lena.molby.app/topics/cities
Cities
Lisbon mostly — streets, trams, neighbours, the way a place teaches you.
- EpisodeSlow Signals, episode 48 The sound of a room Every room has a voice before anyone speaks in it. Acoustician Inês Carvalho on churches that hum, cafés designed to feel busy, and why the quietest room she ever measured made people anxious.
- EssayLow Tide, issue 263 What the 28 tram knows about patience Forty minutes, four kilometres, and the slowest lesson Lisbon has taught me.
- EpisodeSlow Signals, episode 46 Walking as a writing tool Novelist Tomás Reyes walks eleven kilometres every morning and writes for ninety minutes after. We talk about gait and sentences, getting lost on purpose, and the notebook he keeps in his sock.
- EpisodeSlow Signals, episode 43 Fado and the art of the pause Fadista Marta Lobo on singing in a room of forty people, the silence the audience owes the singer, and why the most important note in a fado is the one she doesn't sing.
- EpisodeSlow Signals, episode 41 The patience of maps Aiko Tanabe draws maps by hand. We talk about what a map leaves out, walking a city to draw it, and the year she spent mapping one street in Kyoto.
- ThreadThread Lisbon sounds, ranked Lisbon sounds, ranked, by someone who records them for fun.
- EssayLow Tide, issue 250 A city that sounds like itself Lisbon has a sound you can recognise with your eyes closed. Here is how I learned to hear it.
- EssayLow Tide, issue 246 Saudade is not nostalgia A word my neighbours use every day, and the English I keep failing to find for it.
- TalkUrban Sound Forum, Barcelona Cities you can hear Soundmarks — the sounds that make a place itself — are disappearing faster than landmarks. A short talk with recordings from five years of listening to Lisbon.
- EssayLow Tide, issue 121 Why I moved to Lisbon with one suitcase Five years ago I left London with what fit in the overhead bin.
Low Tide
A letter from Lisbon, every other Sunday.
Essays first, before they land here. No tracking pixels, no ads, one click to leave. 6,400 people read it; the next one goes out on Sunday 1 November.
