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Schuyler Mitchell argues that the national security state is a wonderful tool for a skilled authoritarian to crush American democracy: "If you tell an FBI agent to proactively go out and find anarchists, violent extremists, before they can act, they’re going to look for someone with that ideology. Now you have Trump telling people to go out and look for antifa, which means they can be opening assessments on people who they, for whatever reason, feel have this nebulous, broad ideology."

"Arendt did not strive for consensus – in her view, politics had to be antagonistic and, if needed, controversial. What mattered most was the act in itself. Her whole body of work could be summarised as a call to democratic action. Speak, criticise, engage with others – do anything you can to avoid the peril of silence, and the temptation of violence." Marc Le Chevallier elucidates Hannah Arendt's belief that open dialogue and debate are vital to the health of democracy. 

Justin Kadi explains why Vienna has been described as "a renters' utopia".

"He took inspiration from the deluge of countercultural books in the 1960s concerning earth mysteries, typically trying to decode the neolithic constructs of Silbury Hill, Avebury, and the stones of Cornwall. With a Blakean grandness fuelled by a quasi-Situationist eye, he sought to establish a sacred geometry to link the Hawksmoor churches together." Robert Davidson talks to Iain Sinclair to mark the 50th anniversary of his influential book of poems Lud Heat.

Colin Burrow reviews a biography of Muriel Spark and the first volume of her collected letters: "By 1963 she had arrived. She was rich enough to buy green and blue Hermès suede gloves in Paris. She was also suave enough to conceal beneath those gloves (most of the time at least) the knuckle-duster with which she had established herself as a Famous Author."

Modernism in Metroland on Maxwell Fry and the rise of the high-street electricity showroom.

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Rei Takver reports on fears that Labour’s new data access law would allow a future Reform UK government to replicate an Elon Musk-style DOGE data-grab: "If Reform gains power in 2029, campaigners say it could use Labour’s data access law to carry out its policies, which include a crackdown on immigration, the radical downsizing of the civil service, eliminating 'government waste', and decimating the UK’s net zero projects."

The British right is adopting an increasingly extreme form of ethnic identity politics, while failing to explain what the rest of us are supposed to be so worried about, argues Jonathan Portes.

Toby Buckle insists American liberals should stop trying to act as the referees of political debate and recognise that they are partisans for one side of it: "The liberalism of the early twentieth century was a project aimed at social reform. That of the mid-century – of the New Deal, Great Society, and civil rights eras  – while certainly complicit in many of the evils of its world, was also a creed with a strong sense of its own values. Far from being content to 'neutrally' enforce existing rights, it sought to expand them and create new ones."

Katy Holland says The Sound of Music has never been popular in Austria because it challenges the way the country likes to paint itself as a victim of Nazi Germany: "Austrian officials, sensitive to the implications of wartime collaboration, initially objected to the use of swastika banners in Salzburg to depict the Anschluss, and relented only when filmmakers proposed using archival footage of Hitler being welcomed by cheering crowds in the city."

"Slag heap debris on the English coast has apparently been fusing into a new kind of sedimentary rock. A team of geologists studying the beach recently 'found a series of outcrops made from an unfamiliar type of sedimentary rock. The beach used to be sandy, so the rock must have been a recent addition.' ... Based on inclusions of trash amongst the sediments, such as a discarded coin, some of this rock could not have been more than 36 years old.'" BLDGBLOG has news of rapid geological change.

"There is only ten years between the two tv adaptations but technically a lot apparently happened in that ten years. The Children of Green Knowe looks as fresh as ever; it’s very difficult to believe that it is thirty years old. A Traveller in Time, only eight years older, looks visually awful." Maureen Kincaid Speller compares and contrasts television adaptations of two children's books.

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Heidi Siegmund Cuda and Dmitrii Kovegin discuss where the anti-Putin resistance in Russia goes from here: "Putin killed Navalny. There is no other way to look at it. Putin along with Russian intelligence kills anyone who opposes him and the regime and who is influential. Anna Politkovskaya, Nemtsov etc. I believe Navalny went back to Russia knowing he would be imprisoned and likely die because he was courageous and believed in his purpose."

J. Mckenzie Alexander asks if Popper's 'Open Society' can survive the information age: "In the book I question if, in looking for likes or retweets, we’re actually chasing the sugar rush rather than the truly nutritious, substantive meal. My concern is that, in a number of senses, people are using these proxies as a way to satisfy very real and justified human needs - but these proxies just aren’t adequate to doing the job right,"

Georgia is descending into a pro-Putin Mafia state, reports Will Neal.

Felicity McWilliams explores the disproportionate impact of a small group of West Berkshire Commoners on the US-USSR nuclear arms race in the 1980s.

"What we have, then, is an omniscient narrator. Except, in a twist that seems to make no sense, where he does pop up to make a comment in his own person, it’s often to admit uncertainty, or to explain that what he’s saying is close to speculation." Daniel Soar on Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamzov.

"The collective angst of the motherless von Trapp children is vaguely written and blandly performed. The film urgently needs the stakes-raising intrusion of the Nazis in its second half; the breath-held tension of its climactic escape sequence may be drafted in from another movie altogether, but necessarily so." Guy Lodge celebrates the flawed but enduring film The Sound of Music.