In the summer of 1989 I went to Paraguay. I was six months late; I had missed the story. In February that year, when Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner, the western hemisphere’s longest serving dictator, had been overthrown, I was somewhere else. It was the kind of bad luck you dread as a reporter.
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‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
‘The kitchen telephone would ring and it would be Gustavo Stroessner, the General's son, bellowing in that strange accent down a fuzzy line from Brazil, like an unruly fictional character nagging for a larger part in the plot.’
‘Once I came home at the end of August, it was as if nothing had ever happened. Indeed, nothing had.‘
‘Anniversaries, of course, can be a two-edged sword: they invite historical reappraisal.’
