Author Jessi Jezewska Stevens visited three Viennese balls last season for the magazines Foreign Policy and The Dial. She was particularly taken with the Science Ball. Here’s an excerpt:

“The Vienna ‘ball season refracts the flamboyant anachronisms of a region in transition. Dozens of guests and former debutantes (…) described the events to me in terms of glorious contradiction. The balls, I was told, are elegant, tacky, rarified, intimidating, democratic, elite, ironic, gorgeous, decadent, tiresome, astonishing; they are both political and apolitical, accessible and inaccessible, international and decidedly Viennese.'”