The Barren Nothing-Place
On growing up in the creases of bilingual versions of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
The Mothers Grimm
What ties Gretel to her witch? Louise Glück’s poem Gretel in Darkness provides answers.
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.
The size of longing
On Jacob Israël de Haan’s Palestine and Arnold Zweig’s novel of post‑Zionist disillusionment
« Ça ira! There will be fire and enthusiasm in you »
In search of Anthon van Rappard, Vincent van Gogh’s forgotten friend.
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…
The case of the missing elephant
On animal charisma and animal vengeance. What happens when an elephant goes missing a year after her death.
Corrupted, yet intact
On the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Europe of European integration.
Schwarzeneggerology
On Arnold, action cinema & Übermenschlichkeit. « Arnold Schwarzenegger was action cinema’s Adamic man, alternately entering and exiting normal human time. »
Beamer, Dressman, Bodybag
On the unexpected joys of Denglisch, Berlinglish & global Englisch. « My own language, made camp. »
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. »
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?
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! »
The room I am in
Tight pants. Fashionable coats. Music. Defiant looks. On the last men & women who passed through the Bulgarian gulag.
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.
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.
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.
All is not vanity
Lose, delete, restore. What to remember when everything is always, forever, in a digital now?
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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. »
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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
A kayak in Zierikzee
Was a Dutch town founded by Inuits in the 9th century? On American discoveries of Europe.