I How do you read? In posing this question, I have in mind the Surrealists’ question of 1919: “Why do you write?” But this time around the question is about reading. Weren’t the Surrealists also great readers? In André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humor, didn’t he turn his readings of Lautréamont, Roussel, Arthur Cravan, Leonora…
I The South China Sea, fabled and contested, stretches from the Taiwan Strait south to the Java Sea and the Singapore Strait, where the Horsburgh lighthouse, an active relic of Asia’s violent encounter with Europe, now keeps watch over the world’s most crucial chokepoint. North of Singapore, the sea is bounded to the east by…
We arrived at our goal in the dark, via the Avus. The green eye of the Radio Tower winking, as we saw the city sprawled below us. The broad streets radiated inwards reaching towards a center, monsters’ fingers, from the days of silent film, closing round a throat. The journey passed by ditches, new building…
I picked roses on the Wannsee and don’t know who to give them to. Jakob van Hoddi We left the city on muddy paths along the riverbank. Bare trees dogged us unseen like shadows in the icy water, the grey cross hatching. We brushed past blackthorn, breaking off alder branches with our shoulders. We…
The cold glint of gold in the winter sun. The monuments no longer blaze like back in the day, the barrels of anti-aircraft guns, clumsy tanks. The old capital of terror turns over in its sleep, shifts from one side to the other: East-West. A great listening ear hovers in the air above the Tiergarten…
This black train, puffing out clouds of white smoke, still races towards the viewers. They say some jumped up in fright, thinking the catastrophe was about to occur. The light on the wall of the salon, light from an incarnate summer’s day – so different from the Paris light at the same moment, outside on…
Enough of these silver spoons and tropical helmets, widows’ broaches and porcelain; enough of these bent and antiquated bird cages, and the photo portraits of dead children. Set up in rows on wobbly tables, under canvas in wind or bad weather, what do they say, what do they hide, these remnants of the nameless crimes…
In May 2021, a newly hired journalist at the Associated Press, a twenty-two-year-old Stanford graduate named Emily Wilder, began posting provocative musings on Twitter about fighting between Israel and Hamas. Wilder had not been assigned to write about the Middle East. She may have thought she was tweeting as a private citizen. But the Associated…
Whenever sabers begin to rattle somewhere in the world, I am irresistibly drawn back to Thucydides, the Athenian general who wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War, the deadly clash between Athens and Sparta that raged from 431 to 404 BCE and engulfed most of the Greek-speaking world in its chaos. He wrote, perhaps, precisely…
To understand Éric Zemmour, the ultra-right candidate who has garnered so much attention in the French presidential election this spring, it helps to go back all the way to April, 1793. On the thirteenth of that month, France’s ruling National Convention voted the arrest of the deputy and journalist Jean-Paul Marat. The violent rhetoric that…
—book of the there we’d have been— We remained entranced by words positing a world beyond their reach, that words don’t go there said with words. They were speaking for the we that was no we they knew. It wasn’t music went where words were unable,…
Something new and unexpected is happening in Myanmar. No, not the most recent coup d’état. Few countries have had so many coups as Myanmar. The surprise is that, a year later, the military are still not in control. That is what has never happened before. On February 1, 2021, when a new parliament was due…
