The Lions of Al-Rassan est un roman de Guy Gavriel Kay publié en 1995, parfois considéré comme le chef d’œuvre de l’écrivain canadien et l’un des meilleurs romans de fantasy historique.

Hauntingly evocative of medieval Spain, a deeply compelling story of love, adventure, divided loyalties, and what happens when beliefs begin to remake – or destroy – a world.

The ruling Asharites of Al-Rassan have come from the desert sands, but over centuries, seduced by the sensuous pleasures of their new land, their stern piety has eroded. The Asharite empire has splintered into decadent city-states led by warring petty kings. King Almalik of Cartada is on the ascendancy, aided always by his friend and advisor, the notorious Ammar ibn Khairan – poet, diplomat, soldier – until a summer afternoon of savage brutality changes their relationship forever.

Meanwhile, in the north, the conquered Jaddites' most celebrated – and feared – military leader, Rodrigo Belmonte, driven into exile, leads his mercenary company south.

In the dangerous lands of Al-Rassan, these two men from different worlds meet and serve – for a time – the same master. Tangled in their interwoven fate – and divided by her feelings – is Jehane, the accomplished court physician, whose skills may not be enough to heal the coming pain as Al-Rassan is swept to the brink of holy war, and beyond.

Al-Rassan qui donne son titre au roman, c’est évidemment un miroir d’Al-Andalus, le nom que les historiens donnent à la péninsule ibérique sous domination musulmane à l’époque médiévale. Le récit se situe à une époque similaire à celle suivant la chute du califat de Cordoue et sa désintégration en plusieurs royaumes rivaux. C’est une période d’incertitude et de déclin faisant suite à ce qui peut être vu comme un âge d’or.

Compte-tenu de ce décor, on se sera pas surpris que le roman soit porté par une ambiance nostalgique, empreinte de mélancolie. On a le sentiment que c’est la fin d’une époque, qu’un chapitre glorieux se ferme et que le prochain sera sanglant, tragique. C’est la fin d’un monde, la lente agonie d’une civilisation qui a illuminé par sa culture, son art, son architecture et qui a vécu en quelque sorte entre deux mondes, si ce n’est trois.

Peut-être entre trois mondes car dans l’univers imaginé par Guy Gavriel Kay, trois religions se partagent les âmes des habitants de cette région. Ces trois religions reflètent les trois principaux cultes monothéistes de notre monde : pour l’Islam, les Asharites, qui vénèrent les étoiles ; pour le Christianisme, les Jaddites, qui vénèrent le soleil ; pour le Judaïsme, les Kindath, qui vénèrent les deux lunes. La religion occupe une place importante dans l’univers de ce roman. Même si tous les personnages ne sont pas des croyants, ils appartiennent tous à une culture liée à l’une des religions.

Puisque l’on parle des personnages, c’est l’occasion pour moi de signaler qu’ils sont incroyablement bien écrits. Je garderai longtemps le souvenir de Jehane, Rodrigo, Alvar, et évidemment Ammar, mais aussi de certains personnages secondaires remarquables. Tous à leur façon nous parlent de loyauté, d’allégeances parfois contradictoires, et des choix qui en découlent. Doit-on être fidèle à un monarque, à un royaume, à sa famille, à ses amis, à sa foi, à des valeurs ?

Tout au long du roman, Guy Gavriel Kay place et déplace ses personnages comme des pièces sur un jeu d’échecs. On sait que la confrontation finale est inévitable, que son issue sera forcément tragique, mais l’auteur parvient tout de même à nous surprendre. J’ai lu les derniers chapitres et l’épilogue en retenant ma respiration, presque en apnée, tellement j’étais époustouflé et ému par ce que je lisais.

En quelques semaines et après avoir lu quelques uns de ses romans, Guy Gavriel Kay est déjà devenu l’un de mes auteurs de fantasy préférés. Il était temps que je plonge dans ses œuvres, et je vais poursuivre cette découverte dans les semaines qui viennent.

Exiled Iran crown prince Reza Pahlavi interviewed for a live podcast at the Politico Security Summit in Washington, D.C. 12 May 2026.

New photos from the Politico Security Summit this week are now available exclusively from the Technewslit portfolio at the Alamy photo agency. At the event, Politico journalists interviewed current members of the U.S. House and Senate from both parties overseeing national security matters, as well as former Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.

