Berfrois

November 2021

Meta Narrative

Meta Narrative

Users conform ever more closely to one or a few of the narratives on offer, driven by powerful mimetic dynamics to converge on common thoughts, words, and actions...

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In the past money may have made intimacy possible, now intimacy makes money…

In the past money may have made intimacy possible, now intimacy makes money…

Advertising is a major force behind the Internet, promising free content while promoting the ethos of choice. But the possibility of choice has literally put a price on intimacy...

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Prousting in the Republic of Letters

Prousting in the Republic of Letters

Marcel Proust represents many things. Chief among these perhaps, especially for non-French readers, is quantity...

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Farah Abdessamad on François-René de Chateaubriand

Farah Abdessamad on François-René de Chateaubriand

I spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...

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Generational Carbon Pricing

Generational Carbon Pricing

The role of carbon policy was to keep ‘single agents’ from free-riding on one another...

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B. Alexandra Szerlip: iSpy

B. Alexandra Szerlip: iSpy

As a test, thirty painted foxes were set loose on a weekend...

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Hoof, Wing, Paw

Hoof, Wing, Paw

I’ve always loved Jim Harrison’s poetry—so full of itself, so direct and hungry and angered and awed...

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Where Berlin Begins

Where Berlin Begins

From the bridge, I go back, usually, through Babelsberg. I pass flocks of ducks trustingly swimming up to the shore. Above, on a small hill—the palace...

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Artificial Taste by Mary Wollstonecraft

Artificial Taste by Mary Wollstonecraft

A taste for rural scenes, in the present state of society, appears to be very often an artificial sentiment, rather inspired by poetry and romances, than a real perception of the beauties of nature...

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Redefining the Boundaries of Blackness and Germanness

Redefining the Boundaries of Blackness and Germanness

Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement stands at the intersection of questions regarding Black German activism in the post-1970 era...

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Jennifer Keohane on Gary Hart

Jennifer Keohane on Gary Hart

Character assassination is the intentional destruction of a person’s reputation or credibility through strategic communication...

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Opened Worlds

Opened Worlds

None of this was window dressing, or walled off by the same invisible barriers preventing true movement in most video games we’d played...

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