‘Pop songs have the power to make me behave badly, and for the first time in my life I want to do the right thing’
First come the drums—then the cymbals and the glockenspiel. They sound jangled and edgy, like callow teens eyeing each other up at a dance hall, each waiting for the other to make the first move. And then comes the hand, flicking the switch or pulling out the plug—whatever’s quickest. It’s m…
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘Is there in fact a jostling for dominance between the art forms, some barely suppressed competitiveness?’
Adam Mars-Jones on music and ceremony.
‘gormandizing, gluttonous, lickerish, guttling’
Excerpts from Lydia Davis’s diary.
‘What happens to a dancer when they stop dancing?’
Diana Evans on dancing and writing.
‘The people I’ve photographed made Beirut liveable.’
Sama Beydoun photographs the nightlife of Beirut.
‘Ordinary sounds change their meaning in the context of war when the reverberations of sound can mean death.’
Ada Wordsworth on silence, noise and the war in Ukraine.
‘ancestry.com fucks with my mind’
A poem by Eve Esfandiari-Denney.
