‘Was there a story? Yes, there was always a story .Did you write this one down? I've written them all down’.
It wasn’t really his story. I thought it was. I thought it had something to do with him–or one of his shipmates, at least. That it had happened on a boat he knew. But then I was reading to my son one night, and there it was in this book of sea stories.
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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 catastrophe had not happened to all of us, we began to understand, but to each of us.’
‘To the inexperienced, hurricane stories always sound like exaggerations.’
‘She got skinny and became a clairvoyant. And she wasn't even a stigmatic.’
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘I came to feel that I was hiding here in the physical world, like a child who hides in a computer game to escape a more consequential reality.’
Tao Lin on his spiritual awakening, via psychedelics and the literature of near-death experiences.
‘The first time I heard the word exile – sürgün – in Turkish, I was a child. It struck me how closely it rhymed with another word: hüzün – melancholy.’
