We don’t have maps for the world in which we now find ourselves living. Sure, the whole Earth has been mapped by machines, and we can at any time open an app to access those digital representations, but those aren’t the kinds of maps I mean. They cannot tell us how to navigate this life, nor can they orient us towards a sense of our place in this world.

We used to have such maps. We called them myths, and they were told to us by poets. But we don’t have so many myths now, and we have even fewer poets.

In her speech in acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the writer, poet, and fantasist Ursula K. Le Guin said the following:

When I first received this collection of poems, I thought immediately of Le Guin’s words, because Amanda Coleman White is exactly the kind of poet Le Guin told us we’d need.

I’ve always particularly loved that bit in Le Guin’s speech about such poets being “realists of a larger reality.” She was playing a bit there, noting that the award had previously only ever been given to writers of “realist” fiction. For her and also for every good poet, what’s fobbed off on us as “realism” seemed to be rather limited. Like the maps I mentioned, realism can tell you where we are, but it can never tell us what “where” actually means.

On the other hand, the myths told to us by poets are the kinds of maps that tell us everything we really need to know. What does a place mean? What’s our place in that place? What (and especially who) else has lived, lives, and will live there? And where do those strange doors we see at the edge of our vision, glimpsed only for a moment, lead to?

That’s the “larger reality” Le Guin spoke of, and we need writers (“poets, visionaries”) who know how to get us there. Because that’s what a poem really is, a map into, out of, and through the Otherworld. And that’s also what this collection from Amanda Coleman White is, a really good map. Inspired by the Romantics, by Celtic myth, by her own experiences, and by the same current of visions seeping out through works like George MacDonald’s fairytales, Hinterlands is a startling poetic map of larger reality, the Otherworld that is always around us.

—Rhyd Wildermuth, druid, author, and Jungian Coach

Hinterlands, by Amanda Coleman White, can be ordered here.

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It can be ordered here (use code SUMMER26 for 25% off at checkout).

Having a clear sense of purpose is indispensable for effectively confronting State violence and undermining authoritarian forces. History, however, teaches us the risks and consequences of allowing that sense of purpose to fuse with armed resistance. Once we arrive at the conclusion that forceful oppression must be met with force, an unstable chain reaction can be set in motion. When the pain and trauma of living under violence continually reinforce that conviction, the motion begins to resemble a feedback loop – the more we normalize violence as method, the more we risk forgetting how to live without it.

The tragic irony of fighting for righteous ideals is having to wage war to end war. Knowing apathy and disengagement will not protect us or our loved ones from pain, we march towards this pain in the hope of making a dent in history. What we hold here is not a glorification of that march, but a history lesson from those who have already walked it – and who have had to live with its consequences.

There is no sealed “inside world” immune from the “outside.” What happens in Spain, Italy, Mexico, or Rojava does not remain contained. The circulation of tactics, ideologies, weapons, and narratives is global. So are grief and resistance. To pretend that these struggles are isolated is to misunderstand the architecture of modern power.

This book navigates the nature of organized, and armed, anti-militarist and anti-authoritarian resistance. Anti-militarism questions the institution of organized armed force as a primary instrument of politics. When this instrument becomes, as it often does, genocidally weaponized, it is not surprising that some anti-militarists may rationalize the militarization of its resistance.

Militarization is the golden child of authoritarian regimes. As such, anti-authoritarianism challenges the concentration of power itself, and powerful Armies are the most effective and swift method of concentrating it. Some movements may identify as anti-authoritarian as opposed to anti-militarist perhaps because they know they must fight authoritarian forces with an army. The essence of fighting to dismantle oppressive power structures is present in both. Because confronting tyranny by any means goes beyond replacing battalions’ commands, it requires transforming how power circulates through society.

The ultimate non-violent instrument against tyranny remains the pen – or today, the keyboard. Some would add the vote. A cohesive communal narrative anchored in democratic values is the backbone of a functioning society. Yet we must ask honestly, where do we see such cohesion today?

Journalism without critical analysis becomes documentation without direction. Analysis without civic engagement risks becoming abstraction. And electoral victories do not automatically dismantle entrenched systems of violence, much less permanently.

For years, I and countless other journalists reported on massacres carried out by military police in Rio de Janeiro. Reporting was insufficient without interpretation; that interpretation was insufficient without electoral consequences. A genocidal tyrant was voted out of federal office in Brazil, and yet the worst massacre in the history of the state of Rio de Janeiro followed. Writing or voting are incomplete when isolated from deeper structural transformation.

Christopher Scott Thompson understands that if writing and voting alone were enough, we would not find ourselves in the alarming situation that spans the Americas and beyond. Technology accelerates at a pace that outstrips public oversight. Innovations are unveiled before societies can meaningfully debate their purpose, and too rarely are they deployed in service of dignity.

Coordination among those subjected to systemic terror remains fragile. Individual heroism, however admirable, cannot substitute for collective strategy. Amid all that, there is almost no time to look at the past, at the history of our predecessors.

History is far from linear. To many of us, it has felt more like a deranged spiral, probably. We encounter familiar landscapes under new names, election cycles, and territories. Yet there is another danger. Those who learn too much from the past may cling to its tactics as if they were sacred. Reverence can calcify into rigidity.

Innovation requires memory, but it also requires the courage to depart from inherited scripts. To study past resistance is not to reenact it, but to understand its limits as well as its strengths.

Any serious reflection on war must confront its human toll. Warfare is not an abstraction of maps and slogans. It is the sight of lifeless bodies where neighbors once stood. It is the unbearable odor that lingers after explosions. It is the task of identifying the dead. It is the echo of grief in families for generations – trauma transmitted in silence and in story. Without acknowledging this social and psychological weight, war risks remaining theoretical, stripped of its enduring cost.

Finally, we must be clear about scale. Fascism was not, and is not, a marginal aberration. The mass mobilization achieved by regimes such as Mussolini’s in 20th-century Italy demonstrates how quickly authoritarian nationalism can root itself in modern societies. By contrast, Italian communism, though influential, never commanded the same totalizing apparatus of state and corporate power. Today, global capitalism, with its borderless flows of capital, data, and spectacle, can reproduce fascistic tendencies with alarming ease. Concentration of wealth, militarization of policing, the normalization of surveillance, and the erosion of democratic institutions under the guise of efficiency and security means modernity has done everything but bring resolve to the threat of absolute power.

What you are holding in your hands is neither a manifesto for violence nor a hymn to despair. It is an invitation to examine past struggles without romanticizing them, to differentiate resistance from domination, and to imagine forms of coordination that defend dignity without surrendering to the very logic they seek to defeat.

Get the book here.

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You can also read this piece and see more photos at A Beautiful Resistance.

Something kinda sad about‍

The way that things have come to be‍

Desensitized to everything‍

What became of subtlety?

Tool, “Stinkfist”

A few weeks ago, I was scrolling through the Instagram stories of friends and came across one which appeared more as outrage than update. A hot take, as the kids call it. Someone had sent her a text message, asking if she would like to hang out, to which she responded in the affirmative. Days and weeks went by as she waited for a response as to when. Nothing came. Later, in conversation with friends, it dawned on her to refer to the solicitor in question as an inicitibia, a pun that combines the words iniciativa (initiative) and tibia (meaning “lukewarm,” but often used in Spanish as “tepid” or “half-hearted, lacking enthusiasm”).

In response (but not in opposition) to her wordplay protest, I asked if she, on the other end of this reported digital dialogue, had become something of an expectatibia, a person whose expectations had become equally half-hearted as a result of our contemporary communication (or the lack thereof). Laughing, she agreed, and we began a long diatribe on passivity.

The theme of passivity has been lingering like an old cigarette butt in the analytical ashtray of my days for the last few years. Perhaps not unlike yourself, I oscillate between a deep-seated revulsion of social media and a dulled acceptance of it. I continue to tell myself that as soon as the End of Tourism Podcast has reached its limit, as soon as I get a few books published, the need to post updates on the screened-in spectacle will end and I will finally be liberated from that which ails. Ojalá. While the loathing of digital worlds can easily turn into self-loathing (as a result of our digital impotence), it can also open the aperture toward apprenticeship, toward studying the tools that seem to sway, surveil, and subvert our days.

Juxtaposing Passivity

According to the Miriam-Webster Dictionary, “passivity” describes the way in which one is either “acted upon by an external agency, [or] receptive to outside impressions or influences.” It can also mean “lacking in energy or will (lethargic),” “not active or operating (inert),” or “receiving or enduring without resistance (submissive).” The notion of passivity isn’t exactly a common thread of dialogue or debate in our times, in part, because the times traffic in passivity as acceptable, normal, and even reputable civil behaviour.

In common parlance, “passivity” is sometimes referred to in opposition to “aggressivity.” And yet, passivity is not the opposite of aggressivity. Passivity is the opposite of activity, of action. In the above definitions and others like them, passivity is defined as a negation, as the lack of action, as not reacting, not participating, not involving. While the pedantic particulars show that such negation itself is of course dependent on an action, such negation is a choice, however coerced, to surrender or relinquish what we might call conscious choices or actions. It is the inability to engage with the other directly. Passivity is not the negation of aggression, nor are they opposites, but unlikely bedfellows. Passivity plants the seeds for passive-aggression, the former the root of the latter. Today, the architecture and algorithms of social media are case in point.

Left on Read

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all offer the ability to engage with others, to like, comment, share or repost their publications. They invite human beings to leave behind their humanity as soapbox shitposters in the comment sections of people they don’t know and will never meet. They enable algorithmic and attention-deficit reward systems that disable any sense or skill of consequence to one’s digital actions in the lives of others. They permeate and promote the ability to use surveillance tools on each other, instead of analysing the systems and structures of said surveillance.

On Instagram, among other apps, digital communications make it possible for the sender of a message to see whether the recipient has seen or read their message. When hours or days go by without a response, having noted that the recipient indeed read a message, a sender can feel that they were left hanging, or “left on read.” Instagram, the so-called vanity app, also lets you surveil who has seen your “stories.” Maybe you too have had the experience in which someone who has read a private message of yours but not responded, then spends the following days or week viewing your story updates, but without responding to your message. In this context, it’s not difficult to see how passivity can turn into passive-aggression among social media users.

Let’s try to translate this digital dynamic into a real-world scenario. Imagine for a moment that you’re having an in-person conversation with a friend or lover. You’re both drinking coffee, listening in to the lilts and letters in the other’s voice and words. For twenty minutes, the conversation swings between thematic branches. You ask them a question and without any notable cause, they turn blank, staring vacantly at you for minutes on end. They then get up, leave the table, the cafe, and the neighbourhood to tend to whatever it is they need to tend to. But you’re still there, in the cafe and conversation, waiting for a response. Morning turns to afternoon, afternoon turns to evening, light to night, and you continue to gaze into the place where your friend’s mouth was moving, waiting for an answer. And you wait, and wait, and wait. A couple of days go by and you’re still sitting there in the proverbial position. Finally, your friend returns, sits down at the table, takes a sip of three-day old coffee, and answers your question as if there was nothing in their days-long departure that would warrant pause or protest.

Spaced Out and Squaring Off

This example, as superficial as it may seem, can shed light on our contemporary cageyness and conflicts. In virtual worlds, at least on a social level, no one is really expected to respond immediately as if they were sitting across from you. In fact, the above example is somewhat disingenuous, in part, because the “left on read” dynamic is so common today that the conversation plays out almost identically, albeit with both parties engaging in such behaviour. Friends and acquaintances orbit each other like satellites spaced out high above a grounded reality, passing occasionally by with fleeting responses. Being “left on read” is so common that the person in waiting not only ignores the expectation of a response, but inevitably embraces the same passive tendencies. At the end of the day, the structures of online communication (if it can still be called “communication”) are built to enable and ennoble this capacity, and subsequently, to conceal their effects on us. While they might appear to appeal to our patience, they are undermining our interpersonal response-abilities.

Let’s be honest: I do it, you do it, and mostly everyone we know does it. Such passivity probably didn’t begin with social media, but social media takes the passive aspects laden in the culture and doubles down, feeding us sedatives. In using such technologies, we acquiesce to living within a media ecology that absorbs the dominant dynamics and then, typically, alters or augments them to fit the frameworks and goals of the technologies in question. In this case, the goals are mounted and maintained by technocratic oligarchs who secretly sell passivity in all its submissive forms. This is both cause and consequence of the exponential passivization of the people.

Still, when we imagine (and sometimes rightfully so) that receiving a response is important if not mandatory, the passivity of one can easily turn into the passive-aggression of another. Why did it take you a week to respond, knowing that I needed the answer days ago? This seems to be the obvious outcome of a system hell-bent on passivizing, such that any kind of direct response to or rejection of one’s passivity is seen as aggressive, or aggressive-aggressive (as opposed to passive-aggressive). In an era of manufactured overwhelm and snowflake (in)sensibility, a clear and direct response can easily be equated – by the hyperpassive among us – as overkill, as offensive, even abusive. At times, such responses may indeed amount to such things. However, our reactions to them alongside our interpretations of those reactions are dictated by the intermediary languages and tools we accept as status quo.

Let’s be fair, the vast majority of working people living in late-stage capitalist economies are inundated by the requirements of modern life. Busy with work, partners, kids, hobbies, school, homework, and getting around. Busy in order to put food on the table and into bellies. Busy being addicted to the scroll and spectacle. The overwhelm cannot be understated, but it doesn’t simply get us off the hook. Acquiescing to passivity simply deepens the unlikelihood of things being otherwise in our time.

The roots of passivity among us surely existed long before social media and for myriad other reasons, whether personal, cultural, even theological. In my experience, the east-coasters of the United States tend toward very direct communication, which for many would border on aggression. West-coasters, on the other hand, have seemed to me to inhabit more passive perspectives. Maybe you’ve come to similar kinds of generalizations in your travels.

