touch of shade and light later on, only to heighten a work’s immortal glow.

The book I reread
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is one of my favourite stories of all time. Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning as an Ungeziefer, some kind of monstrous creature. I think it perfectly encapsulates the relationship between the individual and social structures.

The book I could never read again
Anything by Enid Blyton. Her work has not aged well.

The book I discovered later in life
When I was travelling in Egypt I read The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany and Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz. Both books are intertwined with my memories of staying in downtown Cairo.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I read A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess when I was 15 and living in a children’s home. Its protagonist, Alex, was the same age as me. I found the book shocking. The use of “nadsat” (teenage slang) as the language spoken by his “droogs” also showed me that there are many ways to innovate in a novel.

The book I am currently reading
Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir A Hymn to Life. I think she is extraordinary and inspiring.

My comfort read
Poetry: a single stanza in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens, or The Man-Moth by Elizabeth Bishop, or Temptation by Nina Cassian. There are so many poems I return to endlessly, as with a favourite record that never fails to contain something familiar and new at the same time.

 The Delusions by Jenni Fagan is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£18.99). 

THE GUARDIAN

Who Killed Bambi? by Monika Fagerholm

 

esenta todo lo ominoso de las damas de hierro.

Monika Fagerholm

Photo by ULLA MONTAN

WHO KILLED BAMBI?

by monika Fagerholm

Translated by bradley  harmon

LET’S START HERE. One morning, September 2014.

            Gusten Grippe is walking down to the waterfront. Kallsjön, Villastan: it’s been a long time since he’s come down here on his own. A few years ago he moved away from the suburb where he grew up and vowed to never come back. So what’s he doing here now, on this specific September morning at the beginning of a fall that’ll throw him back to what he’d once left behind? The right answer: nothing. No reason, no mission. He just sort of ended up here on a morning jog. Yes, sometimes he still goes running here in Villastan, drives out from the nearby suburb where he currently lives, extravagantly, in a swanky bachelor pad with two floors (this here Gusten is a real estate agent, the realtor from hell as they say, his nickname, because he’s that good). Perhaps it’s an omen, a sign, something from the sixth sense. Most likely just a coincidence, an ironic fluke.

India’s timeless spiritual journey

Devotees releasing glowing plates of offerings into the Ganges at night, reflecting a timeless act of faith and reverence

India’s timeless spiritual journey

A look at ashrams, sacred sites, and soulful traditions

Nihel bchini

8 JULY 2026

India has long been revered as the spiritual heart of the world—a land where ancient wisdom, living traditions, and mystical practices continue to flourish. From the sacred banks of the Ganges to the quiet solitude of Himalayan ashrams, the country offers a deeply transformative journey into the essence of spirituality.

 

A colorful sign stands prominently in front of the historic Convento de San Bernardino de Siena, showcasing the picturesque town that captivates visitors with its riotously colorful streets and rich history

Not your average pitstop: Valladolid, Mexico

Hidden depths and ancient wonders in the heart of Yucatan

Shruti Kunke

8 July 2026

Winter months of 2025. As the virus of the season went around town wreaking havoc in Toronto, there was another contagion spreading faster and wider – the Cancun fever. Every single person I know was going there between February and April. 

Tony Bechara / An artist of many worlds

Tony Bechara, Untitled (detail), 1969. Courtesy of Parrish Art Museum

Tony Bechara: an artist of many worlds

27 Jun — 1 Nov 2026 at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, United States

30 JUNE 2026

 

My work is about the experience of vision, prior to the interpretation of a specific image—I am interested in that early reaction to light as it becomes cognitive. Painting is a vehicle of light and vision first, and then symbolic and narrative.

(Tony Bechara, 2001)

Mónica Ojeda / A Life Less Governed by Death

 

Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun by Mónica Ojeda. Translated by Sarah Booker. Coffee House Press, 2026. 240 pages.

A Life Less Governed by Death

Ecuadoran author Mónica Ojeda’s new novel is a celebration of the transfiguring power of dance, music, and neo-shamanistic knowledge.

