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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.
Rahmane Idrissa is a writer and researcher based at Leiden University’s Africa Studies Centre. He is the author of The Politics of Islam in the Sahel: Between Persuasion and Violence, and is currently working on a history of the Songhay Empire and a novel on the Sahel’s ‘generational seasons’.
More about the author →
‘It ended up taking fourteen years. But on the other hand, it only ended up taking five minutes.’
Sheila Heti on writing her latest book, Alphabetical Diaries, editing and the instability of a self-portrait.
‘The world comes down on your head if you don’t tell people what they already believe to be true.’
Andrew O’Hagan on truth, journalism and fiction.
‘ancestry.com fucks with my mind’
A poem by Eve Esfandiari-Denney.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘Rooms jaundiced by bad lighting, so you wondered, what is ague, and could we have it? Rooms that hummed, a hum you couldn’t quite identify, or that seemed in the end to come from your own head.’
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