My time in Oaxaca has unveiled the communicative culture here to be one beholden to deep passivity (not without its direct, aggressive, or even violent iterations). This passivity likely stems from an old-time form of hospitality that carries with it dialects of discernment that speak more to subtlety and care, rather than ignorance. However, without a history of media ecology bound to a particular culture, time and place, the transformation of conscious subtlety into unconscious submission gets lost in the fray. It ends up being flippantly affirmed, as so many spells do in our time, as cultural essentialism (“that’s just the way they are”) or with epithets like “it’s always been this way.”

Direct Action

Meditating on the place of passivity in contemporary modern culture, I wonder how it is that we both consider and conceal notions of passivity. This very yarn could be understood as a passive (indirect) shot at friends and acquaintances regarding their own latent ways. Or, we could imagine that none of this is personal. As it happens, you’re not that vain, and this song ain’t about you. However, it is for you. Moreover, it is an attempt to try to pull the personal, as well as the passivity that provokes it, out of the song long enough so that we might be able to listen to the music of our times with different ears.

When I hear people speak of passivity, the word seems to emerge as being synonymous with “subtlety,” “sensitivity,” “humility,” “patience” and “pacifism.” However, none of these things come close to describing “passivity,” the synonyms for which are, in fact, “indifference,” “insensitivity,” and “apathy.” The mechanics of technocratic algorithms push us toward the latter behaviours, toward becoming susceptible and eventually helpless to the onslaught of external impressions and influences. The result is not only the conflation of subtlety with apathy and pacifism with passivity, but the wholesale loss of the former terms as living attributes of clear and concise communication.

In reconsidering the effects of passivity for this essay, a kind of rhythmic recall came swimming into my mind. It led me to revisit the song “Stinkfist” by Tool, whose lyrics can be read as an analogy for our contemporary attachments and addictions to machines:

Something has to change‍

Undeniable dilemma‍

Boredom’s not a burden‍

Anyone should bear‍

Constant over-stimulation numbs me‍

But I would not want you any other way

Believe it or not, the song was released thirty years ago, long before social media and online algorithms. Their follow-up album Lateralus has a song called “Schism,” which seems to confer and confirm the consequences of our precarious passivity:

Cold silence has a tendency to‍

Atrophy any sense of compassion‍

Between supposed lovers‍

Between supposed brothers [1]

Today, social media users are both iniciatibias and expectatibias. We hedge our bets on social expectations while using little if any initiative to properly confront how those expectations are (mis)guided by the media we use (and are used by). Collectively, as passivity is pushed on us and into us, the capacity for direct action is endangered, both in communication with each other, and politically, against the systems that sedate the possibility of us being anything but passive puppets secured to social media strings. The possibility of direct action is dead on arrival, because “hey, all you have to do is ‘like’ or ‘share’ and you’ve done your duty.”

The spell is so deep that it’s hard to imagine things being otherwise. And yet, we must imagine things otherwise. What kind of compassionate remedy might emerge in the face of cold silence that doesn’t bow to further discord? How might we reconvene our communication as a form of communion, finding the kindling to craft kinship among us? Considering everything you’ve been offered here, how might you take this little spark in your hands and carry it among your days?

[1] The recorded version of this song repeats the line “between supposed lovers,” however, in live renditions the second iteration of “lovers” is often replaced by “brothers.” According to Ultimate Guitar, singer Maynard James Keenan said that the tracks on Lateralus are “all about relationships, learning how to integrate communication back into a relationship. How are we as lovers, as artists, as brothers? How are we going to reconstruct this beautiful temple that we’ve built and that’s tumbled down?”

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Chris Christou

Chris Christou is a cultural ecologist, storyteller, and writer. He is the founder of Oaxaca Profundo Learning Journeys and the host of The End of Tourism Podcast. A graduate scholar of the Orphan Wisdom School, Chris writes about the crucible of culture, from food to psychedelics, exile, media and myth. www.chrischristou.net

You can also read this piece and see more photos at A Beautiful Resistance.

The popularization of artificial intelligence is reshaping not only technology, but also the economics of knowledge production. Alongside entertainment and opinion, increasingly valued internet content is structured, explanatory, continuously updated information which can easily be parsed by AI systems. In this emerging landscape, projects modeled after Wikipedia occupy a particularly strategic position. They produce organized human knowledge in a form ideal for machine learning. While AI companies benefit from these digital ecosystems, who else benefits alongside them?

Wikipedia is perhaps the clearest example of this transformation. The Wikimedia Foundation has received donations from major tech firms including Google, Microsoft, Apple, GitHub, Adobe, and others. More recently, Wikimedia formalized commercial relationships with AI companies through Wikimedia Enterprise, licensing structured access to its data to firms including Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI. “Wikimedia Enterprise isn’t just about getting tech companies to pay for their use; it also provides them access to Wikimedia projects at a volume and speed designed to meet their data needs.”

One interpretation is that Wikipedia has become infrastructure for the AI economy. Large language models depend heavily on massive quantities of clean, human-written, frequently updated information, and Wikipedia is among the most trusted and machine-readable repositories ever created. Wikimedia officials themselves have acknowledged the pressure AI scraping places on their systems. “Wikipedia knowledge for AI training has driven up server demand and, subsequently, costs...” As such, Wikimedia is attempting to secure compensation for value that AI companies were already extracting for free. And its partnerships may represent an effort to force redistribution within an already unequal ecosystem.

Open collaborative knowledge production has become economically indispensable to AI systems.

The Observatory project, launched by the Independent Media Institute, presents itself as a “wiki” devoted to explanatory, evergreen political and intellectual content. Rather than publishing static essays, it aims to create continuously updated guides that synthesize the work of scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals into accessible explanatory texts.

The model resembles Wikipedia not only stylistically but structurally. The content is modular, educational, searchable, evergreen, and optimized for accessibility rather than academic permanence. In practice, this means translating dense intellectual work into machine-readable explanatory language.

The project’s relationship to AI is reserved for conversations with potential contributors and writers. Contributors were told that AI language models favor exactly this kind of content — wiki style, continuously updated, explanatory, digestible prose — and that this visibility within AI systems constituted part of the exposure contributors would receive in exchange for their intellectual labor.

In addition to AI systems benefitting from this publishing style, AI discoverability appears to be consciously integrated into the intellectual production’s rationale and value proposition.

Traditional scholarship depends on stable citations through fixed editions and archival permanence. Evergreen and living documents complicate that structure because texts can change over time. While authors may receive bylines, the work itself becomes fluid. Citations become unstable, and the historical durability traditionally associated with intellectual production weakens. Not to mention that AI companions seldom cite their sources.

This creates an asymmetry. AI systems benefit precisely from dynamic, continuously updated explanatory content. But for scholars and writers, the professional value of unstable, constantly rewritten texts may be considerably lower than that of fixed publications with durable citation value, and whose readers are conscious of who they are reading. Or, simply, conscious. Which is why the labor issue becomes even sharper when payment is replaced with promises of exposure.

Exposure through AI systems is fundamentally different from traditional readership. Large language models often synthesize information without clearly preserving attribution or directing users back to original authors. Even when AI systems indirectly amplify ideas, the resulting economic value is captured primarily by technology platforms rather than by the intellectual workers whose labor improved the models’ outputs. This publishing structure aligns closely with the needs of the AI industry.

The funding ecosystem surrounding the Independent Media Institute further complicates the picture. Nonprofit databases show that IMI has received substantial funding through donor-advised philanthropy structures, namely the GS Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund, formerly known as the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy. Donor-advised funds have become increasingly influential mechanisms within elite philanthropy because they allow wealthy donors to receive immediate tax benefits while shielding the flow of donations from public scrutiny.

That same year, an IRS disclosure error unintentionally revealed several major contributors to the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund, including Steve Ballmer (former Microsoft CEO), Laurene Powell Jobs (with stakes in Apple and Walt Disney), and Jan Koum (WhatsApp co-founder). The opacity is not accidental; concealment is one of the institutional features donor-advised funds explicitly provide. As a result, the inability to establish direct donor intent cannot automatically be treated as evidence that no structural alignment exists.

Brand new systemic incentives are coming to life. The AI economy is rewarding the production of simplified, structured, evergreen intellectual content optimized for machine absorption. Nonprofit media projects, open knowledge initiatives, philanthropic capital, and AI corporations all operate within this same ecosystem, even as their motivations may differ.

What emerges is a new political economy of intellectual production. Scholars, journalists, and public thinkers may increasingly be encouraged to reshape their work into AI-friendly formats not because such formats necessarily best serve human readers, but because they maximize discoverability, circulation, and machine usability — an offspring of the SEO friendliness of the early 2000s. Meanwhile, the greatest economic gains may accrue not to the producers of knowledge, but to the companies building commercial AI systems atop that knowledge infrastructure.

It is yet to be revealed whether intellectual labor in the AI era will remain a largely uncompensated public resource, or new models of ownership, compensation, and attribution will emerge before the infrastructure of human knowledge is permanently absorbed into machine economies.

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Mirna Wabi-Sabi

Mirna is a Brazilian writer, editor at Sul Books and founder of Plataforma9. She is the author of the book Anarcho-transcreation and producer of several other titles under the P9 press.

(Use code SUMMER26 for this discount)

Being Pagan (2nd edition), by Rhyd Wildermuth

(nonfiction/pagan/environmentalism/guides)

In a world of uncertainty, political upheaval, climate change, and endless consumerism, in alienated societies bereft of meaning, connection to nature and community, what does it mean to be Pagan?

From druid, theorist, Jungian coach, and writer Rhyd Wildermuth comes this updated and expanded edition of Being Pagan. Exploring the meaning of pagan connection — to time, to land, to body, to nature, and to Other — through history, personal experiences, and myth, Wildermuth offers simple yet profound guidance for anyone searching for a deeper way to live.

Including new chapters on magic, the unconscious, the gods, and history, this new edition releases 21 June, 2026.

Anti-Militarists at War, by Christopher Scott Thompson

(nonfiction/politics/anarchism/world history)

Though generally opposing militarism, anarchists nevertheless frequently find themselves taking up arms and militarizing their movements. From the formal anarchist military columns in Spain, the trained resistance units in France, and the collective arming of men and even women in Oaxaca and Rojava, anarchists seem to have quite a habit of going to war.

In Anti-Militarists At War, Christopher Scott Thompson (author of Pagan Anarchism) treats the complicated relationship between anarchism and militarism (as well as the treacherous alliances with capitalist states that anarchists have often made) with a critical yet sympathetic touch, and with an eye to the most important question facing anarchists today: what can be done when the world marches to war?

Releases 7 July

The Walls of Jericho, by Ronald Ruskin

(fiction/thriller/mystery/pandemic)

“A hard-to-shake techno-paranoid fever dream about the collapse of truth, trust, and sanity in the digital age.” — Kirkus Reviews

Dr. Leila Elfassi is the new director of the emergency psychiatry ward at Manhattan Central Hospital. But just as she takes the position, a strangely contagious mental disorder starts to shake the world. Violent rage, extreme paranoia, and sudden group-think are spreading as fast as viral internet memes, and researchers studying the cause of disorder find their work sabotaged — or even end up dead.

And then, Leila learns a terrifying truth about the plague from an anomalous archeological find in the ruins of Jericho that the scientific community refused to hear: this has happened before.

Equal parts spy, medical, and historical thriller, The Walls of Jericho is a relentless, fast-paced, and incisive look at modern technology and the human condition.

Releases 16 June

On My Way To Wisdom: The Evolution of a Trauma Therapist, By Alison Miller

(memoir/trauma recovery/spirituality/ritual abuse)

In this beautiful memoir, renowned trauma therapist Dr. Alison Miller recounts her long and wending life journey towards an undeniable and humane wisdom. From her youthful struggle to find herself as a woman who didn’t fit what people thought women should be, to her eye-opening experiences as a student in India, through her survival of domestic abuse at a time few openly acknowledged it, and into her professional life as a therapist for abuse victims, Miller weaves a beautiful narrative of a spiritually-curious life grounded in compassion for others and for herself.

Sometimes startling, sometimes heart-wrenching, but relentlessly kind and inspiring, On My Way to Wisdom is a remarkable autobiography that will feel as beautiful as a fairy-tale and as true as your own life.

Releases 7 July

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There’s nothing “intelligent” about AI or Large Language Models, there’s definitely nothing creative about them, and they’re really, really awful for the world.

Besides gluttonously consuming absurd amounts of energy, water, and other resources so that a handful of really awful rich people can get even richer, they’re making us all dumber, more reliant on computers, and more distrustful of our own capacity to understand and shape the world we all share.

AI operates on prediction. Each word or pixel that a chatbot or image generator spits out is a computer’s guess at what should follow the previous ones, based on all the human writing and images fed into its training sets. That’s how it generates sentences that sound human and images that look “real,” fooling some into believing there’s a real intelligence in there.

There isn’t.

Real writing, the kind that we call “art” and “literature,” the stuff that conveys actual truth and meaning, the stuff that changes your world, is never going to be predictable. Ask a writer how a particularly beautiful sentence or a soul-shaking truth appeared in a manuscript, and most will give you a confused and perhaps even panicked stare. That’s because real writing and real art comes from otherworldly and unconscious realms that only artists, writers, mystics, and madmen ever visit, and never for very long.

Pagan and animist people believed that thoughts and stories came from the gods and spirits. That’s why it’s call inspiration: a spirit got into you. And when you hear a really good song, read really good writing, and gaze upon really good art, it feels like something spiritual just happened to you; that’s because it did.

But there’s no spirit in AI. There’s no ghost in the machine.

And that’s why we don’t use it.

Sul Books only publishes humans, not machines. All our artists, authors, and editors have agreed not to use AI, and we’ll never use it in anything we offer to the world.

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When’s the last time someone asked you for directions?

That’s the question I asked myself several years ago. I was sitting outside a cafe, reading a book. This was (and still is, in some places in Europe) a perfectly normal human thing to do. So, too, was the other thing I was doing while reading and drinking my coffee: gazing passively at the people passing by, taking in their presences, bit of speech, and their modes of dress. In other words, “people watching,” one of those pass-times we all often did before the internet.

