About this Project

This anthology is part of Dirt’s Nightlife Review series, created in collaboration with The New School. The Nightlife Review looks at nightlife through a poetic lens; Invisible Nightlife Review brings a speculative angle to the project.

Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, this collection gathers rhythmic, philosophical, and imagined essays that drift through the hidden, surreal, and often overlooked dimensions of nightlife.

The project was organized by Daisy Alioto and Nika Simovich Fisher, who led a university-wide pitch call in Spring 2025. Students from Communication Design, Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism, Journalism and Design, and Anthropology proposed stories for the project. Eight were selected and live here on this site.

Paying homage to the quiet structure of Invisible Cities, the anthology draws its own categories—not of places, but of nights. Borrowing from Mikayla Emerson’s “Four Kinds of Night,” the entries fall into four moods: Neverending Nights, White Nights, Blood Nights, and Buried Nights.