Brian Goodman Brian Goodman is the author of The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers Across the Iron Curtain. He teaches at Arizona State University, and last year he was a Budapest Open Society Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University.

The Last Days of the Danube Institute | A Report from Postliberal Budapest

Brian Goodman

Espresso Embassy, a third-wave coffee shop in Budapest’s diplomatic and governmental quarter, is where visiting reporters and academics come to talk politics. On the way in for my morning coffee on March 18, I passed a poster for Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party that had been vandalized with a Sharpie: “the safe choice” had become “the certain way to get fucked.” From across the cafe, I spotted the American journalist and...