"Familiar and unbearable. In this awful and bewildering and relentless city, I am beginning to feel once again like I am in purgatory. What if the closest place, the underside of your own skin, is also the most unbearable?" —Wiam El-Tamami for @grantamag
"So it made sense that the perfect storm of shame, defectiveness, and poor body image would converge around a rite of passage as momentous as becoming a mother—the ultimate test of womanhood. I had spent my life assimilating, performing a kind of whiteface; having a child would certainly unmask my racial shame."
Congrats to our contributor Sanjana Paul for being selected to the @grist 50! From our archives, check out her essay, "Who Gets to be a Climate Innovator?":
"The years I’ve spent with these cats—with Detective in our house, with Walker in a small apartment, with Mango on the porch next door—is worth all the feelings of loss." —Dan McQuade for Defector
PERSPECTIVE: When Manasvi Verma moved over 8,000 miles from New Delhi, India to St. Louis, she ate less of her Dadi's kadhi, but more of her roommate's mom's chicken noodle casserole. How has that changed her from the inside out and the outside in?
Photographers let's join forces and do a joint #Fediverse project!
The idea is to make a photo essay about someone interesting in your area or wherever you happen to be. An interesting character but less known or a disappearing profession. Any technique and any equipment. Let's leave our comfort zones and learn something new in the process.
We can upload publications here directly or on blogs as you are more comfortable!
The plan is to do a #photo#essay on negatives, but as a backup I will also be shooting with a #dslr. Due to the limited amount of text here, the whole thing will appear on my blog (pl & eng) and on Medium. I will of course be uploading some of the photographs here! I expect the whole thing to take three weeks at the most, but as soon as I have any interesting photographs you'll be the first to see them!
"It took time until I was ready to watch sunsets again. On the day of the explosion I had looked up at the sky, and seen a pink, orange, and white mushroom cloud... I used to love sunsets. I would chase them across the city, one of the first subjects I learned to photograph." —Tamara Saade for Delacorte Review and Literary Hub
Powerful people imprisoned by the cluelessness of their own isolation, locked up with their own motivated reasoning: "It's impossible to get a CEO to understand something when his quarterly earnings call depends on him not understanding it."...
editing pass on this brutally #difficult#essay, at some point i need to cut 10% or so from the #middle or else insert two short sections there—point #being to break up the pounding monotony that’s one of my #failure modes.
works-cited excerpt:
“Lennon: 'Julia'; Playboy interview January 1981. Milch: circle and line, tests and verifies, fictive persuasion. O Jamesy, dead and wake. Julian of Norwich. Teresa de Avila. Juliana Hatfield, 'Spin the Bottle.' Salt'n'Pepa…”
Sincere apologies for our not posting here of late! We had some behind-the-scenes tech issues to contend with.
BUT we’re thrilled to be back with a fantastic #essay from Laura Bogart on how Greta Gerwig’s #Barbie and the film's tale of occupying liminal spaces was a reflection of her own experience of coming out later in life.
(we’ll also be posting a bunch of recent features throughout the day). Good to see everyone and we missed you all!
"I can see my father as he was then, a deep-eyed, deep-skinned, welterweight of a man—broad-shouldered and slim in the waist. At least this is how my four-year-old eyes remember and reenact him, sailing Las Vegas Boulevard, the nose of his ’69 Charger cutting through neon, the clamor of sudden jackpots and cocktails a’ripple in his wake." —Erica Vital-Lazare for The Baffler
"How did Momo make me feel? She had taught me that moments live in the flickering gold light of a beech tree and a bowl of warm soup. That loss waits for all of us, so we’d better wring happiness from every second." —Linda Button
Writer and editor Mrigaa Sethi grew up as part of Bangkok's conservative Indian community, "where their child's eventual heterosexual wedding was the dream twinkling in every parent's eye." Here, they talk about the evolution of their relationship with their fashion designer mother as they discovered their sexuality and identity as a butch gay woman.
It feels like the world is ending from every possible direction.
Maybe you feel like your world is ending too. And neither of us benefits from putting on a fake smile and keeping on as if we aren’t dealing with deep, existential, debilitating fear.
So here’s an uncomfortable question: does #marketing work even matter during an apocalypse?
Forcing your computer to rat you out - Cory Doctorow - Pluralistic (pluralistic.net)
Powerful people imprisoned by the cluelessness of their own isolation, locked up with their own motivated reasoning: "It's impossible to get a CEO to understand something when his quarterly earnings call depends on him not understanding it."...