‘The world is all mixed up these days, and America can no longer claim immunity.’
I’m sitting in the expansive spaces of Renzo Piano’s four-storey airport outside Osaka, sipping an Awake tea from Starbucks and waiting for my bus home. I’ve chosen to live in Japan for the past twenty years, and I know its rites as I know the way I need tea when feeling displaced, or to head …
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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.
‘The writer on place has to go further inward, into the realm of silence and nuance and personal enquiry.’
‘The immigrant’s dream – that he or she can make a better life for the children – becomes a kind of tragedy when it comes true.’
Pico Iyer and Caryl Phillips discuss migration, V. S. Naipaul and the meaning of home.
‘I was inside a silence that was not an absence of noise so much as the living presence of everything I habitually walked – or sleep-walked – past.’
‘You can throw yourself into any fantasy, she (and her country) might have been saying, so long as you don’t mistake it for real life.’
‘I get on the train to hear the funereal call of my boyhood: ‘Reading, Didcot Parkway, Oxford.’’
‘One day in January a tall thin man with long white hair came into our courtyard. He was draped in a green cloak, torn in various places.’
