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Library: Current Preoccupations
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Cynical trollery
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Editor’s note Issue Ten included a personal essay by Guido Snel, « On being plagiarized ». Snel’s starting point was his finding of uncredited language from his own academic writing about the Yugoslav…
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Issue Thirteen update
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Last Friday, our founding editors Sander Pleij and Wiegertje Postma went to our designer Patrick Doan’s house to cross the final t’s and dot the final i’s on Issue Thirteen.…
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Have you seen my cat, Freedom?
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Editor’s note On 30 October, the Putin regime officially shut down Novaya Gazeta, the last independent – and antiwar – newspaper to be published in Russia. After years of arresting and…
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Herbarium
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Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbarium Claudia Horn (OR Books, 2026) Rosa Luxemburg was a theorist, politician and revolutionary murdered in Berlin on 15 January 1919, together with her compatriot Karl Liebknecht. She…
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« Look Mickey! »
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« Look Mickey! » By Fernanda Eberstadt Late October is New York’s sweetest moment. I’m in town for the week – which is about as long as I can stand, before the…
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Looting and desire
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France is now officially a country of malcontents. To make sense of the chaos of conflicting interests and threats, I read and listened to dozens of interpretations, but none added…
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Sensible and sensibility
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Jane Austen is my alpha and my omega, so last weekend, I went to see the new Sense and Sensibility adaptation directed by Georgia Oakley, with Daisy Edgar-Jones as Elinor Dashwood and…
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Folie
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Parting (2025) Sebastian Haffner (W&N, translated by Michael Hofmann) The handwritten manuscript of Abschied spent more than ninety years waiting in a desk drawer. It was published last year in…
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Election, Latvian-style
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On the morning of 3 October, a friend I hadn’t heard from in a long time called. The question was right there again: who to vote for? I had already…
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Vignetting is like playing TIME’S UP
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I love to play TIME’S UP*, especially the third round when we have to rely only on gestures, mimics and sounds to make our team guess the answers. Your body…
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The bar across the street
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Last week, I went every morning for breakfast to the perfect bar. You stood at the counter for your shot of coffee; the other customers all greeted the owner by…
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Shepherds of Europe!
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They’d put me on a float. It was midnight. A tractor hauled me and some twenty-five villagers into the woods. We were going to cut down a tree. I’d had…