‘If you were twenty in the summer of 1967, San Francisco was the only place to be.’
If you were twenty in the summer of 1967, San Francisco was the only place to be. The number one song told us all to wear flowers in our hair, as we were going to meet some gentle people there.
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‘It was a peculiar, alopecic landscape of hummocks and gullies, with patches of grass growing on what looked like white earth, and rarely a soul to be seen.’
Ian Jack on the legacy of the Scottish textile bleaching industry.
‘When the world releases him from its oily grip will there still be a world?’
Fiction by Dan Shurley, featuring the 2019 explosion of an oil refinery in Philadelphia.
‘Black waves bring animals to the town’s shore. Sticky corpses float on the oil.’
Ariel Saramandi on the sinking of the MV Wakashio off the coast of Mauritius.
‘None of us hung out with them or knew them really, except two boys in our class, who stopped going to school after crude oil became such a big deal.’
A story by Claudia Durastanti, translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris.
‘His best photographs are expressionistic, almost calligraphic, as though he’s displaying the hidden signatures our collective appetites have etched across the Earth.’
Anthony Doerr introduces the photography of Edward Burtynsky.
‘And it wasn’t that day, or the day after, but sometime after that, you cried in your kitchen.’
‘This makes more sense to me as a bodily practice: that desire to push one’s physical limits well beyond their natural bounds.’
‘I was trying simultaneously to numb the grief I felt and to burrow into that grief, so I could stand in it.’
‘After a while people’s faces began to fade, and they came to seem like hoards of noppera-bō, faceless spirits gliding by.’
Two stories by Tomoka Shibasaki.
Margaret Busby was Britain’s first Black woman publisher. At the age of twenty, she was also one of its youngest.
‘Social media has allowed everyone in the world to raise their own little flag of self’
