INI · An independent literary spaceEnglish edition · Budapest / Prague
Literature · Satire · Social observation
Some illusions deserve a closer look.
Essays, satire, stories and a few inconvenient observations about the world we have grown accustomed to calling normal.
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Illusions Not Included
Latest Writing
The latest published work from the English edition of INI.
Power & society
The Owl — When Looking Serious Was All It Took to Seem Wise
The owl has been a symbol of wisdom for centuries. Perhaps because it watches before it reacts. We, meanwhile, have built a world in which almost everyone can publish an opinion before the facts have finished arriving. The strange part is not that we speak so much. It is how quickly certainty begins to resemble knowledge.
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Money, work & the economy
Free Money Knows No Social Class…
A handful of one-dollar bills falls onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. At first, people watch. Then someone bends down — and suddenly the dollar is no longer quite the same dollar. Abbie Hoffman wanted to provoke Wall Street. What he exposed was something rather less convenient: the strange moment when value becomes desire, desire becomes competition, and the crowd quietly makes the ridiculous feel perfectly normal. Money has a curious quality: it behaves very differently when there is a great deal of it in an account and when a single bill is lying on the floor in front of us. In the first case, we can talk about it seriously. Investment strategy, returns, risk, liquidity, expectations. We sit upright, use the appropriate vocabulary and generally feel that we are the ones managing the money. A bill on the floor offers a rather more direct relationship.
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New Writers
Alex Buday
Founder & Writer
Alex Buday writes about power, money, history, human nature and the quietly absurd machinery of everyday life from a Central European perspective. His work moves between literary satire, personal memory and cultural observation.
Notes
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Why INI? INI did not begin as a platform. I simply needed a place for the kind of writing that does not have to prove its worth in three sentences, does not always feel obliged to make a point, and sometimes cannot quite decide whether it is an e…
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Essays, satire, stories and brief observations from different points of view, without convenient answers. Explore the latest writing, or open the notebook in Notes.