tracking the berlin vibe-cession

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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I won’t say who because I didn’t check on the publishing front when we were chatting, but by their own empirical evidence, a Lemaire bomber jacket won’t get you into Berghain but a Bottega (unbranded, unmarked) one will.

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

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.

Berlin was going to be different. If there was anything I’d heard more about this city than its unmatched freedoms, it was that anyone could afford a decent life here on a part-time job’s salary. Universities were free for everyone. I’d enrolled in a master’s program for the visa and found a student job in my first week. I moved into a shared

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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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