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Essays
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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.
