April 2020
Unherd Immunity

The health secretary, Matt Hancock, supported by Downing Street, has persistently denied that attaining herd immunity, by allowing the disease to infect most people, was ever a policy, goal, strategy or even “part of the plan”.
Read More‘You might be better off just talking on the phone’

Last month, global downloads of the apps Zoom, Houseparty and Skype increased more than 100 percent as video conferencing and chats replaced the face-to-face encounters we are all so sorely missing.
Read MoreRemember to Eat

Remember restaurants? I do, but dimly: candlelight, cloth napkins, a basket of warm bread. Food delivered in courses
Read MoreIn Soviet Russia, food cooks you!

Food is a window into any culture. In Soviet society, gender and food were always tightly interconnected, which looks like an ideal representation of the ambiguous nature of Communist ideology...
Read MoreWho is free from Melancholy?

Melancholy is a condition unsuited to a pandemic. Like ennui, it is an ailment born of stability. The strong light of catastrophe withers it.
Read MoreScreening Screen Screentime

Up until COVID-19 changed everything, I’d been pretty strict in regards to screen time for my sons. They earned video game time...
Read MoreCam Scott on Robert Glück

“In the 1430s, Margery Kempe wrote the first autobiography in English. She replaced existence with the desire to exist,” writes Robert Glück...
Read MoreDear Lockdown Diary

A diary can serve as a stimulant to feeling. It can remind the author, whether she is writing from prison or the warfront or a sickbed or—blessedly—from the safety and comfort of her own home, that she is alive.
Read MoreEd Simon: The Hidden Lightbulb

Work No. 227: The lights going on and off consists entirely of an empty white-walled gallery in which the lights flicker off and on for five seconds apiece.
Read MoreJeremy Fernando on Cancer

When we think of cancer, we tend to think of death — but what if it is of the order of life?
Read MoreAnandi Mishra: The Self in Quarantine

I was just wetting my toes into the sands of self-isolation in Delhi, when a putrid smell came along, an estrangement within another estrangement.
Read MoreSusanna Crossman: Riding the Baking Edge #3

This is the third in a weekly baking series dedicated to Leonora Carrington. This recipe fell into my hands on a day I don’t remember...
Read MorePoet Times

The poet is born in squalor, his first love. Some of the poet’s favorite words include seedy, shabby, seamy.
Read MoreIn these days of solitude and waiting…

Statue of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Hamburg, Germany. via Flickr/KeokiSeu (cc) by Stephen R. Haynes Why did 13 people make their way to my campus on a dreary February evening in 2020 for a new class I was teaching on a long-dead German theologian called Dietrich Bonhoeffer? We obviously shared...
Read MoreBrowsing On Your Own

Solitude has become a topic of fascination in modern Western societies because we believe it is a lost art – often craved, yet so seldom found...
Read MoreNicholas Rombes: X’ed Out and Vivarium

Both X’ed Out and Vivarium assume an other world that leaks into the main frame world where most of the action happens...
Read MoreThe Heyday of Epic Phoning

One of my favorite sentences in twentieth-century fiction is the one that goes: “She was a girl who for a ringing phone would drop exactly nothing.” It’s from J.D. Salinger’s short story...
Read MoreJulian Hanna: Do It Now

If you want to garden and you’re able, do it now. If you want revolution and you’re able, do it now...
Read MoreClose Reading Patti Smith by Ed Simon

The collaboration between heartland arena rock bard Bruce Springsteen and punk poet goddess Patti Smith which led to “Because the Night”...
Read MoreSusanna Crossman: Riding the Baking Edge #2

Borges wrote, “I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin...
Read MoreLike many ugly controversies, the beginnings of #gamergate are linked to the end of love — well, the end of a relationship, at least....
Read MoreA response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I...
Read MoreAs a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The...
Read MoreEric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.
Read MoreWhat, then, is sociocide? Sociocide resonates with the term demodernization formulated by A. V. Tishkov to account for the consequences of the war in...
Read MorePoet Fiona Sampson is a former career violinist, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, overt references to music appear in her work.
Read MoreIn May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom....
Read MoreFlorence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping....
Read MoreTo begin at the end: After nearly two hours exploring facets of exploitation in the globalized food system, Luc Moullet closes Genèse d’un repas/Origins...
Read MoreNow it seems the state’s radical conservatives are degrading the historic, populist-provincial mentality of Iowa; they are revising the state’s legacy within the broader...
Read MoreA few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world....
Read MoreThe persistence and proliferation of pseudoscientific thinking in contemporary culture demands explanation. Clearly there are some pragmatic reasons for its expanded existence, and people...
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost....
Read MoreAs many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind...
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost. The ghost for me.
Read MoreIf duende, the source of inspiration that Lorca sets out to champion in his essay at the expense of the Muse, is “in sum, the spirit of the earth”, a force linking body and soil through a struggle akin to death, then the Muse is a force that speaks to the head and inspires art that is, in the words’ most negative senses, cerebral and high-minded.
Read MoreBurton was born in Kentucky. He moved itinerantly before settling in Oakland. Temperatures rise, so does the suicide rate.
Read MoreI’ve been writing a more or less monthly memoir of my life in the sixties and seventies when I lived with Doris Lessing, and my continuing relationship with her until her death last year at 94. It is also an ongoing portrait of my incurable cancer.
Read MoreThe cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers...
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