Also, several technology leaders at the U.S. Defense Department answered questions about new drones and artificial intelligence projects. And German parliament member Roderich Kiesewetter advocated for increased support for NATO and Ukraine’s continuing battle against Russia.

Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) at the Politico Security Summit in Washington, D.C. 12 May 2026.

Lockheed Martin sponsored the event. At a few points in the program, protestors against Lockheed Martin and American policy in the Middle East broke out from the audience, with security literally dragging out the protestors kicking and screaming. More photos from the summit, including the protestors, are in a gallery at the TechNewsLit Smugmug collection.

Copyright © Technology News and Literature. All rights reserved.

This afternoon I'll be following CBS coverage of PGA Championship Golf: third-round play in the 108th PGA Championship from the Aronimink Golf Course in Newton Square, Pa. The broadcast will air in my area from Noon to 6:00 PM.

For those keeping score, I never did get to the yard work yesterday as I'd earlier intended. The thought was in my mind when I woke, but when I started moving around the house I realized I had no business stumbling around the front yard pushing the lawn mower. Maybe tomorrow.

And the adventure continues.

The census occurs in Canada every five years no matter who is in the government at census time, or what they have been up to. So weird to see stories of people using it as a way to protest. I thought that participating was common sense. I suppose each time it comes around there are likely a handful of people who find a way to get mad about it. Those same people likely have a computer, a cell phone, a watch, a television, and a car that are all collecting data about them 24/7. A lot more data than is on the census form. They are cool with the oligarchy compiling data about us for malicious purposes, but are not cool with the government collecting data about us for useful purposes.

I also used to think that common sense applied to vaccines. Turns out though that we live in a country where a lot of people believed what a bunch of truck drivers had to say about vaccines, over following the advice of people who dedicate their entire lives to science and medicine. Now measles has made a comeback. Should be interesting to see if their opinion about vaccines changes back when things like rubella or polio start to make a comeback like measles has. Measles can escalate for some people and kill them, but I think that most people fully recover. Rubella and polio are diseases that last a lifetime. They are highly contagious, and are preventable with vaccines that people are now refusing in the same way that they are refusing to do the census. Probably the same people. I guess the big difference would be that if they refuse the census they will have angrier letters arriving in their mailbox until eventually someone in a uniform will knock on their door. If they keep refusing at that point they will get fined $500. Refusing vaccines will cause a lifetime of illness and suffering for their babies.

Around the corner from the John Paul II mural on the same convent wall – discussed in an earlier post – someone has pasted a different kind of holy figure: naked, sitting on a low ledge, headphones on, eyes on her phone, a Lidl bag of May asparagus beside her.

It is not painted into the wall. It is a paste-up – paper cut to shape, glued onto the plaster, removable in minutes. The artist is Krzysztof Zbik Rubach, known locally as Vanzbik, a Wroclaw muralist whose work consists almost entirely of female nudes in public space. He has been doing this for years. Some of his pieces survive on tolerated walls; others, on more exposed spots like the bridge near Szczytnicki Park, have been destroyed without explanation. This one, for now, is intact.

The wall belongs to the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, the nuns who agreed in 2022 to let football fans paint a five-by-twenty-five-meter John Paul II onto their building. That mural faces the entrance to Ostrow Tumski, Wroclaw's cathedral island; pilgrims and tourists pass it on the way to the dom. The Lidl Madonna faces the other direction – Wyszynskiego street, a tram and bus stop, the daily flow of commuters waiting in May 2026 weather. Same wall, two different audiences, two different rules about what counts as a picture.

The first thing the Lidl Madonna does is recognizable from any catalogue of Marian iconography. The seated posture, slightly turned, head lowered toward something held in both hands – this is the Madonna of Humility, the Madonna with Child, the Mater Dolorosa contemplating what she cannot let go of. Every traditional attribute has a substitute in the picture: a halo becomes over-ear headphones, the mantle becomes bare skin, the lilies and pomegranates of Marian symbolism become leeks, asparagus, and chard in a discount-store bag, the gold ground becomes a graffitied convent wall. There is no Christ child; there is a phone. The image does not announce any of this. It just builds a Madonna out of present-tense materials and lets you decide whether to see it.

