No conspiracy needed to destroy a democracy, boredom will do
Julien Gracq published The Opposing Shore in 1951, when the European ruins were still…
ESSAYS
ESSAYS — ACIDREPORT
Essays
In-depth texts: cultural analysis, political reading and history as a tool for understanding the present.
The Mammals That Stopped Reproducing So the App Could Keep Running
A thirty-year-old man, in a recent debate, said something his contemporaries rarely say out…
The Traqueto as True Mirror of Colombian Capitalism
Colombia has spent decades conducting a cultural operation without a name and almost without…
What Tanizaki Knew in 1933 and Five Billion Users Are Learning Too Late
In 1933, as imperial Japan electrified itself at a forced pace and Western architects…
Schopenhauer, or How Loving Is Obeying the Species and Calling It Freedom
Schopenhauer was not a man who chose his words to reassure. His thesis on…
The animal we never chose and never managed to do without
There is a scene that plays out millions of times a day on screens…
In 1886, Tolstoy Described a Man Who Did Everything Right and Never Really Lived. Today That Man Has a Hundred Million Followers
There are books that age and books that wait. The Death of Ivan Ilyich,…
The fury governing our world was already in the Iliad, and Homer knew how it ends
Homer wrote the Iliad nearly three thousand years ago. The first word of the…
Aimé Césaire and the moral laboratory Europe exported before importing its consequences
What is most unsettling about the Discourse on Colonialism is not its verbal violence…
Rosa Parks, or the day refusing to give up a seat changed the mechanics of power
Some gestures make no noise when they happen and yet shift the world. That…
The Autumn of the Patriarch: How to Read Trump, Bukele and Orbán with a 1975 Novel
The Autumn of the Patriarch, published in 1975, does not narrate a dictatorship. It…
Varlam Shalamov and the Model the Twenty-First Century Inherited from the Gulag
Varlam Shalamov spent fourteen years in the camps of Kolyma, in the far north-east…