After seven years we are shutting down signandsight.com. The site will remain online, but for now no new texts will be posted.
We still believe in the idea behind signandsight.com. We are convinced that Europe needs a public sphere, and we think that this public sphere is best achieved by combining the possibilities of the internet and traditional media. As before, we still love our motto “Let's Talk European”. Yes, English is now the lingua franca of contemporary Europe. However, when English is used to bring articles written in another language to an international readership, then it serves as a bridge to these others languages and helps create waves. Interestingly, the most lively reactions to signandsight.com came from the US, where there is an intellectual audience that wishes to escape its domestic borders.
Some of the most wonderful experiences with signandsight.com were when Harper's reprinted an interview with Thomas Bernhard, because it had been first translated into English by signandsight.com, when Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post and Paul Berman of the New Republic discussed texts or debates that had originated from signandsight.com and which had found echoes in Swedish, Hungarian, Spanish, Polish, and French newspapers. Signandsight.com never had a wide popular readership, but it was a catalyst for European public debate.