‘I see in an instant what has brought people to the valley for four centuries.’
If you wish to visit the valley of Kashmir without being turned back, shot or kidnapped, there are two approaches. The first is by air from New Delhi, where the valley looks orderly and comprehensible in the Himalayan sunshine: a small place of lakes and rivers, orchards, patchwork fields and tin ro…
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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.
‘In the imagination of strangers there is a small town in America which represents not just itself but the whole country‘.
‘As many as thirty-five states in the world are thought to have the capacity (if not the wish) to build a nuclear weapon.’
‘My first sight of modern Iraq was a colossal fairy-lit head of Saddam Hussein hurtling out of the darkness, as if from another galaxy of despotism and violence.’
’In my inferno of solitude, I thought there must be some reason why I was doing what I was doing.‘
‘Ask anyone in Ayodhya, and they will say the city’s Hindu–Muslim harmony can withstand any test.’
Snigdha Poonam on the construction of a Hindu temple on the ruins of a mosque in Utter Pradesh.
‘Even for those of us who feel we have integrated our history, there can be fragments, like shrapnel, that push to the surface without warning.’
