Motto? “Because middlebrow is not an option”. I mean, come on - how could I not love it? But it isn’t just the catchy name or the pleasant design or the ragingly offensive condescension. I found the site when The Rumpus linked to this piece by Matthew Battles that imagines the effects of using a fictional translation machine made by Walter Benjamin. If you’re not familiar with Benjamin, he was an early 20th century Marxist critic who had a charming mystical touch, and he’s most famous for an essay called “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility”, which described how art’s position and function in society changes when we are able to mechanically reproduce it. Battles wonders how this machine might work, and does this lovely thing where he pretends to put the same passage through this translation machine repeatedly, switching it back and forth between English, French, German, or Portugese, so that:

the languages weave among each other like dancers around a maypole, exchanging tenses and inflections and making light of homophony. The words themselves fall like angels through the void, swerving in Lucretian, meaning-making trajectories. The “counsels of the wicked” become so many “conseils misdirected,” and then the language pulls back like a curtain to reveal that the Lord Himself is a prancing “cavalheiro.”

It’s great. Also fun to read is a celebration of something near and dear to my heart: the hangover . It’s an experience writer Josh Glenn laments having missed, as he voluntarily sidestepped the strange clarity of the morning after, its painful, strange reminders of last night’s mistakes.

I have frequently talked with friends about that rare, ideal hangover, one that is just present enough to remind you had a great time the night before without any accompanying nausea or fatigue. What’s more, do it right and you feel the perfect balance of happiness and regret so that, staring yourself down in the mirror, you arrive at some epiphany about yourself, discover some cause to the behaviour that unleashes itself when under the influence.