The General Mills factory, Chicago, 1949
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‘I grew up in a factory town, Aurora, Illinois, some forty miles west of Chicago.’
The General Mills factory, Chicago, 1949
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‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
Thom Jones is the author of the short-story collections The Pugilist At Rest, The Cold Snap and Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine (Faber/Little, Brown).
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‘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.
‘in the Huangma Mountains, everything rots readily’
A poem by Zheng Xiaoqiong, translated by Eleanor Goodman.
‘Question: ‘What do a Trabant and a condom have in common?’ Answer: ‘Both decrease the pleasure of the ride.’’
Durs Grünbein introduces photography by Martin Roemers.
‘It would be many years before I understood that around my mother’s sober acceptance of the status quo was a whole culture she had developed for our subsistence and well-being.’
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