What exactly are we living through: CANMEXUS 2026? USA & Former Allies 2026? Our very own annus infantinus?
On the field, every World Cup is a contest of idioms: between the Spanish-influenced juego de posición and post-German Gegenpressing, between philosophies that rely on holding the ball and those that assert themselves by working without it, between the set piece-heavy structuralism now fashionable in the English Premier League and the crashing unpredictability of the South American game. At an official level, however, the World Cup’s cacophony of on-field styles cedes to a party-pooper monolingualism.
More than fifty years since its thirty thousand inhabitants—most of them Greek-Cypriots—fled before the advancing Turkish army, the resort city of Varosha on Cyprus’s southeastern coast has been reborn. Now, from 8 AM to 6 PM every day, visitors are free to enter this modern wasteland through a casually guarded gate and wander a small portion of its once-thriving streets. From what I’ve seen, the tourism may be less dark than dumb, kitschifying the skeletal city into yet another selfie backdrop.
Pandemic-era restaurant culture extends and amplifies forces that were already apparent under the old regime: the numbing frictionlessness of delivery food, the retreat into private spaces, the appification of everything. By raising the cost of staying afloat online, Grubhub and Yelp have contributed more to the demise of Covid-era restaurants than their survival. Delivery workers’ bodies are now deemed essential, but their paychecks remain as murderously trivial as ever.
Pandemic-era restaurant culture extends and amplifies forces that were already apparent under the old regime: the numbing frictionlessness of delivery food, the retreat into private spaces, the appification of everything. By raising the cost of staying afloat online, Grubhub and Yelp have contributed more to the demise of Covid-era restaurants than their survival. Delivery workers’ bodies are now deemed essential, but their paychecks remain as murderously trivial as ever.
We walk to escape the trauma of the pandemic, only to relive it all over again by walking.
We’re told this is temporary, a momentary suspension of normality, and in our hearts we sentimentalists all want to believe the streets will soon be filled once more with stoop dawdlers, grandmas pushing shopping carts, vested business bros with their phones on speaker, fleets of annoying schoolkids, boys and girls out on the prowl, the stench of weed and the cries of desire. (On second thought, let’s consign the business bros to the past.) But we all know the dream of a quick recovery is delusional, that our altered reality will last a year, maybe two.