The reason I asked myself that question was because there was a family making quite a commotion in front of the cafe. I could feel their tension and frustration quite clearly, even before I let my attention drift to their words. They were Americans, speaking west coast English, and they were quite clearly lost.

The father of the family looked particularly flustered, because his wife kept giving him the kinds of glances that a woman tired of her husband’s incompetence gives a man. He was staring at his phone, and she was staring at hers; likewise, their two adolescent children. Four people, four phones, and none of them could find what they were looking for.

“Can I help you find something?” I asked, shocking them.

They looked at me, then looked back at their phones, completely ignoring my offer of help.

I didn’t push the issue further, but after half of a minute and more agitation, the father finally spoke. He told me the place, explaining the map on his phone said it should be nearby but they couldn’t find it.

I laughed, and then I pointed to a restaurant just across from the cafe where I was sitting. “It’s right behind you.”

The four of them turned and looked in the direction I pointed. Then, they did something that’s stuck with me as much as the question I asked myself that day. They looked back at their phones, conferred with each other a little bit, and then walked away from both the cafe and the restaurant they’d been searching for.

I shrugged, kept reading, kept drinking my coffee. A few minutes later, though, I saw them return, phones still in their hands, and then they walked into the restaurant I’d pointed out to them.

Of course, I don’t know for certain why they left and came back. It’s certainly possible that they’d wanted to check out another restaurant before finally deciding on that one. But the way they held their phones made me conclude otherwise. I think they didn’t actually believe this was the correct restaurant, even after seeing it with their own eyes. Never mind the fellow American who’d confirmed it for them.

They needed their phones to confirm it for them instead.

I found it all quite funny and somewhat sad, but dwelt for quite a long time on the question I’d asked myself. Really, when was the last time someone had asked me for directions? I couldn’t remember. And then a much more uncomfortable question arose that made me put the entire matter out of my mind: when was the last time I had asked someone for directions?

I didn’t want to think about it back then, because I already knew it had been quite some time. But the question came back to me again later when I was with visiting a friend in another city. I’d offered to take him out to dinner if he’d kindly pick the place for us to eat. My offer had provoked quite a crisis, though: it took him hours to decide on a place, because no nearby restaurants had adequately-positive Yelp reviews.

“I don’t care about the reviews,” I’d told him. “I just want to buy us dinner.”

I really didn’t care, and I tried hard to convince him of this. Eventually, noticing how he’d become frozen by indecision, I just picked a place for us, but I could tell how uncomfortable he was by my willingness to just throw our fate to chance like that. And though we’d had a perfectly fine meal, I think he still wasn’t convinced it had been a good idea to just pick a restaurant without previous assurance from his phone that it would be good.

I can look back on my own life, especially the last fifteen years of it, and find therein countless stories illustrating the same problem these examples point to. I’m sure you could, too, no matter your age or relationship to technology.

We’ve been losing crucial aspects of our capacity for autonomous thought to the “automation” of machines. Put that way, it sounds quite dire, but we don’t experience it quite that way in daily life. Instead, it’s a slow progression, like the melt of a glacier or the slow collapse of an abandoned house. Bit by tiny bit, we give over crucial parts of our decision-making processes to machines, letting search engines, apps, and personalized algorithms incrementally direct our actions.

At such a slow pace, it feels more like “convenience” to us, not self-abasement, and thus it becomes quite difficult to see how much of ourselves we’re losing.

Stories are the only way we can really understand what’s been lost, so here’s another one. When I was 17 and applying to a college in Massachusetts, I stayed for a week with my grandparents. My grandfather drove me to that interview, and then, to my complete shock, he handed me some money and said, “We’ll see you at home.”

They lived in Connecticut, and the college was in a small town north of Boston. He knew I’d never taken a train before and that I had never been to Boston. I had only their address and phone number, plus the small but adequate amount of money my grandfather had given me.

I had no map, no train timetables, and absolutely no fucking idea how to do any of this.

The more I think on it, the more I’m convinced that this was the greatest gift my grandfather ever gave me. When there’s no machine in your pocket to consult about a decision or to tell you where you are, you have to find other ways of figuring those things out. You also have to trust yourself and also the general goodness of others. You have to trust that you’ll figure things out, and you have to trust that other people might know better than you do. You then have to ask those people, strangers who knew things you don’t know, like how to get to the train station or even how to buy a train ticket.

Now, of course, a 17 year old in the same situation would probably just consult his phone, asking an AI “assistant” fragments of questions like “how to buy a train ticket,” “get ticket Boston Hartford,” and “where to eat Boston train station.”

And that’s why I think it’s much harder for those younger than I am to see what they’ve lost, because they didn’t get as much experience trusting themselves and the world as I did. That’s also, probably, why we see so many studies reporting absurdly high levels of crippling social anxiety in so-called “Generation Z” teenagers and adults. Reliance on smartphones and the internet for information has alienated them from their own and others’ humanity, particularly our faculty for knowledge about the world through our in-person social interactions.

You only learn how to interact with people by interacting with people. When the majority (or in some cases the totality) of all your social exchanges occur through the mediation of a machine, of course you’ll fucking feel awkward and anxious when you’re thrust into physical contact with others.

But that awkwardness and anxiety are a necessary step in learning how not to be awkward and anxious. It’s the initial crisis we all face as we learn to be social: no one’s born knowing how to interact with other people.

The problem for younger people now is that there’s no one telling them this, no one coaxing or coercing them into these initiatory rituals. And worst of all, they’ve come to believe that their condition is physical and medical. They get diagnosed (or self-diagnose) with social anxiety, or autism, or ADHD, and thus the very conditions which have led to their alienation from themselves and each other become situations which must be sustained. Things must be kept calm, unpredictable situations and awkward social interactions must be avoided, strange and unfamiliar people and experiences must be kept far away. Everything must be known beforehand, safety and certainty confirmed by a “reliable” automated source.

They’re not the only ones suffering in this way, of course. And in their defense, they were born into a world where the adults they trusted should have known better. Those adults still should know better, but too many of us have been losing our own autonomy in favor of security and safety. I’ve met quite a few people who’ve become addicted to consulting an LLM like ChatGPT or Grok before making a decision about something, or worse, those who use these machines to check if their ideas about a matter are correct. I know very few people who drive without GPS in their cars, and fewer still who’d even consider leaving their house without their phone.

None of this is terminal, though, neither for those of us old enough to have learned better nor for those too young to have experienced the world before algorithms. And though not everyone was fortunate enough to have a grandfather engineer such a brilliant initiation as mine did, we can always still do this for ourselves, our children, and each other.

That is, we can still get lost. We can still lose ourselves in order get back what we’ve been losing.

It’s really simple when you think of it: just go somewhere unfamiliar without your phone or any other device to consult. Then, if you really get lost, ask someone around you for help. If you’re feeling really daring, ask them to help you without them looking at their phones, either.

If you live in a place you know too well to get lost in, then just leave your phone at home and go somewhere you don’t normally go. Bring a book, maybe, but make sure you’re also letting yourself people watch, opening your awareness to what else is happening around you rather than shutting it all out.

Maybe you’ll meet a new friend. Maybe you’ll even meet some parts of yourself you lost, and you can then find your way home together again.

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You can also read this piece and see more photos at A Beautiful Resistance.

The day after the assassination of the Ayatollah of Iran, the “Wake Up Brazil” demonstration, scattered with flags of the United States and Israel, took over parts of Copacabana and other streets across major Brazilian cities. On Sunday, March 1, 2026, the group of demonstrators gathered at the corner of Avenida Atlântica and Rua Bolivar to protest against the federal government and certain ministers. While the foreign flags are not directly related to the protest’s agenda, they are used as ideological symbols of international alignment, and this alignment also occurs at the financial level.

Called for by right-wing leaders and heavily publicized on social media, the demonstration brought together supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro, and its central agenda was criticism of Lula’s government and calls for amnesty for those involved in the January 8 attacks. The turnout in Rio was relatively small, especially when compared to the request for authorization to block traffic made by the organization to the municipal government. The Official Gazette of Rio reports the closure of the entire beach due to a gathering that turned out to be of around 4,700 people between Rua Bolívar and Barão de Ipanema.

Councilman Rafael Satiê formalized the request to close streets to enable the demonstration in Copacabana on a scale that indicates an expectation of a large audience, with extensive road closures for an extended period. His political activity aligns with the evangelical field, as he presents himself as a pastor, although he does not disclose which church he belongs to. However, he has already demonstrated public closeness to the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, defending its events and positioning himself against criticism of the institution. The Universal Church, in turn, has a history of allegations of money laundering and tax evasion investigated by authorities in Brazil and abroad, with accusations of using multi-billion-dollar donations from the faithful in complex financial schemes.

This framing takes on a more explicit political contour when one observes that, on the eve of the event, he posted on social media that the Ayatollah had been righteously “slaughtered,” a term loaded with dehumanization. At the same time, he celebrated the actions of the United States and Israel, connecting their institutional role in organizing public space to a clear political-ideological positioning in the international debate. In other words, these international flags reveal the presence of transnational networks of ideas and funding that have permeated Brazilian politics for decades.

Think tanks and the global influence machine

The United States possesses the largest intelligence structure in the world. It comprises nearly two dozen agencies, including the CIA, and operates with an annual budget exceeding US$70 billion. Since the Cold War, declassified documents show that these structures have been used not only for traditional espionage but also for political influence operations in countries considered strategic.

Latin America occupies an important place in this history. Direct or indirect interventions by the United States in countries such as Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Brazil, especially during the 20th century, have been extensively documented. The case of the Brazilian coup is now seen as blatant, but even it was only confirmed by documents released decades later.

In the 21st century, the methods have modernized. International political influence does not always manifest itself in coups or clandestine operations. It usually operates through networks of institutions, foundations, think tanks, and civil organizations.

One of the main international networks of this type is the Atlas Network, an organization based in Washington that connects more than 500 think tanks in about 100 countries. Founded in 1981 by British businessman Antony Fisher, it aims to promote public policies related to market economies, reduced state intervention, and economic liberalization. The organization provides funding, training, scholarships, and educational programs to partner institutions worldwide.

In Brazil, one of the organizations associated with this network is the Millenium Institute, created in 2005 by, among others, Paulo Guedes, former minister of finance under Bolsonaro. The institute presents itself as a study center focused on promoting economic freedom, fiscal responsibility, and liberal democracy. Its activities include publishing articles and analyses, organizing events and debates, producing institutional videos, and political training programs for young political leaders.

Think tanks rarely survive solely on individual donations. They depend on institutional funding, often coming from companies, foundations, or international organizations. Like other think tanks, the Millenium Institute does not provide financial returns to those who invest in it, at least not directly. Its goal is to influence public policies in Brazil, and the implementation of these policies can be profitable in the long term, offering a good return on investment for a foreign entity such as the United States government.

Files from the Millenium Institute indicate financial support from the financial management arm of Bank of America. (Some of these pages have since been removed.)

Bank of America, in turn, maintains a long-standing partnership with BlackRock, now considered the largest asset manager on the planet, with trillions of dollars under its purview. Tom Montag, former president of Bank of America, served on BlackRock’s board of directors while working at BofA. Meanwhile, about 2 years after Merrill Lynch “joined forces” with BlackRock, it was acquired by BofA.

BlackRock also maintains close relationships with the United States government and the CIA. During the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic, the company was hired by the Federal Reserve to manage asset purchase programs aimed at stabilizing markets. And several company executives have moved between positions in the private sector and positions in the US government, a phenomenon known in Washington as a “revolving door.” Thomas E. Donilon is one of these executives. As BlackRock’s vice president, he was a member of the CIA’s board of directors for almost a decade and is also a member of the board of a think tank called the Council on Foreign Relations.

There is an argument to be made that this does not mean that there is any coordination between companies, think tanks, and intelligence agencies. But a trail indicates that the institutional networks connecting global finance, public policy, and intellectual production are dense and interconnected. It is not surprising that this revolving door phenomenon generates concern, as it shows that these career incentives between the public and private sectors can shape political choices even without explicit corruption. Favors for future employers and legislative influence through former colleagues create an environment conducive to conflicts of interest.

This is the core of the Economic Theory of Regulation: Through this revolving door, regulatory agencies begin to serve the interests of the industries that should be regulated, instead of the interests of the public. Paulo Guedes, founder of the Millennium Institute, is a perfect example of this, having served in public office as a minister, created banks and investment management companies, as well as one of the main liberal think tanks in Brazil.

The ecosystem of mobilization

While think tanks produce ideas and train political cadres, another type of organization is active in street mobilization. In Brazil, the NasRuas movement is one of these groups. Created during the political mobilizations of the past decade, the movement gained notoriety by organizing protests against the Dilma Rousseff government and later participating in successful pro-impeachment campaigns. Groups like this applied strategies inspired by US political campaigns, including the intensive use of social networks, targeted digital advertising, production of viral political content, and coordination with influencers and ideological pages.

A recurring characteristic of these movements is diffuse funding. The Brasil NasRuas association, for example, does not disclose in detail the origin of all its donors or the amounts raised for specific campaigns. This lack of transparency led the movement to appear in judicial investigations such as Inquiry 4828 of the Supreme Federal Court, where Minister Alexandre de Moraes authorized a series of inspections to investigate the organization and financing of demonstrations considered anti-democratic. The result revealed the potential of “the existence of a fully structured virtual communication network aimed at both the sectarianization of politics and the destabilization of the democratic regime to obtain direct economic and indirect political gains.”

Carla Zambelli, founder of the NasRuas Association, and Paulo Guedes, founder of the Millennium Institute, were linked mainly because they were part of the same political project during the Bolsonaro government, in which Guedes was responsible for economic policy and Zambelli acted as an ally in Congress supporting this agenda. She was investigated for committing several crimes, including money laundering through the Association she created, NasRuas, and is currently in prison.

