Cities And Paper

Is The City Finished?

Sam Kahn | Castalia | 17th August 2026

For thousands of years, culture used to radiate outwards from the city. No longer. The rise of algorithmic recommendations and the pandemic may have led people to realise that “they didn’t have to depend on the city for much at all”. “The cultural claims of the city — its theatre, its music venues, its fashion, its literary centres — really may not matter for the distribution of cultural content as a whole” (1,300 words)

The Undertaker

Feyi Fawehinmi | 1914 Reader | 17th August 2026

Intriguing from the opening line: “Cheung Yan became a dollar billionaire simply by noticing.” In the 1990s, containers were arriving in America packed with Chinese goods and returning empty. Cheung bought waste cardboard and sent it back to China on the ships, to be pulped and turned into new boxes. She built her empire when Premier Zhu’s reforms were turning China into an export juggernaut (5,400 words)