At a party on Neckarstraße one hopeless weekend last January, I escaped into the twofold luxury of potent conversation and mild inebriation in the company of Klaus V--, one of the few people I recognized there. He was telling me about the political history of Transoxiana (birthplace of Timur, part of the Chaghatayid khanate, bounded by the Oxus and Jaxartes), which he recently conquered on horseback during fieldwork in Central Asia. I enjoy Klaus’s exhaustive style and had braced myself against our host’s kitchen island to better receive the torrent of proper nouns. It made me remember the past. …

The Holocaust and the Nakba—the expulsion of Palestinians from historical Palestine, which has been ongoing since the end of 1947—are deeply intertwined. The Nakba is, among other things, a direct consequence of the Holocaust. Yet it is excluded from German collective memory, its relationship to German history only legible negatively in the representation of Israel as a safe haven for Jews. The nation’s once-lauded “memory culture” never links Israel’s self-conception as a Jewish state to the systematic expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians. The violence experienced by Palestinians must remain unspoken, taboo. When made visible, it becomes threatening—something that competes with the Holocaust and contaminates the German culture of remembrance. This is why the violence against Palestinians cannot be acknowledged as a continuation of European anti-Semitism. Doing so would force Germany—home to the largest Palestinian community in Europe—to confront the ongoing present of its history and to acknowledge that the nation’s moral rehabilitation is incomplete. …

In our new series on fact-checking for Kiosk, “Cutting the Bean,” we feature short articles that showcase knowledge as a path toward marvel, that mount what Marina Warner describes as “a rescue operation of magic from the realm of irrationality,” and that celebrate Caillois’s “debacle of the evident.” We are all raised in boxes of a kind, and ferns lie waiting in the footnotes. …

Postage stamps are sticky things. An ignored coda, a preface neglected: stamps are the last glimpse of a missive dropped into a mailbox; they catch the recipient’s eyes before she has time to tear the flap. They are a duty, or rather, evidence of duty exacted. In the case of international mail, stamps traverse a quartet—sender to receiver, state to state. They are issued by a nation and often commemorate it as so; without a bilateral treaty, postage goes nowhere. Letters enter archives while stamps get shorn from their words, preserved in manila folders and philately sleeves. They rarely return to their origin, and if they do, it is under cancellation, effaced enough to make them void. …

In the spring of 1954, Reinhard Müller stepped onto a stage in the German city of Wolfsburg as a volunteer in a magic show. His presence was captured in a small sepia photograph, where he can be seen in conversation with a tuxedoed magician holding the elegant pocket watch that Müller has just entrusted to him. The conjurer is Helmut Ewald Schreiber (1903–1963), better known by his stage name Kalanag. He is in the final stages of a trick called “The Devil’s Mail,” a popular feature of his world-touring magic revue, Simsalabim. A few moments before, Müller’s watch had been reduced to fragments in a mortar by sharp blows of the magician’s wand. In the photograph, Kalanag can be seen returning the now miraculously restored timepiece to its owner. But his watch is not all that Müller will take with him when he leaves the stage. To his delight, he will also carry this snapshot, delivered to him in an envelope by the magician within moments of the very scene that it depicts. …

On the flatlands of central Israel, not far from Tel Aviv, “770,” the triple-peaked brick Gothic Revival home of the Rebbe, rises in a spanking orange vertical from a large parking lot. Stroked on one side by the fronds of a low palm tree, it appears fresh as a desert flower sprung up overnight in a flood’s wake. On Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, 770 has the same basic three-story profile, its windows and doorway framed by limestone surrounds, but here the house has doubled in size and added another trio of gables. Edged by a gas station and displaying a relaxed, liver-colored spread in its bulk, the building makes itself at home in the sprawling, unbuttoned metropolis. In New Jersey, 770 has gone a bit suburban-mall office park. On the shore of Lac Désert near Montreal, one might detect a hint of the trademark Canadian maple leaf in 770’s sharp angled gables. In São Paulo, 770 is jammed between soaring white skyscrapers; it has shed girth to squeeze into the teeming megacity. And in Milan—where 770 is wedged between an ample, peach-hued palazzo and a low, old, murky yellow home—the bay window distinguishing the original structure’s center section has transformed into a stylish glass balcony. ...

Islands have played a key role in the development of the modern global economy as trading and military outposts, tax havens, and nuclear test sites serving colonial powers. In addition to their status as strategic economic and geopolitical satellites, islands are also special places that “have long been regarded as ideal sites for experimentation, in fiction and in reality, with their straightforward boundedness presumed to provide unambiguous limits to scope, ambition, and (if all goes wrong) contagion.”¹ Today, so-called Small Island Developing States are at the center of the development of central bank–issued digital currency. Their governments’ efforts to capitalize on digital currencies—as well as the accompanying discourse of fast-tracked economic development and democratization of the financial system promoted by the states and the technology and political entrepreneurs who court them—reaffirm the role of islands as sites of experimentation, this time as fintech laboratories. ...

During the first pandemic lockdowns, thousands of vivid dreams were suddenly shared across the internet and among friends. Though some of them had to do directly with COVID, many were simply intense and mysterious, in the way dreams often are. Yet for some reason, people felt newly impelled to convey them to others. The dreams were soon compiled into databases, written up in newspaper articles, and eventually integrated into scientific studies. This phenomenon may turn out to be a significant event in the history of the social imagination. For thousands of years, and in many cultures, talking about dreams has been considered hugely important. But in modernity, dreams have been regularly denigrated. ...

City streets seemed eerily empty in the early years of photography. During minutes-long exposures, carriage traffic and even ambling pedestrians blurred into nonexistence. The only subjects that remained were those that stood still: buildings, trees, the road itself. In one famous image, a bootblack and his customer appear to be the lone survivors on a Parisian boulevard. When shorter exposure times were finally possible in the late 1850s, a British photographer marveled: “Views in distant and picturesque cities will not seem plague-stricken, by the deserted aspect of their streets and squares, but will appear alive with the busy throng of their motley populations.” ...

In the spring of 1953, a former Nazi named Anton Melchers, who in the Third Reich had been a newspaper editor, war reporter, and—according to his brother—talented propagandist, was admitted to the university psychiatric clinic in Heidelberg. His brother, a former high-ranking SS officer, brought him there because Melchers had stopped eating. At the clinic, Melchers reported hearing voices that accused him of sexual immorality and intimated that he would be “paraded” in the streets. Melchers was also preoccupied, his brother said, with anxieties about being “rounded up and taken away” as punishment for his National Socialist past. ...