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Alcohol

  • Visit the extractocene!

    Visit the extractocene!This article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

    The Eisenthür silver mine is real; the village below is entirely fictive.

  • Flags & bones

    Flags & bonesThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

    On Curzio Malaparte’s Europe — and ours. The midcentury novelist read anew, on war’s aftermath and transatlantic romance. What was, or is, « postwar Europe », anyway?

  • Skinned alive

    Skinned aliveThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

    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.

  • A sangre fría

    A sangre fríaThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

    Fernanda Melchor’s prose hits you square in the face, but its lyricism works differently in Spanish. On Veracruzano modernism, lyrical slang, and worlds so new that style falls apart.

  • Cheers!

    Cheers!This article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

    A photograph found in Rome’s Porta Portese. The recumbent can also raise a glass.

  • The Ogre, the Monk and the Maiden

    The Ogre, the Monk and the MaidenThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

    A story about quarks and antiquarks, beauty quarks and strangelets, gluons, muons, prions, hadrons and charms.

  • Planes, tanks & automobiles

    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.

  • How Americans edit sex out of my writing

    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.

  • Animal Anti-Cities

    Animal Anti-CitiesThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

    « A black cat sneaks across a flower bed toward a shed, past some asters, and squeezes into a gap an arm’s width wide. Some worn-down club-goers lay wasted on sofas, sweat and smoke in a late-summer landscape. » On Berlin clubs and Calvino’s cat flâneurs.

  • Ballad of a Homburg hat

    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?)

  • It wasn’t the beer

    It wasn’t the beerThis article is available for Members only. Check out our subscription plans to become a member.

    How could it be that despite decades of rigorous European unification, of open borders and largely adjusted standards of living, a virus was able to kill up to 40 times more people in one country than in another, only a few hundred kilometers away?