Martin Sustrik

Decentralize or Die. In April 2024, a salvo of cruise missiles destroyed the Trypilska thermal power plant, the largest in the Kyiv region, in under an hour. In June 2023, the destruction of the Kakhovka dam left a million people without drinking water and wiped out an entire irrigation system...

This is a cross-post from: https://www.250bpm.com/p/life-at-the-frontlines-of-demographic Nagoro, a depopulated village in Japan where residents are replaced by dolls. In 1960, Yubari, a former coal-mining city on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, had roughly 110,000 residents. Today, fewer than 7,000 remain. The share of those over 65 is 54%. The local...

With the weakening of the trans-Atlantic alliance, the debate over European integration has entered a new phase. Mario Draghi warns that Europe risks becoming “merely a large market, subject to the priorities of others,” a collection of middling states in a world where the strong do what they can and...

This is a cross-post from https://www.250bpm.com/p/ada-palmer-inventing-the-renaissance. For over a decade, Ada Palmer, a history professor at University of Chicago (and a science-fiction writer!), struggled to teach Machiavelli. “I kept changing my approach, trying new things: which texts, what combinations, expanding how many class sessions he got…” The problem, she explains,...

Sofia Corradi, a.k.a. Mamma Erasmus (2020) When Sofia Corradi died on October 17th, the press was full of obituaries for the spiritual mother of Erasmus, the European student exchange programme, or, in the words of Umberto Eco, “that thing where a Catalan boy goes to study in Belgium, meets a...

This is a cross-post from https://www.250bpm.com/p/eu-explained-in-10-minutes. If you want to understand a country, you should pick a similar country that you are already familiar with, research the differences between the two and there you go, you are now an expert. But this approach doesn’t quite work for the European Union....

Jacques Callot, “The Hanging”, from “The Miseries and Misfortunes of War”, 1633 I’d like to tell you a bedtime story. It’s not one of those enchanting and weird fairy tales in the vein of the Brothers Grimm, but rather one of those synthetic ones with a moral at the end....