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.

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

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.

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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Shift the culture: We need to be better at supporting each other. Forget IQ or EQ - what we really need is a higher Decency Quotient (DQ). DQ is about empathy, respect, and fairness. It’s the foundation for how we treat one another, how we collaborate, and how we celebrate contributions at every level.

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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