pxl

Essays


  • Feeling political together

    A four-hour journey into populist algorithms, and a soup that never got made.

    Read more


  • 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. »

    Read more


  • On being plagiarized

    « To write a biography about a writer like Kiš is a violation of the poetics of the very author it claims to revere. »

    Read more


  • The Passion of strangers: a philosophy of friendship

    Friendship is the only stable social relationship for which « paperwork » has not been invented.

    Read more


  • Looted libraries

    « In both countries, it has left the government officials grappling with an extremely delicate and complex issue. Why is it so difficult to move forward? »

    Read more


  • The plant whisperers

    If you know what you are looking for, you find edible and healing plants everywhere.

    Read more


  • 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.

    Read more


  • 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

    Read more


  • 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.

    Read more


  • « Läheisten päivä Dragsvikissä » (Day of the nearest and dearest) in Dragsvik, Finland), with an illusory atomic cloud.

    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.

    Read more


  • 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.

    Read more


  • 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.

    Read more


  • Yellow, mellow, smellow

    The use of the colon in titling, and other laments.

    Read more


  • 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?

    Read more


  • 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.

    Read more