1. Aby Warburg, in lycanthropic crisis
Kevin Dann’s “Warburg’s Werewolf: An Anamnesis” in The Public Domain Review is exactly the sort of cultured derangement the internet still occasionally justifies. Warburg, the great historian of images, spent time in the Bellevue sanatorium convinced he was becoming a werewolf. The piece is not gossip about madness; it is a reminder that scholarship, symbolism, terror, and metamorphosis once sat much closer together than our sterilised disciplines now permit.
2. The city of the dead, when it still smelled of itself
Also excellent: “The Great Majority”, on body snatching and burial reform in nineteenth-century Britain. What looks at first like Gothic ornament turns out to be logistics, urban density, church fees, medical demand, and decomposing matter pushing back against polite society. A useful corrective for anyone who still believes cities are made of branding rather than sewage, land, and the management of corpses.
3. A better online archive than most people deserve
Wellcome Collection’s online collections remain one of the more civilised places to wander when the rest of the web begins to smell of hot plastic. More than 1.1 million items: books, images, archives, films, audio, manuscripts, and highly specific fragments from the history of medicine, bodies, care, obsession, and error. Better still, they expose the catalogue through open APIs. Display is pleasant; access is culture.
Amsterdam: two things with an actual pulse
At the Stedelijk, Experimental Jetset: Circuits still looks genuinely worth an hour. Sixteen wall works built around near-extinct carriers — 35mm reels, LaserDiscs, cassette tapes, CDs — and the quiet but necessary point that information once had weight, shape, and friction. It runs until 2 August 2026.
Then take the ferry north and give Eye your attention: 2001 — A Time Capsule runs from 16 April to 17 June, with twenty-five films from that peculiar hinge year, many screened in 35mm. Kurosawa’s Pulse, Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There?, Lynch, Haneke, Miyazaki — a reminder that before social media flattened memory, the new century arrived as atmosphere.
Enough. Read one strange thing, see one good thing, and try not to spend the entire weekend inside someone else’s algorithmic compost heap.