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Surviving Autocracy
Masha Gessen
We knew Trump’s range: government by gesture; obfuscation and lying; self-praise; stoking fear and issuing threats.
La Ville Morte
Benjamín Labatut
‘When the day came, even the nuns lay down inside the walls of their cloister.’
The Price of Vagueness in a Pandemic
Eleanor Morgan
‘With each day bringing more confusion as this mysterious virus holds us in its grip, cognitive dissonance is everywhere.’
Introduction
Sigrid Rausing
‘But soon everything that had felt so tragic and dramatic to begin with – thousands of people ill and dying, the great pause, the intense dreams, the solidarity clapping – came to feel normal.’
1 April 2020
Michael Hofmann
‘Living on money from the government, excused our duties and our liabilities, reducing our wants to eating and sleeping and what in the eighteenth century may have passed for exercise, the alderman’s stroll.’
Arbos
Teju Cole
‘I made many pictures of such trees, and each time, some analogy to art would impress itself on me, the more so because of the universally locked museum doors.’
Still Life
Leanne Shapton
‘Because that’s what I’m doing a lot of; looking around the interiors I occupy, the corners of my occupied apartment.’
Open Bookkeeping
Jenny Erpenbeck
‘I write an obituary that appears in the newspaper that she always used to read while drinking her afternoon tea. I receive €170.03 for the obituary.’
Translated from the German by Kurt Beals.
Tête-à-Tête
Diana Matar
‘The features and expressions were uncannily contemporary. Some seemed to be mirror images of the people I had seen at the protest in Piazza del Gesù.’
Yerevan, Armenia
Viken Berberian
‘Ever since the pandemic, our neighborhood is mostly deserted, except for the pigeons and statues.’
Le Flottement
Janine di Giovanni
‘Their lives were halted in time, a predicament they accepted with grace, sometimes even with humor. They appeared to be floating.’
Labirinto
Wiktoria Wojciechowska & Lisa Halliday
‘But only a city without people is immune. Only a city in which nothing circulates, nothing changes hands, nothing flourishes.’
Lisa Halliday introduces the photography of Wiktoria Wojciechowska.
