Voices of the City

By Henry Callow There are many places in modern life that claim to offer relaxation: yoga studios with curated calm, spas scented within an inch of their lives, cafés where the music is chosen to sound like nobody has a pulse. Yet somehow, despite all the deliberate tranquillity on offer, it’s the pub — noisy, lived-in, unpredictable — that remains one of the great refuges for people who genuinely want to unwind. At first glance, it shouldn’t make sense. Pubs are social, room

By Seraphina Delacroix There is a quiet, almost invisible cruelty in the way society scripts our inner narratives about wealth. A poor man—so the story goes—accepts he is poor. Not happily, not without a fight, but with a kind of existential resignation, a metaphysical shrug. His poverty is presented to him as an ontological category: you are what you have, and you do not have much. A rich woman, by contrast, rarely imagines herself as poor even when every practical indicator

by Elias Hartmann People often say that the saddest part of dying is the loss of experiences—the trips never taken, the meals never tasted, the books never opened, the laughter never heard again. But beneath all of that, deeper and more immovable, is something far more devastating: the finality of leaving the people you care about. Not for a while. Not for a season. Not even for a lifetime. But for all eternity. When you die, you don’t just lose this moment. You lose every po