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Essays
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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.