Important
Who will speak European? A puzzle
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Brussels is a concave mirror that returns a concentrated (and somewhat distorted) reflection of the projection of its continent.
On learning to write again
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Ramallah, downtown, fifth floor. The phone rings and the caller’s number appears on the screen. It’s an unknown number. And yet a call that comes at this hour must be answered.
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No one would have understood both the sentiment and the absurdity more keenly than Marx himself, whose face has adorned real currencies in more countries than anyone else’s, with the possible exception of Elizabeth II.
Cretan Europa’s second coming
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Citizen’s day in Fiesole, December 2021. In the EU, Christian Europe stands in quantum superposition, both here and not here. Can Cretan Europa help us imagine better futures?
Woman is space
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« Space », or prostranstvo, is a key word for understanding the literary and philosophical history of Russia. Oksana Vasyakina’s Rana (Wound), a Siberian road novel, remakes the Russian landscape and the Russian novel for women’s worlds. It renders prostranstvo unruly, polysemous, queer.
Firsts in space
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A friend of mine likes to say that the moon landing was real, but dumb. On astronautical tokenism.
A rather disproportionate intervention
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An excerpt from Ijoma Mangold’s memoir, Das Deutsche Krokodil (The German Crocodile), available in English translation from the DAS Editions imprint of Digitalback Books
A messy optical process
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On orthodoxies & heresies of typography. To serif, or sans-serif?
The myth of 1922
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What does modern mean? In Brazil, it often meant an embrace of newness as the possibility of reinvention. In Modernity in Black and White: Art and Image, Race and Identity in Brazil, 1890-1945, Rafael Cardoso unravels the myth of 1922.
The pinnacle of cartography is the pinnacle of uselessness
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« Europe », drawn from memory or intuition. Thick and thin strokes of charcoal: a nod to the coal and steel on which the polity of modern Europe is founded. But more mystical, too: these drawings represent « the conviction that simple tools can grant us the power to face the god of paper. »
By misadventure
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A short story about vertigo from the author of Utopia Avenue, Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green. « Possibly a dare, or a rite of passage, hung in the air. Remember their age: most late teenagers are immortal. »
