History
WHOOOO
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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. »
When the world makes rags of us
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He spoke of painting like a starving man speaks of food. On Józef Czapski, Memories of Starobielsk and the art of observation.
Gerard Croiset & the adventure of the psychic detective
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The clairvoyant Dutch grocer who charted the frontiers of parapsychology and lent a hand to the FBI. « Unbelievable but true! »
Skinned alive
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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.
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.
Glossomania-mania
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On language invention. To desire some other perfect language is at once to acknowledge and to overlook the miraculousness of what we have.
Borderland
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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.
Into the muck
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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?
A breast is a breast is a breast
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To contemplate Pompeii is to contemplate archeology in its most extreme form, framed by the wish not only for discovery, but for resurrection.
Ukraine yesterday & tomorrow
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Ukraine didn’t become an epicenter of world history all of a sudden; it became an epicenter again.
How to write; or, how to insult
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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.
Firsts in space
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A friend of mine likes to say that the moon landing was real, but dumb. On astronautical tokenism.