This ecosystem typically operates on three levels. At the top are financial institutions, foundations, and international networks that support intellectual and educational projects. In the middle are think tanks, responsible for producing content, research, and political training programs. At the base are digital mobilization movements and street organizations, which transform these ideas into public campaigns, protests, and political pressure. There is not always explicit coordination between these layers. But they often share networks for funding, training, and the circulation of ideas.

Given this scenario, the presence of foreign flags in Brazilian political demonstrations takes on another meaning. It represents cultural admiration, ideological alignment, or geopolitical identification. But it can also indicate the existence of an international network of political narratives and funding that crosses national borders. In the March 1st protest in Copacabana, this symbol appeared literally. Perhaps it was just a spontaneous gesture. Perhaps it was a sign of something bigger.

We live at the mercy of the largest, most influential, technologically advanced, and well-funded intelligence and covert operations infrastructure in the history of the world. In this context where ideas and money circulate globally with the same speed as memes on social media, believing that Brazilian politics exists in isolation from these networks may be, at the very least, a little naive.

In any case, it is curious that a mobilization surrounded by international flags and neoliberal speeches ends up leaving as an online trail its “official” crowdfunding campaign, created almost 6 months before the event, whose URL still announces that “Bob, the dog, needs surgery” because “he was run over.”

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Mirna Wabi-Sabi

Mirna is a Brazilian writer, editor at Sul Books and founder of Plataforma9. She is the author of the book Anarcho-transcreation and producer of several other titles under the P9 press.

Yesterday, my mother-in-law bought heating oil for our house.

We already had enough to get us through any potential final frosts, but she, for whom a warm house is more a crucial matter of health than of comfort, decided the supply we share between us needed to be topped up now.

She was wise to do this. In fact, she’d ordered it delivered only a few hours before it was announced on local news that the prices would double, and so we’d just barely missed paying much, much more for it than we did.

Like many very old houses here, we use a central furnace to keep ourselves warm. The system was installed by her brother-in-law who built a wind-powered electrical system in his own ancient farmhouse in the north of this country decades before this was a thing.

Our own heating system is hardly “green,” of course, and much more vulnerable to geopolitical shocks than I prefer. We’ve weatherized, changed out old windows for much more insulated ones, and have generally gotten quite good at conserving heat, but we’re hardly near anything approximating self-sufficient.

My mother-in-law is 83 years old. Born in this very house during the Nazi occupation of Luxembourg, she grew up in circumstances modern city-dwellers associate with the 19th century, rather than the 20th. Water came from a well and you shat in a shack outside no matter the time of year. Half the house was a barn where pigs, a cow, and chickens lived in the colder months, and she, her brothers, her parents, and a grandmother shared the rest of it.

They raised and grew almost all their own food, which was good, because there wasn’t anything like a grocery store within less than a day’s walk. They preserved their surplus, smoked their own hams, and made their own sauerkraut every autumn to get them through the winters. What they didn’t grow, they traded for with the other families in this village or bought at occasional markets in larger villages nearby, all from people they knew well and cared about, even if they didn’t necessarily like everything about them. And all this was considered a very, very good life.

Now, her son and her son-in-law occupy most of the house (expanded a decade ago). The barn is long gone, and so is the outhouse. She lives in a comfortable, modern apartment on its ground floor with windows that look out upon a koi pond. Water and electricity are both pumped in via government infrastructure, she’s got satellite television and high-speed internet (that she never uses), and what she grows now in her part of the garden is more for the pleasure of growing it, rather than necessity.

The two men who occupy the majority of the house do all the work that’s being done on the property, now, but that work’s nothing like it was when she grew up here. They have four jobs between the two of them, none involving manually labor of any sort. Publishing, writing, architectural design, government consulting: none of their jobs could possibly have been called meaningful “work” back when she was born. And while autumn once meant bringing in the livestock for the winter, it now means moving pots of rare medicinal plants from a greenhouse outside to indoor south-facing windows.

As I said, because she manages the heating decisions for the entire house, she ordered more heating oil for us and it was delivered yesterday. It was a very wise decision, and also one neither I nor my husband could really have made with such foresight. She’s been heating this house for decades, has seen the way prices and distribution changes according to the world’s war-weather. She knows these cycles far better than I do, because she’s lived them.

The kind of wisdom she has about such things comes only from lived knowledge. Some of it was taught to her by her own parents and grandparents, certainly, but only by using what they’d taught her over decades of life did it actually become truly useful.

I, on the other hand, got very little from my parents except relentless examples of how not to thrive in life. Sure, the lessons I learned from their innumerable fuck-ups were instructive in their own right, but they don’t really help much in this time of capitalism’s latest catabolic crisis.

Perhaps, the fact that I wasn’t even taught to drive as a teenager maybe helped in some way now. I still don’t know how to drive, and I’m nearing 50, but that lack of knowledge at least gave me a reason to learn the joys of walking long distances, traveling by bike, and getting really good at public transit. So, now that petrol prices will make driving a punitive necessity for millions, perhaps it’s best I never got around to it.

Perhaps the other things I didn’t get from them helped, too. Without anything approximating stability, love, comfort, and even acknowledgment of existence from them, I discovered you had to go find and create those things, instead.

When you’re eight and neither of your parents have even remembered that kids don’t know how to make their own dinner or that they probably even need to eat once a day, you learn pretty quickly to feed yourself. Not well at first, of course, but eventually, in your teenage years, you get good at cooking and then later become a chef for a few years and now you can make absolutely anything so well that every restaurant you go to feels like a big disappointment.

When you can’t just assume things will be provided for you, you learn you have to provide for yourself. This, I think, is how I learned that you can survive almost anything by being a nice enough person, because you cannot actually always provide for yourself and you need others to help you with that. Be a jerk, or take instead of asking for them to share, and they’re not going to care if you live or die. But be genuinely kind, even and especially when you’ve got almost nothing, and you’ll find help when you need it.

And then, later, you learn that the abject failures that you called “mom” and “dad” were failures specifically because they never learned that lesson. Their lives were awful, but they just left it at that. No reason, they imagined, to make anyone else’s life better when my own life’s shit.

And because you learn that’s how they thought and why they didn’t even bother, you then decide to try the opposite approach. Sharing even when you’re poor, cheering someone up even when you’re miserable, telling someone life will be okay even when you cannot believe that for yourself — you try these things, because that’s what you wished they’d done, and it turns out it’s actually a really good way to be.

Sure, you make mistakes. You trust the wrong people sometimes, give of yourself and your limited resources to people who actually already have much more than you and were just trying to see what they could bilk you for. You do work for others that didn’t need the work done for them and were just being lazy. And you stay around certain people because you mistook what they called love for what actually was love. And you learn from this the same way a woman learns through buying heating oil at the wrong time to buy it at a better time.

So, I’ve learned what I could, mostly from trying not to be as useless and destructive to others as my parents were for their children. And I thing what I’ve learned is as important for this time of collapse as what my mother-in-law learned.

We both learned resilience and the ever-expanding relationship between autonomy and community. Taking care of what you can for yourself and those who rely upon you is where you start first. You grow and raise and create what you can, which is often a lot more than most of us imagine is possible.

Then, you exchange for what you cannot provide for yourself by sharing what you have extra of. You find out what others need that you can give them, and get what you need from others, by not being an awful person.

Capitalism, of course, tried to make that last bit not matter any longer. It abstracted out all the things we create and provide and need, turned it into numbers, and tried to hide from us whether things were produced by abused children or sold to us by child-abusing billionaires. You could be a jerk, an asshole, a child-abuser, a rapist, a murderer, and regardless still buy whatever you wanted and sell whatever would turn you a profit, and no one would ever know the difference.

Fortunately, though it will be a really difficult time for millions and likely billions, capitalism is eating itself faster and faster and it’s going to go away. Empire, too, at least this current iteration of it. This newest crisis of oil, caused by two asshole murderers who thought killing a third asshole murderer would make the whole world forget what odiously awful people they really are, will cause shocks throughout the entire fragile system from which it won’t ever recover.

Fortunately, because every crisis of capitalism is an opening for us, the ones who figured out that being kind is a lot better than being unkind, sharing is a lot better than hoarding, asking for is a lot better than taking, and doing the opposite of what people who harmed us did is the really the best way for us all to live.

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Reminder: Empires Crumble shirts like the one I’m wearing below are now available from Sul Books (and an automatic 10% discount gets applied at checkout). And even more cool swag is coming. :)

At Hotel Mirabelle, nothing is ordinary… not its guests, not its staff, and certainly not the journeys they take.

Charlene has transformed a crumbling seaside hotel into a sanctuary for people with disabilities. When a diverse group of strangers arrive for a week-long holiday — wheelchair users, people with dementia, carers, war veterans, immigrants, the lonely, the heartbroken, the hopeful — their lives begin to intertwine in unexpected and transformative ways.

From Brighton’s open water to late-night conversations in Bert’s Bar, friendships form, prejudices unravel, old wounds surface, and new beginnings glimmer into life.

Told with warmth, humour, and extraordinary psychological insight, Hotel Mirabelle and the Wonderful Wheelchair Company is a novel about love, loss, dignity, and the courage it takes to keep living fully … no matter your age, your past, or your body.

Hotel Mirabelle and the Wonderful Wheelchair Company is released today, and below is an excerpt of this fantastic book. More information is available here.

I want a holiday,” said Maureen, smiling at her key worker, Alice, who had just arrived.

“Okay,” said Alice, smiling back. “Can I take my coat off first?”

Maureen nodded. “Yes! But what does ‘okay’ mean? Why did you say ‘okay’ when I said I want a holiday?”

“It means I hear you. You want a holiday.”

“Yes. But you know, I don’t get a holiday without help.”

“That’s right, even though we already know you can manage to go on a holiday without any of us.”

“I do, don’t I, friend Alice? I have been to the swimming pool by myself and for a weekend in Eastbourne. And then there was the big holiday. A whole week.”

“Yes,” agreed Alice. “Can you remember where that holiday was, Maureen?”

“Holiday in Cornwall.”

“Yes. You had a holiday in Cornwall two years ago. And you surprised us all by going away with a travel company without any of us there.”

Maureen lived in a sheltered-accommodation studio flat in Cherry Tree, a new development for people with disabilities. There were ten studio flats and a resident manager as well as a community lounge. But there was no cherry tree on the small grounds of Cherry Tree, which had felt a wasted opportunity to Alice and the other staff and volunteers. At least it was better than those facilities with sunshine-cheery names to wipe out any sense that disability carried a shadow with it. Just a shaved piece of grass with a gravel path around it and three wooden seats.

“Cornwall!” laughed Maureen. “But there was no corn in the wall.”

“No. There wasn’t,” laughed Alice.

“But there was sand in the sandwich,” chortled Maureen.

“Oh, you are so punny,” smiled Alice, putting her arm around Maureen. “I’ve got bad manners, Alice. Would you like a drink? I got tea, and I saved a little milk for you, and then I have to go to the shop to get more milk.”

“Thank you, Maureen. I would love a cup of tea this morning. And I have found something you might be interested in: a hotel in Sunville. It’s a holiday company called Wonderful Wheelchairs.”

“Oh,” Maureen paused while pouring out the boiling water. “That is true. Wonderful Wheelchairs. Because wheelchairs are wonderful, aren’t they? Cos I couldn’t walk without one.” She finished making the tea. “I didn’t spill anything and took care with the boiling water, Alice,” she said, proudly.

“You did, and you remembered I have this bad habit.”

“Very bad habit, Alice. One teaspoon of sugar. Not good for your teeth.”

“I know,” said Alice, folding her hands over her plump stomach.“That’s why you have stayed so healthy, Maureen, and can even walk a bit without the wheelchair,” she added.

“Do you know, Alice, on the last holiday there were all these people there who didn’t have a learning disability, and they couldn’t walk like I can. I was the best walker. Me!”

“That must have been very strange,” Alice said.

“It was. Because my neighbour, Christine, who had Down’s like me, in her family she had a clever dad in a wheelchair and a mum who couldn’t see properly, and her sister had a big fight with her boyfriend and had to go back home to live with mum and dad.”

“Whereas, you are living very successfully here and are good friends with your neighbours, and you can help people who have got good brains because you have a good heart. Even though your parents didn’t.”

There was a long pause as she sipped her tea. “Alice,” said Maureen tentatively.

“Something else. I didn’t say it.”

There was a pause. “Yes?”

“Yes. There was a man on the holiday who was a teacher. At my college. For my class.”

“Your special enrichment course at college?”

“Yes. Mr. Grass. Spelt the same as grass in the garden, but there wasn’t any grass on him.”

“No,” agreed Alice.

“Like Cherry Tree doesn’t have a cherry tree.”

“He was a nice man in college, and he said I had — potential. He was proud of me.”

“Yes. I remember now. You got a certificate.”

“Yes,” said Maureen, pointing to the framed certificate on the wall. “This is to certify that Maureen Anderson was awarded the student of the year certificate for her all-around progress in all subjects.”

Alice looked at the small handwriting at the bottom right, his signature: Edward Anders Grass.

“I didn’t realise his middle name was Anders,” said Alice.

“Yes. Maureen Anderson got a certificate from Edward Anders Grass.” Maureen paused, and then added, “He was on holiday in Cornwall.”

“You never said,” exclaimed Alice. “That is amazing.”

“He didn’t recognise me,” said Maureen.

“Oh, that must have been hard,” said Alice, struggling to find the right words. “But it was years ago, isn’t it? He must have seen so many people in that time. Brains get older, too.”

“No, Alice. You are not being amazing now. You are not getting it. He got that thing — Alzheimer’s. He doesn’t remember people and he couldn’t walk.”

“Oh, so your brain is working better than his, and your legs.”

“Now you’re thinking, Alice,” said Maureen and she burst into tears.