But the iconographic operation is the method, not the message. What the picture actually says, it says along two lines: about the body it shows, and about the kind of attention the figure is paying to her phone.

The body first. This is a lived-in body. Mid-thirties, maybe early forties. Soft belly with the fold a normal torso makes when seated. Asymmetrical breasts of average size. Visible knuckles, real veins. Faint nasolabial lines, lips at their natural volume. Cropped hair under the headphones. Two tattoos – geometric across the shoulder, figurative on the ankle. No filtered glow, no flat midsection, no plumped cheekbones, no hyper-feminized posture. She is not arranged for the viewer. She is not even looking at the viewer. She is in herself, with her things, on her way home.

In 2026, that is a position. The visible female body in mainstream image production – advertising, platforms, fashion, increasingly daily life in big European cities – has been quietly rebuilt over the past five years. GLP-1 weight-loss drugs in the Ozempic family have moved from diabetes medicine to mass thinness therapy; lip filler, cheek volume, jaw contouring, the so-called Instagram face have settled into normal adult life; cosmetic surgery is a routine procurement decision in many milieus, with Poland both a destination for Western medical tourism and a growing domestic market. The threshold for an acceptable female body has shifted, and the shift is pharmacological and surgical, not aspirational. Not having done any of it is now a marked position. A body that has not been optimized has become a thing you have to choose to show.

Zbik shows it. The Madonna form gives that choice its weight. Traditional Madonnas are idealized: young, smooth, symmetrical, often barely anatomical – they were the long original of the optimized female body, centuries before Botox. The Lidl Madonna borrows their seated dignity and fills it with the opposite of their idealization. The sacred frame remains; the body inside the frame is unedited. It is a quiet refusal of the optimization economy, made without polemic, made by showing what an unaltered body looks like when you give it the same compositional respect you would give a saint.

Now the second line: what she is doing with her phone. She is in the pose of devotion. Head down, hands cupped around an object held in front of her body, the world tuned out by the headphones. This is what Marian contemplation looks like. The form has survived what used to fill it. What it now contains is not Christ but the open application on a screen – message, image, feed, song. The picture does not tell you whether that is tragic or natural. It just shows you that the form of devout absorption is still working, with a new center of gravity.

A hundred years ago Walter Benjamin wrote a short fragment arguing that capitalism is itself a religion – not because it replaces religion but because it is structured as cult: permanent, without a day off, producing debt and not redemption, with no outside. He never finished the argument. The Lidl Madonna lets you see what he might have meant. Devotion did not disappear when belief did. It found a new object that fits the old hand position perfectly. The phone is the right size, the right weight, the right shape to be held the way a child was held.

That is also why the Lidl bag matters specifically. Not Biedronka – the Polish discount chain locals nickname Biedra, from biedota, a word for the destitute, which gives the brand an undertone of being where you shop when you cannot do better. Not Epi, the Wroclaw premium grocer where the city's professional class buys imported salmon and small-batch wine. Lidl – the middle, German efficiency, weekly fresh aisle, ordinary May. The choice rules out two readings the picture refuses: it is not a lament about poverty, and it is not satire of aspiration. It is the regular consuming life of regular consumers, depicted with the same care a Renaissance painter would give to a Virgin with lilies.

Around the corner the John Paul II mural is doing different work. It is painted into the wall, not pasted on. It is twenty-five meters long, crowdfunded by the football ultras, signed collectively (kibice wroclawskiego Slaska), addressed to a collective (Poles, Catholics, the faithful, the patriots). It exists to say what we are. It fought a three-and-a-half-year battle with the city's heritage authority and won. The Lidl Madonna is not arguing with it. The two pictures are not in a debate. They live on the same wall because the wall has two sides and the two sides have different rules. The pilgrim side gets a question about identity; the tram-stop side gets a question about how a person lives now.

That second question is the one the Lidl Madonna actually asks. Not what we believe, not whom we belong to, not what we are willing to defend – but what we do with our bodies under pharmaceutical pressure, and what we do with our attention under platform pressure, and whether the old forms of holding something in your hands and looking down at it for a long time still work when the something is a phone and the body is unedited.

The picture is paste-up. It can be torn off any morning. Other Zbik works at less protected spots already have been. The convent wall, the nuns' tolerance, the heavy foot traffic of a tram stop – these are the accidents of survival that let this image exist at all. The argument the picture makes can only be made in a form light enough to be removable. That is not the picture's weakness. It is its condition.

