In 2025, British actor Simon Pegg was interviewed in the Criterion Closet , a renowned series where notable people from the filmmaking industry are invited to browse and discuss their favourite movies. One of Pegg’s ‘closet picks’ was David Lynch’s seminal thriller Blue Velvet , a dark and unnerving mystery set in the heart of middle America. Pegg says that his daughter hated the movie when he showed it to her, but then spoke about how he was delighted that she didn’t like it

Erich Maria Remarque’s beautifully tragic novel, Flotsam (1939) , elaborates the immense hardship many Jews and immigrants faced in the collapse of an already convulsing Europe on the eve of war. His articulate storytelling conveys the brutality many refugees withstood, from the harshness of border officials to the absence of trust between refugees themselves. Like Remarque, Orwell described in Why I Write  the many problems glaring at European leaders during the chaos of the

Across the world news avoidance is rising, as audiences increasingly disengage from reporting despite news being more accessible than...

Illustration by Will Allen/Europinion To say that Russia has a serious “cultural projection” problem seems trivial at this moment.  After...