Alice coughed. Maureen never failed to amaze her. She reached out to offer her hand. Maureen held it for a moment, squeezed it, and then let go.

“Oh, Maureen. How strange for you. Do you know what it makes me think about?”

“No. You have not told me,” said Maureen

“My dad was so very strong. He could lift me. And you know how heavy I am.”

Maureen laughed.

“And then he got a problem with his legs, and he could not lift me anymore or any of the heavy bags of rubbish he used to carry out to the bins. And it is so strange when someone you have always looked up to, who can do all the things you can’t do, suddenly can’t do those things anymore. He used to feel like a giant to me when I was small and now he felt so small.”

Maureen looked at her very seriously. “You loved your dad, Alice, and I loved Mr. Edward Grass, so it feels very sad. But if it had been Miss Jenkins — who was horrid to me in infant school and called me a ‘mad mongol’ — I would have been glad I could do more than her, and I would not have wanted to help her. Is Jesus cross with me for saying that? Am I bad?”

“Oh, dear Maureen. You are a person. A proper person with feelings. And those feelings can be happy or angry or nasty or anything. And Miss Jenkins was terrible and should not have been allowed to teach. Jesus would know you are an honest person who tells the truth.”

Maureen banged her fist on the table so hard that everything on it bounced. “So, friend Alice, now I can go on a holiday because Jesus forgives me, and if Mr Edward Anders Grass comes again I will be very nice to him even though he forgot me.”

Alice hugged her, and then Maureen added, “Jesus wants me to do this trip, Amazing Alice. You see it will be my birthday. I will be 64 in a few weeks.”

Alice was drinking a glass of white wine, which was highly unusual on a workday. She had texted her supervisor, Tony, and he was about to call her back. What luck that he had had a cancellation! Her counselling course for social workers had accepted her volunteer hours at Cherry Tree and included her work with Maureen. And there was the phone ringing. She answered and, hearing Tony’s voice, immediately let loose a torrent of words with hardly a pause.

“Tony. Thank you for ringing back. I know we haven’t got supervision for another few days but I had to ring. It is Maureen. She gets me each time. She makes me weep. She has such a heart and a brain and is trying always to make sense of such difficult things. Today she told me she wanted to go on a disability holiday — it is called Wonderful Wheelchairs. She loved that and said she could travel because of wheelchairs, and they are so wonderful. She never denies her disability and she expresses appreciation for anything that helps her.

“Well, it turns out that two years ago when she went on a one-week holiday, there was a man on the trip who had been a former tutor of hers at college. He had been her favourite tutor and really recognised her achievements. She received a certificate that was signed by him that still has a pride of place. His middle name ‘Anders’ resonated for her with her surname ‘Anderson’ and was a way she hoped to make them more connected, related.

“He did not recognise her. She realised their positions had reversed and that she was now both physically and mentally more able than him. She did not triumph over this, as she cared about him but then thought about an abusive teacher where she would have enjoyed that reversal. And then she worried Jesus wouldn’t like her. I was just gob-smacked. Her emotional understanding is outstanding.”

There was a pause.

“Tony?”

“I’m here. Just thinking. That was a really powerful concentrated burst that came out of you.”

“Sorry. I was gabbing away.”

“No, you weren’t gabbing way. You were faithfully transferring a mass of deepest feelings about identity and disability to me that Maureen had transferred to you.”

Alice sighed. “Oh boy. I feel better already.”

“She is a remarkable woman. In her 60s, isn’t she?”

“ Sixty-three — and she will have her birthday while she is away.”

Tony sighed. “Birthday — a painful day for many people with a disability who have been told or think they should not have been born. And look at her willingness to engage with you on a deep level. She really knows you are listening to her. You can encourage her to think more about the people she might meet on this trip — there might be real-life Mr. Grass or Miss Jenkins kinds of people. She might be tempted to look after everyone because of her guilt. She was brought up in a convent, wasn’t she?”

Alice nodded, though she knew Tony could not see it. “Yes. After her mother rejected her at birth and left her as a baby on a convent step.”

“So there might be more religious issues, too. What a trip for her. A kind of pilgrimage, in fact. I’m glad you’ll be there for her.”

Order Hotel Mirabelle and the Wonderful Wheelchair Company here.

Currently, we have three styles available. Two are on a soft and lightweight unisex athletic cut t-shirt in both light and dark colors:

And a third is on a soft lightweight relaxed-fit tank top (men’s/unisex):

Sizing:

• Pictured model (our publisher, Rhyd) is wearing XL in all photos and is 6’1” (186cm) and broad-shouldered.

• The athletic fit t-shirt fits true-to-size for average to tall heights (may be a bit long for short or narrow bodies, consider one size down in such cases).

• The tank top is a relaxed fit with ample length and wide arm openings. Folks with narrower arms or shorter height than the pictured model may want a smaller size.

• Women-specific t-shirt and tank top cuts will be announced later this month.

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We’re using a print-on-demand service that ships globally, with printing facilities in North America, in the United Kingdom, and in Latvia. The artist, Alley Valkyrie, receives a portion of profits on every sale.

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You can also read this piece at A Beautiful Resistance.

For decades, United States foreign policy has operated not only through diplomacy and open warfare but through a vast architecture of covert operations. From Latin America to Africa and the Middle East, intelligence activity has frequently preceded and prepared public justification for overt military action. Understanding contemporary events surrounding Iran requires situating them within a longer historical pattern of covert destabilization, narrative manipulation, and ideological warfare functioning together.

Covert Operations as a Longstanding U.S. Foreign Policy Tool

Covert intervention has been a structural component of U.S. foreign policy at least since the Cold War. Declassified documents show the CIA orchestrated secret operations to shape political outcomes abroad, including efforts to remove or undermine governments perceived as hostile to U.S. interests.

For example, Project FUBELT involved covert CIA efforts to prevent Chilean president Salvador Allende from governing and to promote the military coup that ultimately installed Augusto Pinochet.

U.S. covert programs in the Congo sought to remove Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and install a more pro-Western leadership amid fears of Soviet influence and control over strategic resources.

Operations were not limited to regime change abroad. Programs such as Operation CHAOS monitored political movements and dissent, illustrating how intelligence logic framed protest itself as a geopolitical battlefield.

These cases show a recurring doctrine of covert action serving as an early stage of geopolitical management, shaping conditions before overt intervention becomes politically viable.

Ironically, after decades of meddling with regimes globally, and in the midst of ICE killings, the mainstream narrative being pushed by Washington is that Iran needs regime change because it crushes dissent.

Iran and the Role of Intelligence Operations

Iran has long been a central arena for intelligence competition. Analysts widely acknowledge deep Israeli intelligence penetration within Iran. Reports indicate Israeli intelligence agencies have conducted sabotage operations, assassinations, and infiltration campaigns, including smuggling drones and weapons into Iranian territory and relying on local networks for targeting military infrastructure.

Regarding recent protest movements, some defense analysts argue that foreign intelligence agencies exploit or even fuel outbursts of internal unrest. Experts cited by Al Jazeera suggest Israeli agents are likely active during protests, gathering information and amplifying demonstrations through communication support and exposure strategies.

This does not mean protests lack genuine domestic grievances. Iran has experienced real economic hardship and political repression. Rather, intelligence doctrine historically treats unrest as an opportunity, showing complete disregard for locals as it exacerbates violence and instability to create openings for influence operations.

Covert Action as Public Relations for War

Covert activity often functions as political preparation. Intelligence operations weaken adversaries materially while shaping narratives that make later military action appear necessary or inevitable.

The CIA’s Operation Mongoose against Cuba explicitly combined propaganda campaigns with intelligence networks and paramilitary planning designed to generate support for regime change. The integration of propaganda and covert action illustrates how military objectives are preceded by perception management.

Recent reporting on U.S.–Israeli strikes against Iran shows leaders openly appealing to the Iranian population to rise against their government while military planning had been underway for months. Such messaging reflects a familiar pattern of intervention framed as liberation.

Strategic Interests Behind Destabilizing Iran

Geopolitical interests, as opposed to humanitarian concern, primarily drive Western confrontation with Iran.

Iran occupies a uniquely strategic position as it holds major oil reserves and sits beside the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of global oil passes. Control over the region and its alliance structures therefore shapes policy calculations.

U.S. sanctions targeting Iranian oil networks and military capabilities explicitly aim to constrain Iran’s economic and regional power. Analysts consistently frame Iran as a strategic rival rather than a humanitarian crisis requiring protection.

In this context, claims that intervention primarily seeks to defend Iranian civilians are revealed as secondary to broader security and economic goals.

Propaganda as a Weapon of War

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s theory of the propaganda model, developed in Manufacturing Consent, explains how media systems can help generate public approval for foreign policy agendas. The model argues that structural pressures — ownership, advertising dependence, sourcing from official institutions, and ideological framing — shape news coverage and “manufacture” consent for elite interests.

Chomsky argued that media distinguish between “worthy” and “unworthy” victims depending on geopolitical alignment, amplifying abuses by enemies while minimizing those committed by allies. Such asymmetry helps normalize interventionist policies.

After the Cold War, scholars influenced by this framework note that the “war on terror” replaced anti-communism as a dominant ideological filter, positioning Muslim societies as primary objects of fear and suspicion.

Islamophobia and the Manufacturing of Dehumanization

Western media discourse shows persistent stereotyping of Muslims and Islam within news narratives. A corpus-based analysis of British and American newspapers identified recurring propaganda frames portraying Muslims through conflict-centered and threatening imagery.

Social-media studies following terrorist attacks likewise found substantial waves of discourse blaming Islam collectively originating in Western countries.

Islamophobia thus functions not merely as prejudice but as a political narrative environment in which military violence becomes easier to justify. When populations are portrayed as inherently dangerous or backward, war appears defensive rather than aggressive.

Diaspora and Conflicted Reactions

Muslims and Iranians in the diaspora face a profound dilemma. Many oppose Iran’s government yet remain wary of foreign intervention by states historically hostile to their region and its people.

Evidence does not support a simple narrative that “Iranians are celebrating” Western or Israeli intervention. While some opposition voices welcome pressure on the regime, reactions are diverse and deeply divided, reflecting fear of war, nationalism, and distrust of foreign powers. Internal dissent and external intervention are experienced as separate realities rather than unified causes.

This ambiguity produces emotional and political tension in opposing authoritarianism while resisting geopolitical domination.

The West’s Limited Understanding of the Muslim World

Scholars of media and discourse repeatedly argue that Western audiences encounter Muslim societies primarily through conflict narratives detached from cultural context. The propaganda model suggests structural incentives favor simplified moral framing over nuanced understanding and credibility.

Practices condemned abroad are often judged differently when occurring within Western democracies, a discrepancy Chomsky highlighted in comparisons of media coverage of allied versus adversarial states.

Therefore, it’s worth questioning the moral authority of predominantly Christian Nations like the USA that condemn repression by States of the Muslim world, while employing aggressive policing, surveillance, sexist norms or legislations, and coercive policies domestically or internationally.

An Ode to Iran

Beyond geopolitics lies a civilization far older than modern conflicts. Iran is the inheritor of Persian traditions that shaped mathematics, poetry, architecture, philosophy, and music across centuries. Its major cities carry layers of history connecting ancient empires to contemporary life. Persian language, whose literature is one of the oldest, has influenced global aesthetics, from mystical poetry, to painting and classical music traditions.

Iran also possesses a long and complex history of women’s political movements. These struggles often being appropriated both by domestic elites and by foreign powers seeking moral justification for intervention. When women’s liberation becomes a slogan detached from Iranian voices themselves, it risks transforming genuine struggles into geopolitical branding.

Eradicating Supremacy

Genuine solidarity requires listening rather than imposing solutions. Policies framed as rescue can reproduce an older hierarchy that positions the West as civilizationally superior and Muslim societies as objects to be corrected or controlled.

Respecting Iranians means recognizing their agency, their diversity of political thought, and their right to determine their own future. Anything less risks repeating the same logic that has justified intervention, domination, and violence for generations.

The path forward is not domination disguised as liberation, but humility — the recognition that understanding must precede action, and that dignity cannot be delivered by bombs or propaganda.

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Mirna Wabi-Sabi

Mirna is a Brazilian writer, editor at Sul Books and founder of Plataforma9. She is the author of the book Anarcho-transcreation and producer of several other titles under the P9 press.

You can also read this piece at A Beautiful Resistance.

A Bandit God

Monotheism comes late in the Biblical story, and somewhere in the middle of Jewish history. Since allegiance to one god over others was overshadowed by a metaphysics of one god instead of others, there has prevailed a tendency to reinterpret the early part of Jewish history in light of the later, seeing monotheism everywhere. But what if, instead, we reinterpreted the later part of the history in light of the earlier, remaining open to the possibility that paganism survives even within “the original monotheism”?

It is only by paying attention to this pagan context that we can fully appreciate the specificity of the god named YHWH, the novelty of the Israelite cult devoted to Him, and the key experience that transformed the Israelite cult of YHWH into the Jewish theology of redemption: the experience of living in exile, among cults of other gods. If there is only one possible god, he must be a god of all attributes, or at best a list of anodyne niceties, which is the same as saying he has no special attributes at all. If there are other gods, then his attributes become specific, interesting, and strange.

The Bible’s depiction of “Elohim” generally resembles the Canaanite depiction of El: He is a venerable, usually dispassionate judge, the overseer of a divine or angelic council, a figure who sits above the world. YHWH, by contrast, is passionately involved in human affairs. He has personality. He gets angry and argues. He is not just the god of all elements, but often he appears specifically as a storm god. At other times, he is a warrior god, “YHWH of Armies,” usually rendered in English as “Lord of Hosts.” But he is not depicted as the general of organized armies. It seems that he emerged as a bandit lord.