Cory Oldweiler

26 May 2026

EARLIER THIS YEAR, The Yale Review ran an essay by Aria Aber, in which the German-born author reflects on her bygone clubbing days in Berlin. One of several framing devices Aber uses to consider her time in the city’s underground party scene is “the difference between ‘day knowledge’ and ‘night knowledge,’” with the latter being that “feeling of [her] mind: altered, wounded, almost unbearably alive.” I never was part of the techno scene, but in college and, to a lesser degree, in grad school, live music in small bars or clubs was a huge part of my life, and a number of Aber’s themes resonated with me, particularly her observations on how music and dance can be a search both for communal belonging and for solitary escape, a way to loosen the reins of control over your life, and a means of raging against the lack of control you have over the world around you.

Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun by Mónica Ojeda

 

• 

Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun

by Mónica Ojeda

Translated by Darah Booker

’Ojeda invites you to an Andean retro-futuristic festival in the mountains. Psychedelia, volcanos, disintegration. And then the language burns and nothing is what it seems’ - Mariana Enriquez

The ear is the organ of fear. It is a door to that which is not of this world. Leaving behind the dread and decay of the city, Noa and her best friend, Nicole, travel up into the Andes, heading for Solar Noise: an eight-day festival that takes place on the side of a volcano, in the infinite expanse of the páramo. A world of mysticism and underground music, in tune with the thunder of the earth and the bellows of the mountains. Noa has been drawn there in search of her father, who, wrestling with the violence of Ecuador, abandoned her as a child. But soon after their arrival at the festival, Noa appears possessed, speaking in a voice that is not her own. Believing Noa to be in danger, Nicole struggles to care for her friend. Until, as the party spills into Inti Raymi - the Incan festival of the sun - the girls’ desire for belonging burns, incandescent, collapsing the thin membrane separating life from death, and trauma from transcendence. Wild and incantatory, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun is both an hallucinogenic trip of a novel, and a heartfelt meditation on love, family and kinship - one that announces the arrival of a major writer.

GRANTA

Karl Ove Knausgård / Interview

 

Karl Ove Knausgård 

Interview

24 July 2012

There is a side to every man, so deeply personal, that it can only be revealed to strangers. When, at the age of thirty-nine, Karl Ove Knausgård decided to reveal his, the result was a six-tome autobiographical novel, totaling over 3,500 pages, as well as a very public lawsuit brought on by his family, and a subsequent controversy that fed the media in his native Norway for months. That was three years ago, and Knausgård is still uncomfortable with the attention Min Kamp (in English My Struggle, Archipelago, 2012), has received. Then again, naming a book after Hitler’s autobiography would seem to welcome controversy. Tall and slim, standing in front of a small audience in the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House in a black leather jacket and tight jeans, Knausgård gave the newly published English translation of his first volume a light squeeze. This, he said, trying to control the thick strands of greying hair that persistently got in his eyes, was as private as a novel could get. In it he revealed his innermost secrets, as well as intimate, merciless details from the lives of family and friends. Everything in it is true, but he refuses to call it a memoir; it is a long confession told with novelistic technique. He felt shame as he wrote it, not because of the nature of content, but because he thought it was devoid of literary value: who would be interested in his life? Eventually he realized that the work was relevant precisely because it was so personal; it created that unique fellowship between the writer and the reader, which is the very core of literature. ‘It is an intimate art form. One author, one reader. That’s it.’

A Strange Bird’s Cry by Karl Ove Knausgård

 

A Strange Bird’s Cry

by Karl Ove Knausgård

The Norwegian author Tarjei Vesaas was born in 1897, the same year as William Faulkner, and two years before Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov and Ernest Hemingway. Vesaas is not usually mentioned in the same breath as the others in this generation, obviously because his books are hardly read outside Scandinavia and, I suppose, because it is easy to think that his books are hardly read outside Scandinavia for a reason, and that reason can only be that they are not as good. But they are.