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MatteoRomano I paid for transport, not testimony, I kept thinking as the woman in the aisle kept singing and the rest of us shrank into our seats pretending the recycled air and the knees in our backs were the only discomforts on board. There is a specific circle of airborne hell that Dante missed. Not turbulence. Not the middle seat. Not the infant with operatic range in row 14. Those are known evils. They have been catalogued, endured, and occasionally survived with one’s f

In DC, during high-altitude consultations regarding finance and power—which is always the true topic—the sovereign interests of of the developing world do not occupy the vanguard. Washington, D.C. is not a city; it is an argument. It is a PhD dissertation with wide avenues, disciplined trees, and a pervasive stillness that novices mistake for peace. It is not peace; it is protocol. The U.S. capital possesses a peculiar mechanism designed to convince us of two simultaneous fal

FIELD NOTES ON THE METAPHYSICAL HORROR OF DCA UNPREDICTABILITY, AMTRAK PURGATORY, THE TRAGEDY OF A THREE-RATE BROOKLYN SHACK Our departure flight from DCA to JFK was liquidated by a meteorological non-event—a civilized, thin drizzle that in Brasília wouldn’t even suffice to clear the dust from an open-air parking lot. We spent five hours under the neon glare of the terminal—a temporal sentence engineered by the aviation industry to remind the traveler that his status apps ar