‘Q: When is a factory not a factory? A: When it’s a chocolate factory.’
My grandfather kept chocolates on his sideboard, in what ought to have been his fruit bowl. He would offer them to us, in a casual, cursory sort of way, and I was never sure how grateful to be. After all, the bags they came in were stamped with the words reject, waste or mis-shapes. They came from R…
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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.
‘It was as though, after a period of wariness, my pipe had warmed to me.’
‘At the moment, I would say that depends what you mean by ‘believe’ and what you mean by “God”’
‘As he spoke, I thought how much Richard himself looked like a flyer: at forty-three he is symmetrical and compact, like Scott Tracy, the handsomest of those idealized pilots in Thunderbirds.’
‘I tried to work out how many elements I would have plugged if I retired at sixty, and soon I was fatigued before a simple subtraction.’
Fiction by A. Jiang.
‘Finally! I thought. Now I get to work in a big factory. I was fifteen and a half years old. I was a child laborer.’
Xiao Hai on coming of age in the factories of Shenzhen, translated by Tony Hao.
