Fresh Blood

Finding new writers for this place turned into a weeks-long nightmare. Mountains of applications, most completely forgettable, mixed in with the ones where people decided we needed to know their bra size or dick length. Like that matters. Like anyone cares. But I kept going through the pile, and then suddenly there were two people worth paying attention to. Which created a different kind of problem.

Wenke is 23, from Berlin, and when I read her writing I couldn’t stop. She writes in this flood—everything spilling out at once, crude and provocative and completely unfiltered. She’d already torn through phone companies, regional politics, cultural commentary, and left everything raw behind her. There’s this reckless energy to the way she works that gets under your skin.

Max is the other one. 22, from Würzburg. He does the opposite—quiet, measured, philosophical. He writes about life and sex and wanting things with this calm that somehow makes it all feel more true. Where Wenke explodes across the page, Max lets it unfold in these careful sentences that have more weight than they should. They’re nothing alike.

I couldn’t pick between them, so instead I invited both to write here for a month. Readers vote on who stays. It’s stupid and it’s right—let the people reading this shape who gets to be part of it.

There’s something I like about not knowing what happens next. Wenke could burn the whole thing down or make it unbelievably better. Max could be the thing that was missing the whole time. Either way, there’s this strange excitement to it—this feeling of new voices coming in, and you don’t know where any of it lands.