Est-il vrai que, ARTE

Mulatu Astatke in The Temple of Dendur, MetLiveArts

Françoise Gilot interview (1998)

Shine little astroid, Sylke Rene Meyer

Portalis Film

 

This movie is really pushing the limits of what science communication is suppose to be. It was made possible by the Portalis European project.

Interview with Princesse Brianna Caradja in French

Recording of Princess Catherine Olympia Caradja

Ten years in France through supermarket snapshots

As we are approaching the end of another year, we are looking back at major events that marked recent history through the lens of supermarket pictures.

December 2013 The amount of cheese in a regular French supermarket is unbeliveable.

September 2020 This abundance is only matched by the different types of wine during harvest season.

January 2021 Who knew a few shelves of pasta could be so memorable. During the Covid confinements this was one of the most hard to find items along with toilet paper, flour and soap.

May 2022 I never put so much value on a bottle of sunflower oil as during the first weeks of escalation of war in Ukraine.

October 2023 Grapefruits from Israel suddenly became a bit too bitter when faced with images from the other side of the fence of a kibbutz.

December 2023 First you couldn't find things, then you didn't have enough money to buy them. Romanians know this story all too well from the 90s.

Public opinion and WWI propaganda, Walter Lippmann

A Halloween story from county Galway

I started reading the story of the missing children from Tuam on the bus to my first Saturday out as a mother, with my own little darling safely asleep in our bedroom on his Montessori tatami. I was already feeling nauseated because of a stomach bug that would eventually clear out after a rainy Sunday at home with my boys. With our Halloween decorations still out, it made me think of the furious fight of my Christian friends on Facebook against these celebrations. Why celebrate the witches, the ghosts and the demons they ask. Maybe because they still haunt us for a good reason, and maybe because sometimes we should be just as horrified by nuns.

Later edit

While the missing children from Tuam seem mere relics from a time long gone, this article sheds some light on a more modern debate in its dark conclusion.

The coming of the Third Reich, Richard J. Evans

"If the experience of the Third Reich teaches us anything, it is that a love of great music, great art and great literature does not provide people with any kind of moral or political immunization against violence, atrocity, or subservience and dictatorship. Indeed, many commentators on the left from 1930s onwards argued that the advanced nature of German culture and society was itself the major cause of Nazism's triumph."

"Even the most diehard reactionary might eventually have learned to tolerate the Republic if it had provided a reasonable level of economic stability, and a decent, solid income for its citizens. But from the start it was beset by economic failures of a dimension unprecedented in German history."

"Money, income, financial stability, economic order, regularity and predictability had been at the heart of bourgeois values and bourgeois existence before the war. Now all this seemed to have been swept away along with the equally solid-seeming political system of the Wilhelmine Reich."

" 'I often ask myself (...) why I write such an extensive diary. I can't leave it alone. (...) Just collect life. Always collect. Impressions, knowledge, reading, events, everything. And don't ask why or what for.' "

"Where books are burned in the end people will be burned too."

"The Nazi party was a party of protest, with not much of a positive programme, and a few practical solutions to Germany's problems. But its extremist ideology, adapted and sometimes veiled according to circumstance and the nature of the particular group of people to whom it was appealing, tapped into a sufficient number of pre-existing popular German beliefs and prejudices to make it seem to many worth supporting at the polls."

Aferim! (2015)

1916: The Irish Rebellion, BBC Documentary

The Spice Trail, Vanilla and Saffron

Ancient Rome, with Dr. Bernard Frischer

Marco Polo, Netflix series

The History of the Middle East, Documentary

British troops by the pyramids sometime between the two great wars.

The Berlin Wall, BBC Documentary

Masters of money, BBC documentary

History of English Language