When language goes dead, cultural life gets harder

living language – In Atlas’ fiftieth issue, Danish writers circle the same fear from different directions: that contemporary life dulls language—and with it, attention, imagination, and freedom. From “manosphere” advice that reshapes thinking, to a copyright dispute that silenc

On a gray kind of day, it can feel as if words are losing their edges. In his editorial for the fiftieth issue of Atlas in Denmark. Kristoffer Granov puts it plainly: in times shaped by modern horrors. people become increasingly numb—and language seems to follow. deadened. News stories loop the same events in lifeless, formulaic journalese. Trite marketing copy fills space. Political slogans repeat until they mean almost nothing. “Thinking,” Granov writes, appears to be in its death throes.

Atlas marks its fiftieth issue by trying to do the opposite—breathing some life back into prose. The editors frame the mission with a line meant to be more than decoration: ‘We need living people speaking a living language to other living people.’

The issue doesn’t treat “dead language” as a metaphor floating above real life. It shows how easy it is for persuasion—slick, confident, familiar—to slip into the mind and then start doing the thinking for you.

Alexander Rich Henningsen turns to the digital manosphere, warning that awareness may not be enough. In his telling, the well-informed internet user knows the dangers—but what moves people isn’t always extremism. It’s something that sounds responsible and measured: training, discipline, health. A fiftysomething on Henningsen’s feed talks with confidence about exercise—‘Training is non-negotiable’—and about lifting weights as a universal duty. with pectorals bulging in the image Henningsen describes. Then there is cardio, presented as a must for avoiding cognitive decline in middle age.

Henningsen stresses the trap: the advice isn’t necessarily wrong. These health influencers often offer recommendations grounded in sound research. Yet in combination, the doses of useful advice can become toxic. As he fell deeper into the rabbit hole of male health influencers. Henningsen says the relentless reminders of his supposed failings began to reshape his thinking. He knew the images of perfect masculinity offered on social media were impossible to attain. Still. he found himself buying into benchmarks that had no place in real life—‘Yes. perhaps hard. long-lasting erections really were a sign of a man’s status and worth.’.

What startled him wasn’t that the ideology existed somewhere out there. It was how quickly it moved from the screen into his internal language of self-worth. In his cautionary tale. the route into far-right misogyny “need not begin with extremism. ” but can start with seemingly sober discussions of exercise. health and discipline.

If Henningsen shows how ideas can infiltrate through the language of advice, Liv Helm shows how institutions can silence creative speech through the language of rights.

Her essay, written after a lawsuit involving the Copenhagen theatre she directs, asks what can—and should—be copyrighted. The details are specific, and the outcome is final in a way that lingers. In spring 2025. Husets Teater and playwright Nanna Cecilie Bang were sued by the rights agency Nordiska on behalf of the American rights holders to A Streetcar Named Desire. A settlement was eventually reached, but the theatre can never perform the play again.

Helm doesn’t treat the legal outcome as the whole story. She describes how it changed her relationship to artistic creation itself. ‘If I become afraid of my own shadow in art, in the creation of theatre – which I love – then I am finished.’

Her essay, she says, is less about settling scores than working through that fear and trying to recover a sense of freedom. ‘My fire must not go out entirely.’

The dispute centers on Notes on Blanche. Helm says it is not an adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. but a play about ‘a woman who sees herself reflected in a fictional character she has encountered in a film’. Yet. in the rights argument. the character’s development belonged to someone else: the rights holders maintained that this was not Bang’s story to tell. with the claim that ‘We own the character’s dramatic development.’.

From there, the argument in Helm’s essay spreads wider, but it doesn’t leave the theatre behind. She reflects on artistic inheritance and intellectual property by pointing to how art develops through dialogue with what came before—Shakespeare’s reworkings of familiar tales. and sampling in hip-hop. What begins as a dispute over copyright broadens into a meditation on authority, power and cultural ownership.

She also returns to a worry that feels stark against the calm language of legal procedure: beneath the conflict lies an asymmetry. ‘A small theatre’ faced ‘a powerful rights regime’ capable of determining not only what may be performed. but who has the right to create and tell stories. And then comes the question that makes the essay read like more than a legal grief: ‘Who will pass on our shared stories over the coming millennia?’.

In Mikkel Borris’s essay on Copenhagen’s changing Nordvest district, the deadness Granov describes takes a different form: not slogans or marketing, but convenient myths people use to talk about place.

Borris asks who is responsible for gentrification—property developers, politicians, investors, or the people who lament it most loudly. He describes a familiar contradiction. While exalting the grit and character of the ‘authentic’ neighbourhood. the gentrifier also demands climate adaptation measures. waste sorting and fewer noise disturbances. Like Midas turning all he touches into gold. the gentrifier buys up an ‘authentic’ property and strips it of its raw charm.

But Borris presses further: what exactly are Nordvest residents clinging to?. As some rougher edges are smoothed out, he finds it hard to summon genuine outrage. The backlash against a proposed cycle path connecting the district’s wealthier and poorer quarters becomes a test of urban romanticism. Diversity. he writes through the tension people live with. is cherished as an aesthetic ideal—but less so when it threatens to become lived reality.

One line captures that bitter distance: ‘One loves the idea of the socially diverse and ethnically mixed working-class neighbourhood … But in practice one does not particularly enjoy spending time with the “socially vulnerable.”’

The issue moves from persuasion and control to the question that, in many readers’ lives, becomes unavoidable: what happens to freedom when it stops being assumed.

Kristian Husted’s essay asks what freedom means once it can no longer be taken for granted. The question is prompted by the death of his friend Ivan, who was killed fighting in Ukraine. Before leaving for the front. Ivan told him: ‘We’re fighting for your freedom too – for the freedom of all Europeans.’.

Husted probes the relationship between freedom. power and security against a backdrop of rearmament. geopolitical uncertainty and growing doubts about the American security guarantee Europe has relied on for decades. He suggests freedom can be more than ‘freedom from’ constraints or ‘freedom to’ pursue goals. It can also be ‘freedom despite’: the capacity to act freely in the face of danger, uncertainty and oppression.

He also resists turning freedom into a single heroic achievement. The lesson he draws from Ivan’s death isn’t about solitary courage but mutual dependence. ‘Freedom is neither a gift nor a given; it is something fragile that must be consciously maintained and defended.’

And at the end, Husted lands where Atlas began—on the communal nature of life that language tries to express. ‘Freedom exists and unfolds within human communities, not in solitary majesty.’

Taken together. the issue reads like a single argument delivered from different angles: language doesn’t just describe the world—it shapes what people believe they are allowed to want. allowed to make. and allowed to fight for. Granov’s opening warning about deadened journalese and slogans isn’t confined to the page. Henningsen shows how advice can smuggle in a mindset. Helm shows how rights language can shut down stories and even fear creative speech. Borris shows how comforting talk can disguise exclusion. Husted shows how the language of freedom can be tested, paid for, and rebuilt.

By the time Atlas reaches its fiftieth issue, the editorial invitation—‘We need living people speaking a living language to other living people’—doesn’t feel like a slogan. It feels like a requirement, the one thing that can keep culture from slipping into numbness.

Atlas Kristoffer Granov living language Alexander Rich Henningsen manosphere Liv Helm Husets Teater Nanna Cecilie Bang Nordiska A Streetcar Named Desire Notes on Blanche Mikkel Borris Nordvest gentrification Kristian Husted Ivan Ukraine freedom Copenhagen theatre copyright cultural identity