You can walk past it on the way to the cathedral and never see it. You can wait for your tram and stare at it for ten minutes without registering what it is doing. Either is fine. The Madonna is patient. She is looking at her phone.

On April 19th, Warsaw fills with yellow paper daffodils. The Zonkile campaign – named for the flower worn by bystanders who watched the ghetto burn – has become the city's annual act of witness to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This year, the daffodils were accompanied by a petition. It asked city authorities to stop flying the Israeli flag at the anniversary ceremonies.

The petition, signed by philosopher Adam Lipszyc and activist Maria Swietlik, argues that the fighters of 1943 came primarily from communist and socialist movements – and that the Israeli flag, symbol of a state born five years after the uprising, does not belong among the markers of their memory. Kamil Kijek, a historian of Polish Jewish life at the University of Wroclaw whose 2026 monograph examines these very organizations, has documented the factual problems with this picture: three of the five organizations named in the petition – Ha-Szomer Ha-Cair, Dror, Poalej-Syjon Left – were Zionist organizations; the Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy, a Revisionist Zionist force that fought in the uprising and flew a blue-and-white Star of David flag at Muranowski Square, goes unmentioned.

But historical inaccuracy alone does not explain rhetorical power. The petition circulates, feels convincing to many, and has generated a serious public debate. That requires something more than factual error. It requires myth.

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Myth, in Roland Barthes's sense, is not a falsehood. It is a historically contingent meaning that has been made to appear natural – self-evident, beyond question, simply the way things are. The myth does not announce itself. It presents its conclusions as descriptions.

The petition operates through three such myths.

The flag without a past. The blue-and-white flag with a Star of David is read by the petition exclusively as a symbol of the contemporary Israeli state and its military conduct in Gaza. This reading flattens the sign's history. The flag – in various forms – was a Zionist organizational symbol from the 1890s onwards, decades before Israeli statehood. It flew at Muranowski Square not as a national flag imported from outside but as an expression of identities that grew inside Polish Jewish life. The mythological operation is precise: it strips the sign of its temporal depth and presents one layer of its meaning – the contemporary state – as the natural, total meaning. A historical object is made to stand only for the present.

The neutral guardian. The petition asks Warsaw's authorities to act as “neutral guardians” of the uprising's memory – to prevent it from being “assigned to one state or contemporary political narrative.” The neutrality claim does real mythological work. It frames the removal of the Israeli flag as a passive, administrative act: the city simply refrains from intervening. In reality, the removal of a symbol is an intervention – it changes what is visible in a commemorative space. Calling this neutrality is the myth: it presents a political choice as the absence of one.

The constituted we. The petition's most charged phrase is nasze dziedzictwo – “our heritage.” The “we” is never defined. It is constituted by the petition's logic: those who identify with the fighters' anti-fascist struggle, minus those who can be associated with the contemporary Israeli state. “Our heritage” sounds like a simple possessive. It is actually a boundary-drawing operation – performed quietly, in plain sight.

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These three myths do not emerge from nowhere. They connect to a pattern in Polish public memory that predates this petition and will outlast it.

Jewish history in Poland – a presence stretching across a thousand years – is processed, in the mainstream, almost entirely through the lens of a single decade: the Holocaust. The destruction was enormous and deserves its place in memory. But the exclusive focus produces a distortion: it makes Jewish life in Poland legible primarily through its ending. What came before – the cultural complexity, the political debates, the Zionist movements, the deep connections to Palestine – recedes into background noise.

The petition fits within this distortion. It needs the ghetto fighters as symbols of universal anti-fascist resistance. To use them that way, it has to subtract their particular identities – the Zionism, the HeHalutz orientation toward Palestine, the Revisionist underground with its own flag and its own dead. The symbol is adopted; the identity of the symbol-bearers is set aside.

This is not a small editorial decision. The fighters of 1943 were people with specific beliefs about Jewish life, Jewish statehood, and where Jewish existence might have a future. Honoring them as symbols while erasing those beliefs is not a neutral act of memory. It is myth-making – the process by which historically specific, contested, complex human beings are transformed into usable abstractions.

The yellow daffodil asks Warsaw to remember. The question the petition raises – inadvertently – is: remember whom, exactly, and on whose terms.