‘Hearing, they say, is the first of the senses we develop in the womb.’
Hearing, they say, is the first of the senses we develop in the womb. For a certain time, inside our mothers’ bodies, the entire universe is a soundscape, nothing else exists.
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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.
‘By the end of our journey together we had signally failed to understand each other, yet an unlikely, even unprecedented connection had formed.’
’Shortly after its publication in 1980 I was surprised to learn that I had written a travel book’.
‘The moments of relief in this awful year that will stick with me are roaming around at strange hours, walking in the middle of the road.’
‘The hard thing, as Alice saw it, was that something bad had happened to her and it was private and then it wasn’t.’
‘And it wasn’t that day, or the day after, but sometime after that, you cried in your kitchen.’
‘When they stand on their hind legs, arms up, wrists limp, rats can take on a beguiling sort of personhood.’
