Issue 28: Spectacle

MAY 6, 2025

Digital devices — and the dopamine hit we get from them — have altered our desire for entertainment. Politicians are rewarded for their public performances more than their policy, the media chases scoops and buzzy headlines and the rest of the internet foregrounds outrageous takes and coarse speech. The pieces in this month’s issue, Spectacle, examine the absurd and harmful things people do for attention, money and power.

Christopher Clark reports from France where, only 30 years ago, members of an African music troupe were exhibited at a zoo, alongside animals, and asked to perform for visitors. Bamboula’s Village is “a shocking symbol of the longevity of colonial ideas in a country still reluctant to meaningfully engage with its imperial history,” Clark writes.

From her desk in Denmark, Anna Juul traverses the cringiest social media platform, LinkedIn, where professionals shamelessly market themselves and their achievements. “People take themselves seriously on this site, which is something that’s always prompted equal parts respect and irritation in me,” she writes. Other spectacles are designed to lift us out of the everyday. At a convent in the U.K., Lamorna Ash attempts to understand the mystery of Easter, arguably Christianity’s most important miracle. “It was like spending four days in an immersive theatrical production,” Ash writes.

Our literature this month includes a raucous story about an old woman on her deathbed, whose “dealings with the devil” run in the family. And Lily Meyer introduces us to Mafalda, an inquisitive six-year-old, in an essay that explores the lasting appeal of the Argentine comic strip as it is translated to English for the first time.

— The Editors