“I learned to adore the way he sidled against me and to hate his momentary affection, just as he learned to detach from me in weariness and depend on me in hunger. Days with him were a quick education in a cat’s existence.” I once spent a year shadowing a musician I loved, whose body […]
We learn a lot as we move along; if we’re lucky, we might shed some old wisdom for better understanding.
“What is it, precisely, that you work for? What real goodness do you seek at the end of your own long line? “
“I felt like a rat trapped in a maze with no finish, running into walls and getting electrocuted at every turn. I wanted out of the hellscape I’d created, but I had formed a whole identity around the latticework of visible bones and tendons; my days were structured around the denial of food. To give […]
“Deep in the valley below us, in the middle distance, gaped the great black cauldron of Litli-Hrútur, its insides awash in a churning fiery stew. We stood in silence on the observation mound with our hands on our hips, faces cast in childish masks of wonder and awe.” Last week, I hit the natural hazard […]
“I don’t get creatively unstuck. I just write despite the fact that I’m stuck. I learned a long time ago that being ‘stuck’ is really just the unshakable belief that everything you can think of writing is shit, and while that may be true, it might also not be, and the biggest predictor of whether […]
“To a reading list on these mind-bending entities at a planetary tipping point, welcome. What you see here are only some fruiting bodies, the rest lies underneath.” I first learned about the parasitic fungus that takes over a bug’s body and commandeers its brain back in 2023, when I picked Zhengyang Wang’s “The Last of […]
“When I cooked Indian food, the smallest number I cooked for was four. But the book suggested that I could cook for myself. Meals for one. It advocated gentle ease as a way of making myself a meal.” Is that the weekend knocking at the door? C’mon in! This week we’ve got a thoughtful new […]
“I still work as a librarian . . . . But my work has changed drastically. I’m trained in violence de-escalation, trauma-informed reference, and medical and mental health first aid, which includes overdose prevention training. I have intervened in fights, talked people down from suicide, removed domestic violence victims from their abusers, hugged strangers, and […]
This week’s edition highlights stories by Peter Flax, Abigail Edge, Jesús A. Rodríguez, Henry Wismayer, and Elif Batuman.
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