What We Lost: COVID-19 Beyond the Numbers
Introduction: Megacity Lockdown Coronavirus has thrived in megacities, determined to make it in the big smoke of the world’s densest urban hubs. It was in industrial Wuhan, now the most infamous...
View ArticlePandemic Diary
1. And suddenly, with the prospect of these days where the unreality of our daily lives cracks open to reveal the reality of the details (the parts, the fractions are clear but not the whole: the whole...
View Articlenotes from this city
notes from this city, which pants around me like a prehistoric beast. its skeleton juts from the riverside brush and the framework of buildings that crop up on the banks, wind flapping in their sheeted...
View ArticleOn Masks
The Dearest Great facial mask now is the time to tell you that I love you my dearest my little prison take custody of my mouth The Man without a Mask I don’t have a mask when I phone someone for...
View ArticleReally Real Dragons
My daughter is a doctor. A dragon doctor. I know this because she tells me every day, all day long, and has been doing so for a month, ever since the nurseries closed. Her conviction wavers only...
View ArticleA Persian New Year Beginning with COVID-19
A few days after the new Persian year began on March 20, Dad called from Tehran. He was sobbing. “Your grandfather passed away,” he said. The first thing that struck me was his choice of “your...
View ArticleCOVID-19
In Athens the statue of Pericles is being disinfected; and for good reason, all those ideas of freedom and democracy clash with an era where humanity communicates in GIFs. Nor is the statue of Dante...
View ArticlePas de Deux
The man is back, trying to be quiet. I watch him, he squints over at me, and I play dead, pretending to sleep. There’s no more heat, no more seething blood. The slow, monotonous flowing of thin blood...
View ArticleA Message to Our Friends on the Moon: The Pandemic of 2020
I was twelve years old in April of the year 2020. At that time, drones did not yet deliver our food, nor was such a varied menu of pastilles on offer, each of which now holds the flavors, spices, and...
View ArticleToward a Vision of Post-COVID Urban Space: Joseph Roth’s City of Miniatures
It is 1921 and Joseph Roth—the Austrian novelist and chronicler of Weimar Berlin—is going for a walk. “What I see, what I see,” he writes. “What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality.”...
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