'I let the tears roll down to the sides of my mouth, and licked them to harden my insides. I wanted to cry gushingly, but I couldn't.'
My mother was the one who told me he was dead. I ran into the bathroom and bolted the door. There was a small window in there with two round jail-house bars. I held on to them hard. I was only ten. I let the tears roll down to the sides of my mouth, and licked them to harden my insides. I wanted to …
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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.
‘Identity, it seemed, was not so self-determined after all.’
‘It is to Shakespeare’s pages I return whenever I feel I am sinking. There I can be sure to find a lifeline.’
‘You have to go on the offensive until you smell victory. Then you have the aphrodisiac and can go full tilt.’
‘The past has never been as present as it is now in the world. But at the same time, all over the world, the determination to manipulate what we know has also never been stronger.’
‘In 1956, my father was thirty-nine years old. He didn't even know how to boil an egg.’
‘My instinct often is to swerve, to try to commit to some kind of reversal on received logics and see how far I can go with it.’
Rachel Kushner on the mystery of prehistory and the true depth of a cave.