There are many theories of the origins of YHWH. Whereas most ancient Israelite culture was contiguous with the Canaanite culture around them, no god named YHWH is attested in non-Israelite Canaan. This suggests that the cult of YHWH came to the Israelites from elsewhere, a hypothesis which is supported by the Bible itself. When Moses first encounters YHWH, he is not in Canaan or among the other Israelites in Egyptian captivity, but has fled after coming to political consciousness and slaying an Egyptian overseer who was beating an Israelite slave. Moses comes to the land of Midian, east of Egypt and south of what would later be Judah, or Judea. It is there, after he marries the daughter of local priest, that YHWH calls out from a burning bush, revealing that He is Moses’s god. He tells Moses to bring this news back to his people, and to lead them out of Egypt, into Canaan. When he embarks on this task, the strange god meets the people as they wander the desert, still not in Canaan, and closer to Midian. Despite the story of Genesis, which places YHWH already in the creation, here we have the story of a foreign god coming to a people’s aid from abroad and only entering their land as he accompanies them on their return home.

The semantic layers thicken when we consider the peculiar fact that, almost everywhere else in the Hebrew Bible, the people who make a covenant with god are referred to in genealogical terms, as the children of Israel or as adherents to one of Israel’s twelve tribes, but the people aided by YHWH in Egypt are also called “Hebrews.” Here and in most of the scattered occurrences of the term elsewhere in the Bible, “Hebrew” is uttered by non-Israelites, often with disdain, often emphasizing the Hebrews’ role as outsiders, troublemakers, scoundrels, or disobedient slaves. This may be because, etymologically, the term evokes the meaning “wandering” or “being across” or “beyond.” So when the patriarch Abraham, uniquely among the patriarchs, is called a “Hebrew,” he is not being called a member of the Hebrew nation. He is introduced as “Abram ha-ivri” (Gen 14.13), which might have meant “Abram the wanderer” or “Abram the one who comes from beyond,” or perhaps “Abram who was one of the bandit folk.”

It is widely speculated that “Hebrew” did not originally refer to a nation or descent group, but to a category of people known elsewhere in the region as Habiru or ‘Apiru. In Mesopotamia, the ‘Apiru were nomads and outcasts. In Canaan, they also became famed as warriors—not the kind of warrior that marched with the imperial hosts of Egypt or Babylon, but untamed desert warriors, partisans who attached themselves to many and no causes. The ‘Apiru of Midian, perhaps, worshiped their own god, named YHWH, and in their struggles against their outcast condition, they joined the suffering tribes of Israel, offering themselves as shock troops against Egyptian oppressors and offering, too, their god.

The novelty of the Israelite cult of YHWH lay not only in the radical rejection of other gods, but also in the strangeness of this new god. The Canaanites already had gods of the sea (Yam) and of the mountains (both El and Baal). They had gods of hunting and war (Anat, Chemosh), of death and the underworld (Mot), of fertility and renewal (Astarte and Asherah). The Hebrews wander in with their god of insurgent wanderers. They made animal sacrifices to YHWH, as Canaanites do to other gods, but their initial cultic centers are in tents rather than in fixed high places. The Canaanite holidays that were originally associated with sacrificial and agricultural practice are overlaid with historical narratives about escape and wandering. Passover, which had been a festival of spring, when unleavened bread reminded people of the poverty of winter, becomes a story of escaping from the sufferings of Egypt. Shavuot, when the Israelites celebrated the harvest of grain, is recast as a celebration of the encounter with YHWH in Sinai. Sukkot, when the Israelites would spend time in outdoor booths to celebrate the fruit harvest, gains new meaning as a commemoration of life spent outdoors during the time of wandering.

But the greatest change to Israelite cultic practice comes still later—when the inheritors of the Hebrews become wanderers again.

Exile among Other Gods

The deportation of the Judahite elites to Babylonia both consummates Jewish monotheism and throws the tradition back into a polytheistic world, where the god that had been given special place by the state of Judah is no longer society’s dominant god. In Exile, two mutually contradictory tendencies develop, one that idealizes the lost kingdom of Judah and dreams of return and restoration, and a second that denounces all worldly kingdoms and turns the dream of return into a symbol of universal redemption. The first tendency praises the former kings who suppressed non-YHWH worship, blaming the tolerance and polytheism of other Judahite kings for the catastrophe of Exile. The second tendency defers the imagined return of the proper kingship to an indefinite future, questioning the legitimacy of all rulers until that time arrives.

In the editorial activity that follows this historical moment, when Persia conquers Babylonia, allowing a faction of Judahite intellectuals to return home while other factions remain abroad, the contradictory tendencies of exilic thought leave their marks on the compilation of texts that would be gradually canonized as the Hebrew Bible. Some passages that enter the compilation are clearly aimed at justifying the authority of the semi-autonomous Judahite government in the new Persian province of Yehud.

Other passages condemn such worldly authority, cry out against the injustice of those in power, and look forward to a whole new world. While the Book of Kings praises the old monarchs and their forced centralization of worship in Jerusalem’s Temple, all the preceding books celebrate the rich spiritual life of Israelites dispersed across plains and hills, who had no need to place their god in a fixed home. While some Biblical passages emphasize the liturgical responsibilities of priests and the people’s responsibility to obey them, other passages declare the holiness of the whole people and celebrate the prophets who speak without priestly license or royal approval.

While at some moments the prophets exhort the people to return immediately to their homeland, at other moments they begin to understand the people as wanderers through an exile that began with the exit from Eden and will end only when earthly paradise is restored. While some stories condemn all foreign and unofficial cults, others merely celebrate the wondrous characteristics of YHWH. While the former tendency aligns with the efforts to eliminate the worship of all but the one authorized god, the latter tendency expresses itself in an underground spirit of paganism.

If we take up the antimonarchical tendency of Jewish tradition, Judaism becomes at least a little bit pagan again. The Hebrew Bible was canonized during the period when the Temple in Jerusalem was rebuilt and Judean cultic practice was recentralized. But as Judean autonomy was increasingly restricted under Greek and then Roman domination, and after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, Jewish tradition would reconstitute itself as a theology without a cultic center, as the tradition of a people among many peoples, and as the worship of a god who differs from other peoples’ gods. It was only then, when the high priests of Jerusalem were replaced by rabbis without a Temple, that what we now know as Judaism was formed.

Judaism became itself not by having its own god sanctioned by a state, but by having a different god, a god that differed from the gods of those who ruled. Jewish intellectuals in this period stopped obsessing with the pagan-ness of the unauthorized gods around them and instead devoted themselves to finding space for their own god, which had become unauthorized. Judaism became itself by having the wrong god, by becoming pagan to other gods. And when Christianity and Islam came to rule in most lands inhabited by Jews, Judaism became other to the monotheisms in power.

It is true that it became a slogan of Judaism to declare that “YHWH is one!” (recited in the prayer “Shema Yisroel”), but this utterance derived its power from the awareness that YHWH was also an other to the others’ gods. By the act of resisting other claims to universal divinity and insisting on a specifically Jewish understanding of the god that is “one,” Jewish tradition carried forth the pagan practice of connecting every god to a people and allowing each people to make its god in its own way. If the boundaries among peoples were “fixed… according to the sons of El” (as we saw in Deuteronomy 32.8), there could be one Baal in Ugarit and another in Samaria, one El in Phoenicia and another in Israel, one YHWH in Midian and another among the wanderers of Sinai. The Lord could be one among the Jews and another among the Christians and the Muslims. Even if he was also still a little bit the same. He was worshiped differently, narrated differently; he was a different character.

The Underground Tradition

By resituating the Jewish god, among the world’s many gods, we can place Jewish tradition back in the plural ontology from which it emerged at the cusp of Western classical history, when philosophy began to seek unitary laws of nature and universal human justice but still assumed that there may be many paths to fulfillment in the universe. When theology began to imagine universal salvation but still allowed the poetry of particularity to grow apart in every different land.

The Bible tells the story of a covenant that becomes the connecting point between the Israelites and their god. Thereafter, if the people fail their god, he has the right to punish them, but if he fails them, by all rights they too should be freed from the terms to which their ancestors agreed. If there is only one god with whom to make a covenant, and if He is the sole master of the universe, then the contract is signed under duress. A contract like this can only be legitimate and upheld in the court of popular opinion if it is signed freely. In order to sign freely, the signatories must have somewhere else to turn if they don’t like the deal. It is only an act of freedom, that is, if there are other gods. Other gods, or else no gods at all which would leave us free to make a covenant among ourselves.

Jewish tradition does not only tell of the foreclosure of this freedom—the command to associate with a single god and no other god—it tells also of the struggle to maintain this freedom, long suppressed by the later Biblical narrators, but long defended by the people of whom they write. This is the tradition of rebellion and refusal that was repeatedly condemned by Biblical writers, but which also captivated them enough to make them keep telling the rebels’ stories. They left an underground tradition in the Bible’s pages, denounced and yet available for us to revive. We can place ourselves among those who insisted on worshiping the female Asherah alongside male YHWH. We can join the sons of Korah who declared against Moses that all the people are holy, not only their priests and their god (Num. 16.3). We can join in the creative pleasures of engraving images and building golden calves.

We can consider that building idols is what any creative theology must do. However much the prophets might inveigh against the base material that supposedly composes inferior and false gods, consider that the decisive material is not stone or gold, but words and ideas. They can pass through hard matter and rise up to make stories, with characters that speak to us and help us think beyond dumb experience and presupposed truths. The underground, pagan current in Jewish tradition is what enables the tradition to reject the claims of absolute truth that are made for the gods of those with power. The building of idols reminds us that it is up to us to make or remake or unmake our gods.

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Joe Grim Feinberg

Beloved author of A Demonology of Desires.

Joe Grim Feinberg is a writer and social theorist based in Prague. His academic work explores folklore, national narratives, and the cultural-historical formation of political subjectivity. His literary work reworks old folk traditions--like ghost stories. Feinberg's novel A Demonology of Desires was published in 2025 by Sul Books.

You can also read this piece at A Beautiful Resistance.

The Tradition of Refusal

For a couple millennia now, Judaism has been understood as a monotheistic religion. The original monotheistic religion, even. The antithesis to polytheistic paganism. This is an unfortunate misunderstanding. The idea of monotheism in general, and its application to Jewish tradition in particular, is a terrible simplification.

Biblical scholars, especially those devoted to the historical critical method that attempts to reconstruct the conditions of the Bible’s composition, know very well that Judaism evolved out of Near-Eastern polytheism, from which it passed through a long period of monolatry (the attitude that many gods may exist, but only one should be worshiped by us), toward an eventual declaration that other gods were not only unworthy, but also non-existent. A monotheistic attitude clearly emerges at a certain point in the history of Judaism, but why should we take as essential the monotheism where the tradition supposedly ended, while we take as incidental the polytheism where it began? What if we shifted our frame of reference? What if, instead of defining Judaism by how it left the polytheistic world behind, we looked again at Jewish tradition as a product of its historical context, a context that was thoroughly pagan?

The Biblical narrators repeatedly admonish the Israelites to obey their priests and their god. But the people repeatedly disobey. Time and again the Bible tells us that the people of Israel are sacrificing to other gods alongside their sacrifices to YHWH and building poles to honor of Asherah, who was apparently treated by many as the female consort of YHWH.

The Bible tells us that all these worshipers of other gods are doing wrong; it announces that YHWH has set out a series of demands for exclusivity of worship, which the people are ignoring. But why do we accept that Jewish tradition is only the tradition that was approved by these anti-pagan narrators, and not also the tradition of the masses of Israelites that these narrators condemned? Why do we take it to be only the tradition of the few who obeyed the jealous commandments, and not also the tradition of the many who refused?

We know that the ancient Israelites’ cultic practice was much like the practice of other peoples around them. Like others, they acknowledged and worshiped many gods, but they expressed a tendency to favor one god, who they thought also favored them. Only in the course of many centuries did Israelites begin to distinguish themselves by a marked exclusivity in their worship, and even then the transformation was far from smooth. As the Bible itself tells us, every turn to mono-cultic discipline was met with intense resistance. For hundreds of years after the Biblical narrators have already declared YHWH to be the one legitimate god, Israelites are still busy worshiping others alongside Him. By the time a concerted effort is finally made to enforce pure monotheism, with the strident haranguing of the prophets and the Book of Kings, the grand narrative arc of the Hebrew Bible is nearly finished, ready to give way to poetic and reflective books, self-contained stories, afterthoughts and epilogues.

To a significant degree, monotheism arrives where the Hebrew Bible ends. The main narrative arc concludes with the conquest of Judah, later called Judea, and the Judahite elites’ deportation to Babylon. Since Near Eastern gods were supposed to protect their peoples, such a calamity naturally demanded a reassessment of Judahite cultic thought. They could have determined that their god had proven weak or unreliable; they could have turned to more successful gods. Instead, they declared that it was not their god who was at fault, but they themselves, who had angered their god and made him right to send the conquerors their way. They preserved the honor of their ideas by wallowing in the guilt of their past deeds.

This is typically considered the great turning point, when Jewish tradition distinguished itself definitively from the other traditions of the region, which after national catastrophes eventually gave up on their national gods. Yet even this move to attribute misfortune to one’s own god’s anger, rather than the god’s weakness, has pagan precedent. The Mesha Stele, a 9th century BCE monument erected in Moab, southeast of Judah, appears to tell how the Moabites were defeated by Israel not because Israel had the better god, but because the Moabites’ god Chemosh chose to punish his own people.

The crucial difference was that the Moabites quickly turned their situation around, beat back their enemies, and preserved their old cultic system in their old land. The intellectuals of Judah were taken far away, separated from the other gods of Canaan and from the masses who had adored them. They were also surrounded by the unfamiliar gods of their new environment, and they learned to concentrate their attentions on the one god who they believe to be really theirs.

