all Issue 5 — November 2024
The Commons: An Exhibition on the Vanishing Commons and the Claim
By Commons
Once, the common was everywhere, it was all of us.
Conversations Issue 5 — November 2024
Time for the Heart: Letters of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan
Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann’s postwar letters reveal the anticipation, rapture, euphoria and betrayal that comes with love.
Essay Issue 5 — November 2024
Sorry Can’t Talk Now I’m Too Busy Optimizing Myself (And Failing)
Sinjan Saadat examines the nature of optimizing our being and non-being in our hyper-techno, image-driven world. His essay explores the ideas of German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han and the art of “Feierabend”—the German term for “clocking out,” the hour when work ends and guilt-free leisure begins.
Essay Issue 5 — November 2024
Wundergestalt In Nature: Goethe, Humboldt, and Hesse
An exploration of wonder as a guiding force in both art and science in the works of political German thinkers such as Gothe, Hesse and Humboldt.
Essay Issue 5 — November 2024
Reading Rickshaw Art in Dhaka
Beyond commodity fetishism, performative appreciation and wholesale appropriation by the urban elite, Rickshaw art indicates an ancient and folk artisanship with a rich elemental diversity and stylistic imagination.
Essay Issue 5 — November 2024
My Favorite German Novel: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain
By Kaiser Haq
Kaiser Haq recounts his many encounters with the works of German Novelist Thomas Mann, chiefly his favorite “The Magic Mountain”.
Conversations Issue 5 — November 2024
Everything is Accidental — A Conversation with Naveen Kishore of Seagull Books
A free-wheeling conversation with Naveen Kishore of Seagull Books about his journey into the publishing world.
Essay Issue 5 — November 2024
Echoes from Muzot: the Poet As a Gardener
By Will Stone
Rilke’s intimate 1924–26 letters to Antoinette de Bonstetten reveal his poetic reflections on nature, solitude, and a blossoming friendship.
Essay Issue 4 — June 2024
Among Sand and Stones
By Ayaan Halder
Ayaan Halder explores marginal life, masculinity and what it means to have a home in India’s North East.
Conversations Issue 4 — June 2024
A Non-conformist in Every Possible Way — A Conversation with Nazes Afroz on Syed Mujtaba Ali
Translator Nazes Afroz in conversation with artist and writer Aninda Rahman on the relevance of reading Syed Mujtaba Ali today
Essay Issue 4 — June 2024
The Mission of Undocking a Ship
An excerpt from the recent English translation of Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Joley Dangay
Essay Issue 3 — March 2024
Roots and Routes
Snapshot of the cultural and emotional transitions faced by a child in a foreign land. Jannat Ferdous reflects on the challenges of adapting to new environments, forming connections and the evolving concept of home and identity.
Essay Issue 3 — March 2024
Sportsman and Scholar: the Story of an Unlikely Friendship
The prologue to an unlikely friendship between an aspiring cricketer and an aesthete. Excerpted from Ramachandra Guha’s memoir “The Cooking of Books”.
Essay Issue 3 — March 2024
Music at Home: A Portrait of Provincial Life
What is the intersection of music in everyday life? Mursalin Mosaddeque on the music of chance, surprise and delight.
Essay Issue 3 — March 2024
Towards Utopia
By Sarah Islam
Anxieties of living in a metropolis in the midst of perpetual political crisis. Sarah Islam navigates the promise of a new beginning and its utopian potential.
Essay Issue 2 — November 2023
Flesh and Bone
By Ayaan Halder
Recollection of childhood memories in India’s Northeast while underscoring the communal tensions at the preamble of a meat market in Shillong.
Essay Issue 2 — November 2023
Education Reform in Bangladesh and Disenfranchised Policy Analysis
By S. B. Shams
Bangladesh’s glossy experiment in education reform involves listening to foreign experts with little local experience or importing a global solution and applying it here uncritically. But there is more to it than meets the eye.
Essay Issue 2 — November 2023
Resilience in Crisis: Bangladesh’s Covid-19 Paradox
By Jayanta Sen
A woefully unprepared health infrastructure meets a pandemic—Bangladesh’s experience with Covid-19
Essay Issue 2 — November 2023
Shonar Tori: On Questions—the Agrarian, the Literal, and the Literary
Rabindranath Tagore’s famous poem “Shonar Tori” is typically interpreted as an existential encounter between man and himself. A different reading emerges when the objects in the poem are taken literally at their historic moment.
Essay Issue 1 — October 2023
Growing Up in Red China — My Peking Days
From musings on ancient antiques, domestic and dictatorial father figures, to pristine observations, driven by child-like wonder, this essay is an exploration of the author’s memories and provides a sweeping yet nuanced lens to view Red China.
Essay Issue 1 — October 2023
All Flesh is Grass
What is it about grass that has fascinated the great American poet Walt Whitman, the transcendentalist thinkers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau? Why do grasslands on horror novels and movies have such an uncanny effect? A personal narrative meets an exploration of the arts.
Essay Issue 1 — October 2023
The Colonial Legacy of Bangladesh’s Education System
By S. B. Shams
On the evolution of the education system in Bangladesh and the subcontinent, the challenges in today’s education policy and its implementation
Essay Issue 1 — October 2023
Narsingdi/Noshundi
On reminiscing wedding feasts–this essay explore the textured versatility and jolliness of rural culinary practices, while being intertwined with humor and amusing notes on the essence of Bangladesh’s hinterlands.