Issue 9
Spring 2018

The people Robert Menasse met in Brussels had left behind their families, and even their tongues, to forge concord in diversity. Europe’s capital is this century’s proving ground — the place where we figure out if we can really live together.
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Essays

Love and Theft

by James McAuley

Six years ago the German tax police entered a modest apartment and found more than a thousand works of art. What crimes lie beneath the Gurlitt Collection, and can pictures testify to them? A report from Bonn and Bern

Habeas Corpus

by Matthew J. Abrams

Egon Schiele, dead a hundred years ago this October, was a demigod to postwar rockers and punks. What is left of his bad manners in the age of Snapchat and sexting?

People of the Book

by Cody Delistraty

Michel Houellebecq envisioned a France whose politicians were so exhausted that a young upstart could break the system. He was almost right: it was Emmanuel Macron

Negatives

The Interpreter’s Tale

How do you tell the story of an institution as powerful, as essential, but also as complex and nebulous as the European Union? Artists never even tried — until Robert Menasse moved to Brussels and wrote his masterpiece The Capital.
by Niklaus Nuspliger

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Interviews

Giuseppe Penone

“If you look at the climate more broadly, you can consider that this fear is ultimately a fear of human survival. It’s not about the survival of the planet, or of nature. What is nature? Nature is whatever is outside; nature will be present even if the human species goes extinct.”

Lucy McKenzie

“This sampling culture, we’ve gone through it. I love being in a new period where we don’t have a scarcity of information or access. Before, an artist might spend all this time hunting for an obscure 7-inch, but art can’t trade on that kind of micro-connoisseur knowledge anymore. We have to do more.”

Negatives

Spin Cycle

by Lucy Madison

Imagine: you send your daughter to figure skating lessons and she starts to idolize Tonya Harding. Yet even a die-hard fan of the rink’s worst apple has doubts about Margot Robbie’s incarnation

The Body Politic

by Madison Mainwaring

At the New York City Ballet, a man takes over a woman’s role. What does it mean to imagine a profoundly sexed art form beyond gender?

Alphabet City

by Linda Besner

In Toronto, Google shifts from Chrome to condos. When private enterprise divorces public space, who gets to keep the data?

The Atlanticist

by Daisy Prince

Dear Meghan, congratulations on your engagement to Prince Harry. Please allow me, your fellow American, to give you the benefit of a little advice.

Portfolio

The photography of Michele Borzoni: economics, Italian style