‘The spring of 1989 was so apocalyptic that at the time it had seemed unthinkable that the year's events would fade or that China would ever be able to forget them.'
To reach the Ranch House Restaurant, one exits from the Bayshore Freeway just past San Francisco International Airport at the Redwood City Putnam Lexus dealership, turns left near the Chef Peking Chinese Restaurant and then stops in a parking lot where the sound of traffic roaring down the freeway i…
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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.
‘But if kitsch cat plates are a far cry from real art, they are also a far cry from socialist-realist propaganda.’
‘Hurrying back to the rally ground, I could already hear the sound of martial music drifting out across Taicheng. As I approached the gates of the field, the music suddenly stopped and a strident voice began blasting out over a loudspeaker.’
‘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.
‘I think I stayed with the text for as long as I needed to give meaning to my grief, crying not in Johanna’s absence but with her.’
Sigrid Rausing on transcribing, translating and editing Johanna Ekström’s final notebooks.
‘We knew almost nothing about her before she was born, not even her sex, so we must have referred to her as “it”’
