Spotify ‘in love’ with AI, promotes playlists for passive listening. What’s behind it?
Spotify appears to have targeted genres particularly suited to passive listening. It identified contexts in which listeners use playlists mainly as background music. The core PFC genres were ambient, classical, electronic and jazz. When some employees raised concerns, Spotify executives reportedly responded that listeners “wouldn’t notice the difference".
Decolonising Language: How Words Shape Power, Identity, and Freedom
Language is never neutral. Everyday terms like “Middle East,” “Third World,” and “ethnic” still echo colonial perspectives that place Europe at the centre and cast other cultures as the “other.” Decolonising language means recognising these hidden power structures and rethinking the words that shape how we see the world.
Two EU countries still deny women the right to choose
If you zoom out and look at the European Union as a whole, you’d expect women’s rights to sit at the core of “European values”—and yet two EU countries still deny women the right to choose. What looks like a settled principle on paper becomes, in practice, a fault line.
Dealbreaker: How EU Asylum Policy is Changing
The European Union’s new Asylum Pact is designed to make it easier for member states to shift the responsibility for asylum seekers elsewhere. But these externalisation processes raise important questions that continue to go unanswered.
Before the Rubicon: Southern Europe, the Iran War and the logic of hegemony
Europe, neighboring the Middle East, was not asked. It was not called, not consulted. The operations were decided in circles of power from which Europe was absent — and their consequences, the waves of instability — it will be Europe that is called to manage them. Rubicons, however, are never announced; they are recognized only after they have already been crossed. And when that moment comes, there will be no 'protocol' left to invoke, because we will have helped erode it ourselves.
The EU Migration & Asylum Pact 2026
The EU Migration and Asylum Pact, taking effect on 12 June 2026, seeks to standardize asylum rules across Europe through unified procedures, shared responsibility, and minimum living standards. As someone who fled Syria in 2013, I know the impact that safety and opportunity can have, access to education and programmes like the JA Company Programme allowed me to grow in ways that would have been impossible without protection.
MERCOSUR – A step ahead or a lamentable turn of events?
As the EU celebrates one of its biggest successes in trade policy, concerns are rising across Europe. Will the MERCOSUR deal be an enemy or a foe to EU citizens?
ECtHR: Poland Violated the European Convention. The Case Concerns Abortion
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Poland breached Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights in a case linked to access to abortion.
