Editors’ Note

Issue 10: Fakes

NOVEMBER 7, 2023

No one knows where the word “fake” came from. The etymology is obscure: it could have come to us from the German “fegen,” meaning to “polish or sweep,” or from the Old English “feak,” meaning “to beat or thrash,” or from the Latin “facere,” meaning “to do” or “to make.” The latter etymon is perhaps the most enticing, because it suggests that the fake might share its origin with the fact. Today, fakes routinely masquerade as facts, and the public is left to discern the difference. The outer limits of fraudulence, mendacity, and deception have never been particularly well defined. 

The pieces in this issue offer unexpected perspectives on the rampant fakery of our times. From London, Snigdha Poonam reports on how an AI lover drove one man to try to kill the late Queen. From San Salvador, John Gibler exposes how President Nayib Bukele has manufactured a punitive carceral regime. From Johannesburg, Eve Fairbanks reads Elon Musk’s biography and wonders what he really knows of the country he left behind. From Bratislava, Ondřej Kundra reports on how a deep fake altered the course of a Slovakian election. And from Oslo, Ida Lødemel Tvedt reports on the pretensions of the Norwegian literary scene.

We’ve partnered with Verstka, an independent Russian magazine run by journalists in exile, to bring you a story of fraudulence on the Russian internet, where the girlfriends and spouses of Russian soldiers swap advice about how to be “good soldiers’ wives.” Jan Werner-Müller reviews the memoir of Axel Springer’s Mathias Döpfner, and asks what the media mogul really meant to say. Kaya Genç documents the making of the first Kurdish translation of Ulysses in an essay co-published with The Markaz Review. We also bring you an excerpt from an untranslated North Korean memoir by Kim Ju-song, translated by Meredith Shaw.

– The Editors