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  • Sick men of Europe

    King Leopold & Sultan Abdülhamid — a tale of two monarchs. «I’ve come to see them as twins of a kind: monarchs in bourgeois garb.»

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  • Of wild men and horses

    Pastoralism is the antidote to industrial farming. Kapka Kassabova treks with wild horses in one of Europe’s last wildernesses.

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  • Miracle & yonder

    Paul Simon’s Graceland & country music’s global history. «The idea of anti-apartheid country music is counter-intuitive but profound.»

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  • The Three Body Solution

    The Chinese Communist Party embraces the sci-fi hit The Three Body Problem.

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  • The business of men

    On pregnancy’s bloody histories & its visceral fictions. A review of Trudy Dehue’s brilliant history of pregnancy research, « Egg, Fetus, Baby ».

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  • Neanderthal aesthetics

    Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, reviewed. «If we discovered a Neanderthal novel, would we be worthy of it?»

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  • Interjections

    Non-words for the remembered & unremembered violence of Bulgarian labor camps.

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  • The Barren Nothing-Place

    On growing up in the creases of bilingual versions of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

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  • Letters from Persepolis

    On the ruined city’s pilgrims & decoders

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  • Forage, farm, hunt

    A photographer asks: why bother making photographs?

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  • Without Cause

    « The exercise here is of a philosopher who would review the AI Act as a text. »

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  • The Mothers Grimm

    What ties Gretel to her witch? Louise Glück’s poem Gretel in Darkness provides answers.

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  • The anarcho-astrologer

    Javier Milei, literarily considered

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  • Moscow on the Med

    Two winters in Istanbul. If you are a holder of a Russian passport, there are few places in the Western hemisphere that you can go without a visa.

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  • « We are the winners of Eurovision »

    Lithuania has lost the Eurovision Song Contest thirty times.

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  • The size of longing

    On Jacob Israël de Haan’s Palestine and Arnold Zweig’s novel of post‑Zionist disillusionment

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  • « Ça ira! There will be fire and enthusiasm in you »

    In search of Anthon van Rappard, Vincent van Gogh’s forgotten friend.

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  • Photographer, refugee, king

    A family’s travelogue from Phnom Penh to Paris and back

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  • And I stripped naked and became a man

    The remarkable diary of third-century martyr Perpetua — a young mother sentenced to death — shows a soft, milky mother-body resisting a military-industrial empire. Texting with Fernanda Eberstadt SANDER PLEIJ Texting with Fernanda Eberstadt While on tour in the US and the UK, Fernanda Eberstadt answers a few questions about her new book Bite My Friends, via text. Portrait…

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  • The case of the missing elephant

    On animal charisma and animal vengeance. What happens when an elephant goes missing a year after her death.

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  • Pigeon Water

    Online, pigeon water is what we swim in and slather on ourselves.

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  • Visit the extractocene!

    The Eisenthür silver mine is real; the village below is entirely fictive.

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  • Corrupted, yet intact

    On the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Europe of European integration.

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  • Schwarzeneggerology

    On Arnold, action cinema & Übermenschlichkeit. « Arnold Schwarzenegger was action cinema’s Adamic man, alternately entering and exiting normal human time. »

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  • « My ghost, we do no batshit »

    On the untranslatability of Ukrainian jokes

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  • The art of losing

    On artificial intelligence, murderous elephants & Elizabeth Bishop

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  • Beamer, Dressman, Bodybag

    On the unexpected joys of Denglisch, Berlinglish & global Englisch. « My own language, made camp. »

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  • An axe to grind should make you sharper

    Forensic Architecture charts state-organized crimes, genocide and other disasters in three dimensions. « Flat maps can’t convey the politics of water and shit. »

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  • An archeology of the air

    On Havelok the Dane, medieval air & the world’s largest wind farm

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  • The inborn germ

    Why death? Who or what dies? Philosophers tend not to explain, but to justify. When do such questions become biological questions? Does it help?

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  • Gerard Croiset & the adventure of the psychic detective

    The clairvoyant Dutch grocer who charted the frontiers of parapsychology and lent a hand to the FBI. « Unbelievable but true! »

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  • The room I am in

    Tight pants. Fashionable coats. Music. Defiant looks. On the last men & women who passed through the Bulgarian gulag.

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  • Planes, tanks & automobiles

    You could tell the US army had arrived because the local garages had sold out of whiskey. Old maps, new wars & vanishing memories along the Polish-Ukrainian border.

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  • How Americans edit sex out of my writing

    What is editing? Two people who both lead a literary life — an augmented reality where the connections between existence and sentences are investigated daily — wage sensual war for the soul of the page.

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  • Borderland

    The great storm surge is coming, it has always been coming in the borderland between Denmark and Germany. Here, Danish writer Dorthe Nors visits the Frisian Wadden Sea island of Sylt, as part of her travels along the North Sea coast.

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  • All is not vanity

    Lose, delete, restore. What to remember when everything is always, forever, in a digital now?

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  • Optimize this headline for Google*

    Google’s rise to dominance can seem inevitable, and its power over publishers monolithic. Yet Google’s wanton disruption of publishing resembles evolution more than intelligent design. Journalists, publishers, regulators, and scholars are left grappling with our new, random god.

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  • Europas & bulls

    A logo might start as a designer’s whim. Only then does one look for meanings to fill it with. On Europas: mythic, artistic, fictional, political, psychological, satirical, and finally unfinished.

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  • A breast is a breast is a breast

    To contemplate Pompeii is to contemplate archeology in its most extreme form, framed by the wish not only for discovery, but for resurrection.

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  • Ballad of a Homburg hat

    On racial metonymy and the art of misidentification. (Meanwhile: has a glass of beer ever been more crisply and deliciously depicted? Has the froth of a European pilsner ever looked so delectable?)

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  • Why we write

    A letter to George Orwell. « All narrative is hypnotic. Some narratives are more hypnotic than others. Because of you, we can be conscious of the kinds and the workings of the narratives that set out to deaden us, lessen us, make us lie, make us part of the lie. »

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  • Eat the dust

    Søren Kierkegaard compared reading reviews of his books to « the long martyrdom of being trampled to death by geese. » What martyrdoms does today’s bookishness portend?

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  • Beyond thalassophobia

    German vice-chancellor Robert Habeck has more than twenty books to his name. It is tempting to read his fiction for glimpses of Green political futures, and his literary criticism for similar clues. How experimental can a literary politician be?

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  • On learning to write again

    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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  • Cretan Europa’s second coming

    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?

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  • A messy optical process

    On orthodoxies & heresies of typography. To serif, or sans-serif?

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  • Football is not football

    How do literary movements arise? About thirty years ago, I watched one emerge out of nothing: the subgenre of « literary » football books and magazines. Not exactly the birth of modernism, but it still taught me something about how cultural transmission works within Europe.

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  • A kayak in Zierikzee

    Was a Dutch town founded by Inuits in the 9th century? On American discoveries of Europe.

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