Editors’ Note
Issue 17: Land
JUNE 4, 2024
The longest lines at Shanghai Disney Resort are not for Mickey Mouse but LinaBell the fox, a pink mascot unknown outside the country, writes Lavender Au in this issue. While Mickey has charmed the world, it has failed to charm China. Why has the formula that worked everywhere else failed?
The reporting in this issue examines our relationship to land — how the places that we come from shape the world we live in. From Italy, Barbie Latza Nadeau reports on Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s attempt to transform Italian culture by firing those she believes denigrate the country and pursuing her critics in court. Our partnership with Verstka Media — a group of Russian journalists in exile — continues this month with a reported story on the fate of Ukrainian children taken to Russia.
Nick Holdstock examines two recent Uyghur memoirs and questions what it means to tell one’s story from a place of victimhood. “The double bind of any claim to victimhood, whether personal or collective, is that one's message must be simple, and yet such simplification produces a narrative that traps an individual or organisation in an unstable position.”
In Vienna, Jessi Jezewska Stevens attends the city’s famous balls, which bring together descendants of the country’s waning nobility. As Europe seems to be falling apart, what does it mean that its leaders are spending their evenings dancing?
Reporting from Berlin and Palermo, Caitlin Chandler asks what it means to find sanctuary — and if in a world that’s growing more hostile to migration, sanctuary is still possible.
Finally, we have a punctuation-filled short story by Yiyun Li. What do our ellipses and colons say about us?
– The Editors