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Saving the angel
« This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. »
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On being plagiarizedThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
« To write a biography about a writer like Kiš is a violation of the poetics of the very author it claims to revere. »
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The Passion of strangers: a philosophy of friendship
Friendship is the only stable social relationship for which « paperwork » has not been invented.
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The plant whisperers
If you know what you are looking for, you find edible and healing plants everywhere.
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Carry The Prophet in your coat pocketThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
When you’re fifteen and you read Kahlil Gibran’s mystical bestseller for the first time.
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My untranslatable nameThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
When my parents went to register my name after I was born, they carried out an especially elaborate plan. They acquired a chocolate bar
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My tongue is Simón Bolívar’s wet dream
My boyfriend had colombianized my Mexican. But my friends had also argentinized it, chileanized it, venezuelized it, ecuadorized it.
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After midnight
The modern world races forward with all its technological might, yet remains trapped in a reactive cycle of disasters. Necessary responses follow catastrophes rather than prevent them.
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The Palestinian seafront of the future — Joséphine Baker in HaifaThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
Long ago, on the coast of Palestine, an elegant Modernist casino was frequented by Muslims, Christians, and Jews. One night in 1943 Joséphine Baker performed.
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Re-generationThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
Photos of young cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire, who prove that after decades of depletion, soil recovery is possible.
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Tree illness as metaphorThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
What do we tell ourselves when all the trees simply vanish?
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The shortest, longest bus tripThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
Travelogue of a day in Minsk & an eternity at the EU border.
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Bethlehem, Jericho & a view of JerusalemThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
A Palestinian writer mentally retreats to three unreadable cities.
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How to abandon an archiveThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
When an authoritarian regime collapses, what happens to the archives of its secret police?
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One last round | Son bir şansThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
English or Turkish? Tipsy or çakırkeyf? A letter to a bi-lingual editor
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The underbelly of Krochmalna StreetThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
Why aren’t Isaac Bashevis Singer’s gangster novels published in English?
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Parallel worldThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
Photos of a Thai village that, due to coastal erosion, is slowly but surely giving way to the sea.
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Sick men of EuropeThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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 horsesThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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 & yonderThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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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Funny hahaThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
Pretty much every European country has a satirical news site – all in the tradition of American example The Onion.
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The Three Body SolutionThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
The Chinese Communist Party embraces the sci-fi hit The Three Body Problem.
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The business of menThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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 aestheticsThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, reviewed. «If we discovered a Neanderthal novel, would we be worthy of it?»
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InterjectionsThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
Non-words for the remembered & unremembered violence of Bulgarian labor camps.
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The Barren Nothing-PlaceThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
On growing up in the creases of bilingual versions of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
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Letters from PersepolisThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
On the ruined city’s pilgrims & decoders
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Forage, farm, huntThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
A photographer asks: why bother making photographs?
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Without causeThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
« The exercise here is of a philosopher who would review the AI Act as a text. »
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The Mothers GrimmThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
What ties Gretel to her witch? Louise Glück’s poem Gretel in Darkness provides answers.
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The anarcho-astrologerThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
Javier Milei, literarily considered
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Moscow on the MedThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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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The size of longingThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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 »This article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
In search of Anthon van Rappard, Vincent van Gogh’s forgotten friend.
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Photographer, refugee, kingThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
A family’s travelogue from Phnom Penh to Paris and back
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And I stripped naked and became a manThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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 elephantThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
On animal charisma and animal vengeance. What happens when an elephant goes missing a year after her death.
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Pigeon WaterThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
Online, pigeon water is what we swim in and slather on ourselves.
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Visit the extractocene!This article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
The Eisenthür silver mine is real; the village below is entirely fictive.
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Corrupted, yet intactThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
On the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Europe of European integration.
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SchwarzeneggerologyThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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 »This article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
On the untranslatability of Ukrainian jokes
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The art of losingThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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 sharperThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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 airThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
On Havelok the Dane, medieval air & the world’s largest wind farm
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The inborn germThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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 detectiveThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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 inThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
Tight pants. Fashionable coats. Music. Defiant looks. On the last men & women who passed through the Bulgarian gulag.
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Planes, tanks & automobilesThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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 writingThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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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BorderlandThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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 vanityThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
Lose, delete, restore. What to remember when everything is always, forever, in a digital now?
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Optimize this headline for Google*This article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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 breastThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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 hatThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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 writeThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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 dustThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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 thalassophobiaThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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 againThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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 comingThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
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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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 ZierikzeeThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.
Was a Dutch town founded by Inuits in the 9th century? On American discoveries of Europe.