- This week, Transport for London announced that they would not be renewing Uber’s licence to operate in the city. As a young start-up, they were forgiven their ‘toddler-like confusion over regulations, taxes, and transit bureaucracy’ despite their ‘violent desire to break everything’. More recently however, the sexist company culture, inadequate driver background checks and dodgy politics have resulted in a backlash against the ‘tech sociopaths’. ‘How much do you think they’ll charge during the next hurricane?’ asks a character in Ben Lerner’s Uber-themed short story, ‘The Polish Rider’.
- The Forward Prize ceremony was held last night at Royal Festival Hall, with awards going to Ian Patterson for best single poem with ‘The Plenty of Nothing’ [paywall], Sinéad Morrissey for best collection with On Balance, and best first collection to Ocean Vuong with Night Sky with Exit Wounds – ‘brushing my teeth at 2 / in the morning I say / over my shoulder / you guys you guys I’m serious’ begins Vuong’s poem, ‘You Guys’, published in Granta 140: State of Mind.
- ‘There really was a war in Vietnam,’ asserts David Thompson in a review of Ken Burns’s new documentary The Vietnam War (with a nod to Jean Baudrillard). But, were the events that took place comparable to how they were (and are) presented? ‘Is this film simply a documentary?’ asks Thompson. Are the witness on film telling the truth or ‘dreaming of a truth that might explain them to themselves?’ Michiko Kakutani has similar doubts about the value of the documentary form – ‘the extensive coverage of Vietnam, in fact, helps underline just how inadequate naturalism and documentary realism are as narrative strategies for dealing with the war,’ she writes, arguing instead that ‘fiction will provide us with a truth that eluded the cameras and neat columns of wire copy’. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s story collection The Refugees might be one place to start.
- The dandelion is a plant of uncertain status. Though dandelion greens are edible – and arguably delicious – the plant is categorised by many as a weed. Rebecca May Johnson debates the flower’s place in her garden: ‘Weeds are “matter out of place” . . . uncultivated, wild, unintended, unaccounted for, anarchic.’ This talk of dandelions sent us back to the Def Poetry Jam archives to re-watch seventeen-year-old Perre Shelton’s striking performance poem ‘Dandelions’. Def Poetry, a spoken word television series with a cult following, has just announced a 25th anniversary season, soon to air on Netflix.
- Reviewing a series of addiction memoirs for the TLS, Eric J. Iannelli, describes addiction as the ‘magical encounter with a substance that allows us to inhabit ourselves fully and elude that pervasive sense of soul-deep discomfort, to feel genuinely at home among humanity and yet uniquely separate to it’. In their ‘Rehab’ issue, Tin House looks at John Berryman’s Recovery, a ‘grim book’ exploring the author’s own struggle with alcoholism. ‘Why do writers drink?’ asks Olivia Laing in The Trip to Echo Spring, a book that looks closely at the long association between writing and addiction, excerpted here.
