France Burns, Serbia Votes

Riots Are Easy. Ballots Are Harder. Ever since I saw Adam Curtis’s 2025 documentary series Shifty, I can’t stop thinking about a sub-plot in it: that intellectuals and creative thinkers withdrew into art instead of trying to change the real-world political system. In my circle, this was absolutely true. At the beginning of the 21st century, we found doing politics, and even debating politics, boring. We much preferred discussing music and movies, and we were deeply convinced that understanding them was what mattered. In real life, from nine to five, we were chasing breadcrumbs left by the post-WWII generation. The breadcrumbs are gone now. In Europe, austerity measures and corrupt politics have left my whole generation pessimistic about our future. The revolts in France over recent weeks show that the new generation will not sit on its hands and accept that this grim reality is theirs. This raw, unstructured process shows that a generation can quickly become radicalized, but European…