Airlift from Berlin Review

A writer grows up poor, escapes her circumstances and writes about it with a mix of shame, guilt and pride. It’s one of the most classic tales in modern literature, and Claudia Durastanti thinks the story stopped being true just as the genre boomed. In this conversation, she and Lauren Oyler talk about autofiction, transfuge de classe narratives and what could be written instead.

Loneliness is no longer a luxury problem for philosophers and artists. Anthropologist Biao Xiang discusses how it became a mass condition and what gossip, Hannah Arendt, and hummingbirds reveal about a way out of this crisis.

In May 2026, an award-winning short story turned out to be likely written by AI, and none of the editors who published it noticed. Lauren and Tobias talk about the scandal and what most writers, even good ones, get wrong about the technology and what it takes to keep writing human.

Florian Meinel, Professor für Staatstheorie an der Universität Göttingen, erklärt, wie das strafrechtliche Regime der Bundesrepublik entstanden ist und warum es heute zu einem dysfunktionalen System geführt hat, das niemanden mehr schützt, aber viele bedroht. Im Mittelpunkt steht der Streit um „From the River to the Sea," die Verpolizeilichung des Meinungsregimes und was Walter Benjamin damit zu tun hat.

Recorded live at Chapters Bookshop in Berlin, novelist Maaza Mengiste talks with Meret Weber about photography and war, the research that reshaped The Shadow King, and her new novel set among the Black Germans and Africans living in Berlin as the Nazis came to power.