And so at last, as the Israelites from the land of Judah become the exile community called Judahites or Jews, they declare their cultic tradition’s unique ability to be to survive catastrophe, because it is the antithesis of the surrounding paganisms. They declare that the others’ gods simply come and go, because their divine authority rests only on the might of their people, but the god of the Jews is eternal, growing in power when His people become powerless. But even at this moment, He only becomes a unique god by virtue of existing among other gods: His importance is affirmed when his worshipers no longer command a kingdom that controls a Temple, but instead need a god sturdy enough to survive without a home and rugged enough to secure his people’s independent existence without any government to support them. Jewish monotheism is firmly established by becoming pagan in a new way: by being the other to other people’s gods.

Canaanite Theology

In 1928, a peasant struck his plow into a slab of stone in the countryside near Latakia on the northern Syrian coast. When he cleared the stone away, it revealed an ancient tomb. Word got out, archaeologists hurried to the site, and in the surrounding area they uncovered the library of a temple in the long-buried city of Ugarit, containing clay tablets from 1400 to 1100 BCE. They were inscribed with cuneiform letters in a language still unknown to the modern world, but after scholars determined that it was closely related to Aramaic and Hebrew, they deciphered it. The tablets told the story of the Canaanite pantheon, and especially of a god named Baal.

Readers of the Bible might recall this name. Baal appears there repeatedly as an evil or false god, YHWH’s leading rival for the Israelites’ attentions. Since then decline and end of Baal worship in the Eastern Mediterranean region in the period after the conquest of Judah and Israel, all that we knew about Baal for some two and a half millennia came from these anti-Baal polemics. Now, at last, we can read Baal’s side of the story. That is, the side told by the supporters of Baal in one of the many communities throughout the region that worshiped him—or, more precisely, that worshiped one or another version of him, since in a context where gods changed from place to place, similar divine epithets could be applied to multiple gods.

We see, in the Ugaritic legends, how this god of storms and weather rose up to subdue Yam, the god of the sea, thus taming the powers of nature and protecting the livelihood of the port city that honored him. For the record, Baal’s nemesis Yam also appears in the Bible, where his name is now understood simply as the Hebrew word for Sea. Even when his divinity was removed by layers of reinterpretation, his name remained as an abstraction—and so the Israelites’ Lord is said to “dry up the sea” [Is. 51.9–10] and “break up the sea” [Ps. 74.13–17, Job 26.12­–13]. Very likely, these lines once told of YHWH doing battle, like Baal, with Yam, breaking him, taming him, keeping him off the land. After Baal defeats his rival, the feat brings him such renown that he earns the right to his own house of worship, and he challenges the god El, who sits at the head of the Ugaritic pantheon.

One is tempted to read this as a “typical” collection of polytheistic myths. Gods come and go, do battle, some win, some lose. The narrative perspective takes sides, to be sure, but the favored god lays no claim to metaphysical exclusivity. The rise of Baal appears contingent, applicable only as long as he defends his position against the machinations of the still-existing gods around him. Yet something atypical could be happening here, in the mytho-theology (the divine mythos and logos, or narrative and discourse) of Ugarit. Atypical in the sense that every pagan tradition is atypical.

Modern Western readers have a tendency to read all polytheisms as theologically equivalent, and to read all monotheisms as distinct. This is a somewhat logical result of the monotheistic tendency to form doctrines and dogmas that distinguish themselves from one another, in contrast to the fundamental tolerance of polytheisms, which easily absorb otherness into themselves. But every polytheism is polytheistic differently. Each develops its own theology, its own ideas of how the abstractions called gods interact and structure the minds of women and men. And we can speculate that if Ugarit had had more time—or if more of its writings were preserved—we might see how it distinguished itself from other systems of thought, developing its specific perspective on the power to harness the elements and subdue the sea, and (as we see in other Ugaritic stories) save humanity from ever-lurking death.

At the same time, the early stories of the Bible are not as atypical as we tend to believe. In many ways, they parallel the stories of Baal: they tell of the rise of a single god to prominence above other gods. In the beginning, before Eve and Adam eat the forbidden fruit, the serpent tells them, “you will be like gods” (Gen. 3.5), and after they commit the act their god says, “man has become like one of us” (Gen. 3.22). Already from the start, the leading god has competition, from a serpent—not called a god, but acting very much like the demi-divine demons of Eastern Mediterranean myth—and from humans, who struggle throughout the rest of the Bible to come to terms with their status as inferiors to a god who nonetheless acknowledges that humans have something godly in them.

When the Israelites find themselves in Egypt, their god proves his power against the ineffectual Egyptian gods. The text does not tell us explicitly that the Egyptians’ gods exist, but neither does it deny their existence. They do not appear in person, but then neither does the Israelites’ god. The Israelites special relationship to their god is not metaphysical, but practical and social. They are supposed to worship him because he can do things for them, and because he “chose” to come to them, and because they agreed to work with him. As Baal did for the Ugarites, he showed them his merit and they built him a home, first in a desert tent, later in a house of stone.

The Hebrew Bible is full of passages that acknowledge the existence of multiple gods. But monotheistic readers have gotten good at ignoring them or finding complex interpretations to get around them. In Psalm 82 (in the New International Version), we read, “God presides in the great assembly; / he renders judgment among the ‘gods’” (Ps. 82.1). He tells them, “you are all sons of the Most High. / But you will die like mere mortals.” (82.6). Here the Israelites’ god declares his rising power; he declares that the other gods are on their way out. But that is in the future of a clearly polytheistic present tense. One can turn this, like all theology, into metaphor, but it is an originally pagan metaphor.

In Deuteronomy, we read (according to the translation of the Jewish Study Bible) that “the Most High [Elyon] gave nations their homes / And set the divisions of man, / He fixed the boundaries of peoples / In relation to Israel’s numbers” (Deut. 32.8). As commentators point out, this makes little sense. Why would god divide all the peoples of the world according to how many Israelites lived in their own land? Even if we suppose this to mean that every people should be the same size (which is not stated anywhere else), what does this have to do with where the nations reside and where the boundary lines between them are drawn?

In fact, Biblical scholars have reason to believe that the original text was much more straightforward. In the Septuagint (the first Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) and in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the same line reads differently: the highest god “fixed the boundaries of peoples / According to the sons of El”—that is to say, not according the sons of Israel but according to the sons of the god named El. And in the pantheon of ancient Canaan and Israel, the sons of El are also gods. In other words: each nation was given its own god and given a place to settle that was presided over by that god. This was a notion typical of the period when the text was written, but incomprehensible to later scribes, who could only understand the polytheistic meaning as a mistake.

When the Israelites escape Egypt and enter Canaan, they find everyone worshiping these gods there. Quite a few more conflicts are required before the god named YHWH definitively prevails as top god, and then sole god. YHWH only definitively prevails when His people are most severely defeated and their history is reread (especially in the Book of Kings) as a history controlled by their god alone, whose power lies not only in championing the Israelites against other peoples with other gods, but also in sending other peoples to punish the descendants of Israel for their sins.

Even the Israelites’ singular god is multiple, bearing multiple names, which likely referred originally to multiple gods, above all to one named by variants of “El” and another named “YHWH.” Only in the dramatic moment when Moses encounters the burning bush on Mount Horeb does the text make the claim—clearly meant to be a shocking revelation in its narrative context—that the god called El or Elyon or El Shaddai or Elohim is really named YHWH. YHWH, a god of this mysterious name, is in fact the god that you, the addressees of the text, thought was another. The names that you thought were many are actually the same (Ex. 3.6). This revelation of divine singularity can only come as a surprise because its addressees think that there are many gods. The surprise of the one is powerful because it collects and contains the many.

The Novelty of Israel

My point is not that the Israelites’ intellectual tradition and its Jewish continuation were unoriginal. Their tradition did stand out from that of their neighbors, just as every neighboring tradition must have stood out from theirs.

First, a faction of Israelite and Judahite intellectuals developed the idea that their god forbade all worship of idols. This had the effect, among other things, of gradually transferring the material locus of cultic practice from a visible figure of a god to the absent center of a smoky tent or temple and, finally, especially after the destruction of Jerusalem’s great Temple, to stories and abstractions contained in a book.

Second, the authors of this book not only told their readers to worship one sole god, but also enjoined them to tell stories only about one god. Or, more precisely, only one god would appear directly as a character on the narrative stage. All the other gods, even when their existence seems to be accepted, appear offstage (mentioned as objects of worship), or anonymously (like the “god,” clearly not identified with YHWH, who attacks and wrestles with Jacob on a riverbank), or in the form of natural phenomena (like Yam as the ordinary sea), or as minor angels or demons (who are never main characters). As a result, new narrative space is opened for people.

Humans play almost no explicit role in the Baal Cycle of Ugarit. Although the battle between Baal and Yam is about the Ugaritic people’s struggle with the sea, the people remain offstage, allowing the gods to represent their concerns. The Bible, by contrast, is mostly about people. With most of the gods cleared away, the humans can “be like gods.” In the Biblical rendering, the kind of story that in other traditions might have been told as affairs of gods are told here as affairs among people, with only occasional divine intercession. In the beginning, god (Elohim or YHWH) interacts with them a great deal. But he withdraws as the narrative progresses, and by the time the Israelites enter Canaan in the Book of Joshua, god is entirely offstage, speaking almost exclusively through prophets, obscure signs and confusing acts of history, leaving humans to argue over what god really wants and means. In this way, mytho-theology turned into history.

But Judaic monotheism only took this humanistic turn halfway. Although humans were condemned to leave the protection of Eden, they were not entirely on their own. They became bound to a god, who protected them but also restricted them. The language of the covenant between the Israelites and YHWH is the language of servitude. The Israelites, in agreeing to the covenant, gain the favor of the world’s allegedly most powerful lord, and in exchange they become his vassals. This is not wholly metaphysical enslavement (it is not grounded in eternal and essential differences between humans and god). Because it is a covenant, it can be broken. But as long as the Israelites are protected by YHWH, they are not free, and whenever they free themselves by breaking the covenant, YHWH rains punishment on them with a fury worse than that of the sternest slave master, sending dogs after his escapees.

In polytheism, people have the freedom to choose among gods, breaking and remaking covenants as they choose. In a completed humanism, people make covenants only with other humans or human institutions that they recognize as human-made things. The claim of monotheism is that people have nowhere else to go and had better settle for god’s terms. Polytheism presupposes a plurality of social arrangements, with each people arranging its own affairs with its own god or gods. Completed humanism likewise presupposes a plurality of arrangements, because the key figure is not an abstract Man engaged with a single God, but manifold forms of humanity. Monotheism sets up a recurring struggle between god and people, who continually choose to accept or rebel against god’s terms.

Even on this point, Jewish tradition remains somewhere between pure polytheism and absolute monotheism. Jewish tradition does invoke a god who is the sole and unconditional master of the whole universe and of abstract humanity, but the same tradition also invokes a particular god with a proper name, YHWH, who makes a covenant with a concrete group of people, the children of Israel. The subjects of this covenant continually struggle to uphold their end of the agreement and to remind their god to uphold his. The crucial—and fundamentally undecided—moment of Jewish thought comes right here, where the unitary ontology of an abstract Man and a purely monotheistic god has not yet solidified and there is still room for breaking covenants, for reflecting on the possibilities that might be offered by other gods, if any were on offer. The ethical power of this moment comes not from the monotheism that was beginning to claim absolute authority, but from the residual paganism that still infuses Jewish tradition with indeterminacy, compelling people to think of their covenants as contingent deals that can be made and unmade.

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Joe Grim Feinberg

Beloved author of A Demonology of Desires.

Joe Grim Feinberg is a writer and social theorist based in Prague. His academic work explores folklore, national narratives, and the cultural-historical formation of political subjectivity. His literary work reworks old folk traditions--like ghost stories. Feinberg's novel A Demonology of Desires was published in 2025 by Sul Books.

The first is a novel that really could stand on its own without any endorsements, it’s that good. It’s called Nothing Happened, and it’s written by Paul Williams, a man who’s pretty famous in his own right for his psychology work and texts.

So, let me tell you about the book. It’s about a “soul-murdered” man, someone whose early life was so full of abandonment, neglect, and abuse that he’s had to split off (disassociate) parts of himself just to survive. This leads him to fear everyone, including himself, and the state of constant alienation he’s stuck in will feel quite familiar to anyone who’s ever had trouble “keeping things together.”

Here’s the official description:

Nothing Happened. That’s why Tim, a successful ad man, is missing internal organs and hauling around a frozen cadaver through the streets and corporate penthouse suites of London.

Nothing Happened. That’s why there’s a tramp yelling at Tim, warning him to kill others to save them from being killed.

Nothing Happened. But when Tim sees tiny fingers creeping out from under a box in a homeless camp, the cadaver starts to free itself from its block of ice…

And here’s the endorsement from the 2003 Nobel Literature prize laureate, John Coetzee:

And here’s how you can pre-order it at a discount before its 24 March release date.

That book isn’t the only novel from Sul Books coming out in March with a big endorsement. There’s another one, an intensely cute and life-affirming book that makes it really hard to believe bad things are ever truly bad. It also kind of makes you really look forward to getting old.

That book’s called Hotel Mirabelle and the Wonderful Wheelchair Company, and it’s really, really adorable.

Here’s the official publication description:

What if there were truly a place for everyone?

At Hotel Mirabelle, nothing is ordinary… not its guests, not its staff, and certainly not the journeys they take.

Charlene has transformed a crumbling seaside hotel into a sanctuary for people with disabilities. When a diverse group of strangers arrives for a week-long holiday—wheelchair users, people with dementia, carers, war veterans, immigrants, the lonely, the heartbroken, the hopeful—their lives begin to intertwine in unexpected and transformative ways.

From Brighton’s open water to late-night conversations in Bert’s Bar, friendships form, prejudices unravel, old wounds surface, and new beginnings glimmer into life.

Told with warmth, humour, and extraordinary psychological insight, Hotel Mirabelle and the Wonderful Wheelchair Company is a novel about love, loss, dignity, and the courage it takes to keep living fully… no matter your age, your past, or your body.

