Matej Bílik is familiar to most of us at BISLA. He graduated only last year and has remained an active member of our community ever since, helping out with Orientation Week or just popping by for a chat. We have asked him to tell us more about his time at BISLA and what he has been up to since leaving the college.
Read an interview with BISLA’s resident professor, James Thompson, as he talks about his life experiences and what brought him to live in Bratislava
Europe has a problem. The sickness of political unwillingness to reform, even slightly, has put us on our deathbed. The indebtedness of large European economies, with the largest political leverage - France, Italy, Spain, has combined dangerously with a wide dislike for reforms. Europe needs to solve this on the local level and the European level, or it will perish. European unwillingness to change was demonstrated long before the Corona-crisis.
One of our veteran writers congratulates and gives a few words of advice to President-Elect, Joe Biden.
While facing the second wave of the corona pandemic, it may be the right time to ponder what the first wave brought and took from us. In this regard, there are many areas we could be looking at. However, we will focus on one specific area - the climate crisis.
Remember when kids in middle school were punished by getting sent to the corner or hit on the tips of their finger with a ruler? Yeah, that must’ve been fun! Fortunately, that has changed, but has it changed for the better? I personally do not think so.
An exciting interview conducted by our BISLA student and member of IL Ponte team Ivona Mičeková. The story about life beyond the borders with new challenges and experience is now available to read at our page!
František Gyáfáš is a Slovak IT specialist, programmer, but also a Profesor here at BISLA and other universities across Slovakia. In this interview of František Gyáfáš by Ivona Mičeková, he goes into details about his colourful past in Socialist Czechoslovakia, his international experiences, and his hobbies.
Viktoria Križanová
An interview by Viktoria Križanová with JUDr. Sylvia Tiryaki, PhD. who is a Slovak academic, analyst, and the co-founder of the Global Political Trends Center (GPoT Center)
The Humanities will never face the danger of extinction, but only new tools to approach them, if we discover a way to make them even better.
Ever since its inception, Russia has been defined both by itself and by its (often short-lived) neighbors as an aggressively expansionist power. Like many other powers, this became the defining feature of Russia, a form of consistency across regimes. Whether it was the ancient Rurikids, expanding 18,000 miles a year under Ivan the Terrible, or the Romanovs expanding into the Ukraine and Alaska, Russian rule was synonymous with expansion.
Everybody feels sad from time to time. It is a natural part of human life. As the Danish philosopher and writer Søren Kierkegaard wrote in his book Disease to Death, if we had a real knowledge of man, we would have found that there was never such a person who was not at least a little desperate in some moment during his life.
History has shown that the Slovak-Hungarian relations are fragile and if the grievances are not approached carefully it can easily become confronting and even hostile. Growing up during the notorious Jan Slota era, I personally experienced how comments fuelling hate can easily be translated to every-day conversations, even between children.
There is a good chance that you have heard this title before, even for someone who is not a follower of the video-game culture. This game is able to give you the single greatest experience you can get from a video game for the last decade. If you will not take my word for it, take into consideration that it was crowned to be the best game of the decade by Metacritic’s users or users on the PlayStation Blog.
I was born and raised in Minsk, my school years passed here, where I first fell in love and then broke up, skipped classes at McDonald’s and drank champagne in the yard. Here I made friends, rode on a skateboard, and drank a lot of coffee. Here I went to university, found a job for the first time, and it was from here that I always wanted to escape.
1989 and the Crisis of the Post-Wall World was the title of the lecture that was given by Professor Timothy Garton Ash from the University of Oxford. During his recent stay in Slovakia, he participated at the International Conference on November 89: 30 Years After, which was held at Comenius University and organized by the Institute of History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. Il Ponte was lucky enough to take part in this event and conduct an interview with Prof. Garton Ash. The given interview was done after the 30-year commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall and prior to that of the start of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.
Suffering a shocking defeat to the populist Republican Donald Trump left the Democrats of the USA in an uncertain position. Clinton, despite winning the popular vote and running on a strong feminist narrative that appealed to the liberal voters of the USA, lost. This narrative was especially important for the Democrats, as they had effectively sabotaged the campaign of Sanders, and thus needed to find a candidate which would fill the shoes of the Social Democrat.
I don’t consider myself a snob in terms of music or coffee at all, at least compared to every hardcore hipster friend I’ve ever had. You know, hipsters, the subculture responsible for a whole generation looking like homeless people wearing gold chains, their favorite indie band being called something like “bananas in outer space” with a cult following consisting of ten people on Bandcamp.
Growing up in Europe gives us privileges that are often too easy to forget. We take for granted a life, that could only be the wildest dream for some. We don’t have to be afraid of persecution, forced to flee our home or getting killed by our government. The story of Ali, that I present here, is about the difficult choices, insecurities, discrimination, and fear, which many refugees experience on their road to Europe.
The revolution is like drinking too much vodka. The first few shots are hopeful – even euphoric. The world seems to be in equilibrium with your improving mood – ready for a personal revolution, everything seems bright and shining, solutions seem easy and within a grasp of another shot of vodka. Then, as the ethanol in your veins increases in amount, things start to look blurry and incomprehensible.
