Forgetting
The size of longing
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On Jacob Israël de Haan’s Palestine and Arnold Zweig’s novel of post‑Zionist disillusionment
Forget your darlings
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On memory palaces, medieval and modern. A medieval woman’s life would not have taken the form of a straight line.
The invention of austerity
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Dramatic economic inflations have punctuated twentieth-century political history. Is austerity a class strategy?
Flags & bones
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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?
The room I am in
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Tight pants. Fashionable coats. Music. Defiant looks. On the last men & women who passed through the Bulgarian gulag.
All is not vanity
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Lose, delete, restore. What to remember when everything is always, forever, in a digital now?