And here’s one of its endorsements, this one from Baroness Sheila Hollins. She’s been the president of the British Medical Association, president of the Royal College of Occupational Therapists, president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and head of lots of other royal societies. She’s particularly known for her work and campaigning on behalf of people with disabilities.

And as I said, it’s a really adorable book. You’ll fall in love with the characters — elderly folks (some with dementia or Alzheimer’s), others with Down Syndrome or developmental disabilities, their caregivers, and a host of other fascinating people drawn into their orbit.

Its tagline says it best: “What if there were truly a place for everyone?”

And here’s how you can pre-order it at a discount before its 17 March release date.

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We’re reprinting a translation of it in English for our non-Czech readers.

The Phenomenology of Spirits

A Prague Demon from Ohio Has Published a Remarkable Book

A bit like the Dictionary of the Khazars, a bit like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a bit like Alan Moore’s Providence or like China Miéville, but most of all as if Zeno Cosini were getting a doctorate while wandering around Westworld… Joseph Grim Feinberg, in short, has written a truly extraordinary novel about how the world is and what we do with it. And I talk about it wherever I go, more or less anywhere and with anyone I can, and yet—tellingly—something about his novel eludes. But first things first.

Dialogue with Demons

A Demonology of Desires: The Rejected Dissertation of the Notoriously Disgraced Folklorist Joseph Geistberg (2025), as the full title reads, tells of demons, of research, and of one humanities scholar who is—as it often goes—as honest as he is unreliable. The more honest he is, the less reliable, and the less reliable he is as a narrator, the better he is as a scholar.

In the book, Geistberg guides us bit by bit through his field research on demons and the people who believe in them, trying to make sense of it all and to say something about it. We encounter a ghost ship still fighting colonialism, night mare demons in Slovakia, wild men, women golems, the specter of communism, maternal depression and more and more demons, which are perhaps just manifestations of repressed fears and desires, as Geistberg himself supposed at the start of his studies. Only, as he grows increasingly involved in them, he realizes that he can’t grasp them with his neocortex. So he tries to understand his objects of research with his whole body, he engages them in open dialogue, and he lets them transform him, even while he never abandons his position of reflection and detachment. After all, he’s still above all a scholar. The problem comes when you abandon rationalist dogmas and a mechanistic understanding of causality—it gets harder to pretend to be playing the game of universalist science and objectivity. It’s hard, then, not to see that scholarly structures and theories are also full of phantoms that intervene in the human world. At the same time—as with all demonic forces—it doesn’t really matter whether we believe in them or not. Geistberg, in the end, always runs up against the fact that it’s practically impossible to break out of modern rationality into a fuller and more surreal scholarly paradigm. Some grant or some advisor or, God forbid, some reader always pulls him back.

It Just Doesn’t Make Sense

Feinberg skillfully pulls us passersby into his novel too. Geistberg is writing a dissertation, and we—who know, of course, that it’s a novel—naturally try to grasp it. To fit it in brackets. To make it a complete whole. To make it an object. To find some firm, warm perspective from which to read, so that the text won’t overwhelm us. But Feinberg, unfortunately, knows very well what he’s doing. In this he is reminiscent of Jodorowsky, who says that it’s naïve to think magical healing works on the basis of deception and ignorance, that the patient must not be allowed to know what tricks the magician is performing on him. Magic works, he says, even when rationally we know very well what’s happening—our powerful subconscious is also always awake, and its world is much more symbolic than we want to admit. So when Feinberg draws out the main plot line against the background of separate demonological investigations, he also plays with our reading and continually undermines our readerly hypotheses. What is a metaphor for what? What should we take as our fixed points? Are we reading a dissertation or a novel? When Geistberg’s passionate dispute with Professor Galsworthy, a proponent of structural universals, culminates in his leaving the Department of General Demonology, and when he gradually realizes that in the Department of Applied Demonology he’s gone from the frying pan into the fire, Feinberg is turning directly to the reader. But is it a metaphor or a meta-commentary? He’s always faster than we are. And along the way he sometimes gives us a quick and mischievous wink, like when he draws out so-called dialectical immaterialism or the phenomenology of spirits. And throughout we still can’t tell if Geistberg might just be nothing more than passionately in love. Just? Nothing more? What if, on the contrary, being in love is the epistemological key to the magical, synchronous macrocosm?

Like Geistberg, in the end we too must give up on sterile reason and ignore the urge to have the text under control, and just blindly trust in the novel, that everything is as it should be. And go on. But it still just doesn’t make sense. It just can’t be that way. Its parts are mutually contradictory, so what? It’s doesn’t matter at all if we believe in demons—it only matters what we do when we encounter them. As we read.

Prague Ghosts and Expat Counterculture

In 2011, when I was seventeen, I remember Prague was full of ghosts and myths. And I was a good ghost hunter. Or was Prague the same as it had always been, and it was just me who was seventeen? Demonological chess can be played with black as well as white. I would sit forever at Café Montmartre, where no one cared about ID cards, sneaking glimpses at the Nepraš sculptures lounging in the corners. I read and wrote. I remember a group of waggish old fellows, who I later learned were the Prague surrealists. Across the way was the Řetězová Street Literary Café, where you could meet [songwriter] Filip Topol, [the underground poet] Magor was still alive, the Unijazz café was unijazzing and I, in the depth of my soul, must have believed in magic nights that time begot. I hung out with my friends on Petřín Hill and listened to [the band] Kopec Šišek, I ran around mildewed clubs in Žižkov, I made zines and was sure that the underground and punk would never die. That Prague was haunted by so many ghosts and poems and melodies and stories and that we were invincible. And then I grew up. Or was it Prague that was crushed by that fucking neoliberalization? I grew up, and almost all the dives and clubs where you could meet your demons closed. Then it was traffic congestion, the housing crisis, heat islands, visual smog, and tourists who haunted Prague.

Yes, those tourists. And globalization everywhere. I don’t know about you, but I admit it’s beyond my power to tell the difference between tourists and expats, and as soon as one of them starts speaking to me in English, I usually lose patience and escape. I don’t care how unique & mysterious Prague seems to them, I don’t care what special light they shed on my home, and I really don’t care about the literary attempts of [Dan] Brown, [Simon] Mawer, [Helen] Oyeyemi, and their like.

But now I sit here and declare that the best Czech novel of last year was written by an Anglophone author. And not only that. Of course, it’s all beautifully obscured, and it has to be said: Feinberg’s Demonology of Desires, because it’s written in English, simmers unnoticed beneath the surface—as if the novel itself were a phantom—but there’s something to it. At the book launch in the then-nonexistent—of course—literary café L’Objet trouvé in Holešovice, I felt like Geistberg when a certain Jirka Kürzer, a sculptor at the time, takes him to an unofficial pub in the old Jewish Quarter to celebrate Purim, and it turns out that in that Jewish cellar he’s really trying to bring to life a golem. And that he may have actually succeeded. Or was it the wine that was flowing so freely there? Instead of an author’s reading, Feinberg decided to present the novel with a demonological staging that was just as strange as the sort of Introduction to Comparative Literature in the room, as English and French buzzed around and mixed with the Czech of the country-folk band Blaho, the samizdat publication Ostrich Street Anthology 2 appeared from somewhere, and the only thing missing was Gianfranco Sanguinetti. And I realized that I was really an idiot. Of course there is an expat counterculture! And of course it’s alive, unusual, and wild. And it’s completely a part of Prague! It’s just not visible if you don’t know where to look. Probably everything that’s worth seeing can’t be seen from the outside. And neither globalization nor the internet have changed that. Maybe it’s just these invisible writers, Italian situationists, Russian surrealists, Harvard phenomenologists, and who knows who else, who still hold a protective hand over the Prague underground, who are now showing how to face the hollow bogeymen of today’s reality. How to disappear.

Order A Demonology of Desires: The Rejected Dissertation of the Notoriously Disgraced Folklorist Joseph Geistberg at the button below.

A Demonology of Desires

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Charlene has transformed a crumbling seaside hotel into a sanctuary for people with disabilities. When a diverse group of strangers arrive for a week-long holiday—wheelchair users, people with dementia, carers, war veterans, immigrants, the lonely, the heartbroken, the hopeful—their lives begin to intertwine in unexpected and transformative ways.

From Brighton’s open water to late-night conversations in Bert’s Bar, friendships form, prejudices unravel, old wounds surface, and new beginnings glimmer into life.

Told with warmth, humour, and extraordinary psychological insight, Hotel Mirabelle and the Wonderful Wheelchair Company is a novel about love, loss, dignity, and the courage it takes to keep living fully … no matter your age, your past, or your body.

Advance Praise:

Baroness Sheila Hollins (former president of both the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Psychiatrists, as well as a renowned disability rights campaigner) says of Hotel Mirabelle and the Wonderful Wheelchair Company:

And Professor Brett Kahr (Senior Fellow at the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology, Former resident psychotherapist for the BBC) says:

More information:

Hotel Mirabelle and the Wonderful Wheelchair Company will be published 17 March, 2026, and is currently available for advance order at a 25% discount from its cover price (use code VALERIE26).

Pre-order your copy of this amazing book here.

Overcome with guilt after the death of his ex-wife, Declan accepts an invitation to a Greek island she visited more often than he ever knew.

Only the novel he begins writing, The Sea Goddess, can help him understand the past and the relentless dance of desire and its consequences. While Declan struggles to make sense of the loss of Siobhan and her relationship to their mutual friend, Teo, Brendan — an Irish farmer, struggles to keep secret a strange woman washed ashore after a tragic shipwreck.

The Sea Goddess is available now for advance order at a 25% discount from its cover price with code ROBERTSON26.

View more details or order the book here.

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Shadow on Darkling Edge releases 17 February, 2026. Before its release date, you can use code JOOLS26 for 25% off its cover price. This discount also applies to Warner’s other title, Ernie and the Mage Killer, as well!

Two hours later, Freya awoke with a start. She sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes. It felt like the middle of the night, but when she looked at the clock on her bedside table, she was surprised to discover it was only just after ten. Her head hurt. She drank some water from the glass by her bedside, and the headache began to fade immediately. She tried to remember whether she had dreamt about anything, but nothing came to mind.

It was too stuffy in the room, too hot. Freya pulled her hair back from her face, tied it with the stretchy band she kept around her wrist, and pushed the duvet aside.

It was still raining outside, but very lightly, and the wind had died down almost to nothing. Freya swung her legs out of bed and went to the window to open it and let in some fresh air. She moved the curtains aside, opened the window catch, and pulled the top part of the window down almost all the way. She wanted the air to be beautifully cool, enlivened by the rain, but it wasn’t. It was barely any less stuffy than the stagnant air inside her room. She stood on tiptoes, rested her forearms on the window frame, and turned her face to the sky. The rain was now stopping, but the sky was still thick with dark clouds.

A flash of lightning hit the top of Darkling Edge, making her gasp in surprise. When the afterimage had faded from her eyes, Freya moved her attention to the high ridge. Lightning flashed again, a bright spear briefly joining earth and sky. The cloud was very low, almost touching the ground at the uppermost point of the ridge.

It looks alive, Freya thought. It looks like it’s reaching down with arms made of cloud. And, as she watched, the sky above Darkling Edge became increasingly ominous. Lightning flashed inside a concentration of jet-black cloud directly above the ridge. It looked to Freya as though this patch was boiling. Beneath it, on the Edge itself, shapes had taken form. They looked like small tornadoes or dust devils, and they danced and whirled on the hillside, standing out in pale grey against the darker canvas of the land and the sky.

The twirling forms moved this way and that, going in one direction for a while and then doubling back, or seeming to spin on the spot. They were not responding to the wind. They had a life and a will of their own. It was as though they were trying to draw Freya’s attention to a particular place, saying, “Look, we want to show you something.” It must have been a couple of miles away, maybe even further, but she could see it as clearly as if binoculars had been held up to her face.

She began to feel uncomfortably seen, as though she was now connected with something inside the twisting shapes. She heard a high-pitched sound, like the whinnying of a horse rising up inside the wind’s wailing. Her breath quickened as she watched the movement on the hillside, and she felt as though she might even be pulled out through the window and hurled onto Darkling Edge. But then, suddenly, after the next flash of lightning, the shapes melted away, and before she knew it, they were gone.

Freya had avoided looking closely at the tree at the bottom of the garden for days, but now her attention locked onto it, drawn like iron to a magnet. The tree was very old, judging by its size, with strong branches and a magnificent crown of leaves. But something about it felt bad. So bad that Freya was surprised it stood upright instead of being hunched or twisted. It was that limb that jutted out sideways. She thought of the pub sign.

“The Hanged Man,” she whispered.

There was a final flash of lightning on Darkling Edge and a distant boom of thunder. In that instant, Freya thought she saw a shadow beneath the thick, jutting bough. A long, slender shape, about the height of a man.

She backed away quickly and let the curtains close over the window. She felt cold, now, and afraid, even though the storm was miles away. She leapt back into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. Goosebumps prickled the skin all over her body, and she was shivering. She screwed up her eyes and said aloud to herself between shallow breaths:

“There was nothing there, just harmless shadows; it’s all in my imagination,” but she couldn’t force herself to believe her own words.

Pre-order Shadow on Darkling Edge here.

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Widely considered to the first modern fantasy novel in the English language, and noted for its influence on C. S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll, and J. R. R. Tolkien, George MacDonald’s Phantastes is also a work of mystical and alchemical transformation. As explained by Druid author Rhyd Wildermuth (author of Being Pagan and A People’s Guide to Tarot) in his introduction to this edition:

This edition is also elucidated by Rhyd Wildermuth with scores of footnotes exploring the often obscure mystical influences and contexts evoked by MacDonald, along with notes for understanding archaic and rare words used in the text.

Phantastes: A Faerie Romance is available in a trade paperback edition, a hardcover edition (grey digital cloth) with dust jacket, and also in digital (EPUB and Kindle) editions.

Read Rhyd Wildermuth’s introduction here.

Find ordering information here.