tracking the berlin vibe-cession

I’m not a big fan anymore. It’s such a Peter Pan kind of place, where you live in the moment, which is beautiful, until you realize that years have gone by.

It’s true that walking through central London in 2024 can feel like navigating a bleak, postmodern satire of the thrills of urban spontaneity: ballpit bars and escape rooms for contrived office socials; expensive, ticketed mega-events; and security guards cosplaying as cops, moving civilians on from heavily surveilled POPS, or privately-owned

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The freedoms associated with liminal spaces – club nights, abandoned buildings, forgotten shopping malls – often have a lot to do with the fact that these places, and the marks people left of themselves within them, will eventually disappear. There’s also something inherently egalitarian about them; a place that nobody owns or stakes an exclusive... See more

IT WAS SAID that if you were a criminal, a member of some tinpot political party, an agitator for a minority interest group, a drug addict, a property speculator, a forger or bootlegger of any kind, an artist, a fashion designer, a writer, underground film director, musician, or just plain crazy, Berlin was where you would eventually end up. It

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Because, let’s face it, Berlin is not a pretty place. The winters are a total nightmare, no sunlight, no warm face. Its cuisine is all about fast food. Large parts of town smell like a public toilet; overdosed tourists randomly pass out on the street. It’s not a city where you would sit out on a cafe terrace to people-watch. But also it’s now... See more

in a recent “places to visit ” issue of the curation newsletter Perfectly Imperfect, Delia Caidescribes an ideal Berlin trip:

I find solo trips to be a delicate art—there is nothing more freeing than setting aside an entire week to wander around aimlessly, anonymously. But you do have to factor in a few hours a day for some inevitable existential

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I’ve never understood why Berlin feels the need to advertise itself to other cities — we get enough free press every time a young journalist visits/moves here. But our new government launched a new advertising campaign and, to be fair, it’s just as cringe as they always are.

Berlin, baby! This is a city infected with a pre-teen’s idea of “being edgy.”