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On Havelok the Dane, medieval air & the world’s largest wind farm

Floods, hailstorms, plague, fire, children lost on a mountain or trapped for years in a ruined villa. On the stories of Adalbert Stifter.

On Cyril Schäublin’s Unrueh (2022), cinema & scale. « No other film has so resized me. »

On the untranslatability of Ukrainian jokes

On Edda Mussolini & fashionable fascism. Can a woman be dangerous yet powerless?

Why death? Who or what dies? Philosophers tend not to explain, but to justify. When do such questions become biological questions? Does it help?

Dramatic economic inflations have punctuated twentieth-century political history. Is austerity a class strategy?

Write your memoir in a hostile tongue. On Marina Jarre, from Latvia to Italy and back.

A story about a lonely railway guard on a desolate steppe. « In the cursed August of 1991 the radio informed Kasatonov that there was a state of emergency in the capital. Then it fell silent, as if the receiver had broken. »

An iron curtain makes a powerful canvas. Images from Sven Johne & Falk Haberkorn’s Aus Sicht des Archivs, documenting life in the former East Germany in the 1990s.

The clairvoyant Dutch grocer who charted the frontiers of parapsychology and lent a hand to the FBI. « Unbelievable but true! »

On language invention. To desire some other perfect language is at once to acknowledge and to overlook the miraculousness of what we have.

Imagine your therapist assigned you to write your autobiography, after which you decided you were cured, so your therapist published it as revenge. Zeno’s Conscience turns 99.

Tight pants. Fashionable coats. Music. Defiant looks. On the last men & women who passed through the Bulgarian gulag.

He spoke of painting like a starving man speaks of food. On Józef Czapski, Memories of Starobielsk and the art of observation.

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.
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.


A friend of mine likes to say that the moon landing was real, but dumb. On astronautical tokenism.

Shoulders were slapped, fingers pointed, hearts fired up. Perhaps a little scuffle broke out after class, a boisterous wrestling over insults exchanged. Nothing to be concerned about. Acquiring knowledge was, after all, a combative affair.

Time? For? Socialism? What happened when Thomas Piketty descended from the elegant mathematical Olympus of economic theory into the muck of political and economic crises, public debates, social confrontations, and competing visions of progress?

Україна не стала епіцентром світової історії раптово. Україна стала епіцентром світової історії знову.

Was a Dutch town founded by Inuits in the 9th century? On American discoveries of Europe.