The Ideas Letter

I once had the pleasure of visiting a rare Alvar Aalto structure in NYC, a closed-to-the-public conference room on the twelfth floor of the International Institute for Education across from the United Nations. It had all of Aalto’s hallmark qualities: a single, continuous aesthetic whole with warm, sculptural interiors and soft golden accents. As much as I admire the work of twentieth century form-givers like Aalto, I never did buy into the Modernist notion that great architecture and design can change social reality. Aalto features prominently in the curator and editor Daniele Belleri’s Ideas Letter essay, which returns to this hallmark Modernist conceit and animates it for the present global condition. Belleri argues that Finnish design—rooted in welfare-state modernism, ecological sensitivity, and a culture of preparedness—has long functioned as a political (even geopolitical) instrument and that today it offers Europe a model for resisting imperial pressures from the US, Russia, and digital platforms. Can Finland, a nation of fewer than six million people, deploy its singular aesthetic purpose in the service of a new European future?

Mahmood Mamdani, the esteemed historian and father of New York City’s headline-grabbing mayor, has rethought in his new intellectual memoir, Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the making of the Ugandan State, the expulsion of South Asians (including his family) during the Idi Amin era in Uganda and the vast political consequences in the decades since. The Kampala-based intellectual Kalundi Serumaga takes the measure of Mamdani’s book to make sense of what was on few proverbial bingo cards: Mamdani’s partial rehabilitation of Amin’s sordid legacy as head of state in 1970s Uganda. Serumaga finds Mamdani’s retelling riven by contradiction but revealing, both of Uganda’s postcolonial struggles and of the limits of Africa’s progressive intelligentsia.