BLESSED RELIEF came as I prepared to take a week offline to get my head back But coming on the back of two short weeks, it was a headache to get everything done that I could—so that week is this week, if you follow. Still, I managed to finish a short novel: based on John Lanchester’s recent praise of the entirety of Georges Simenon’s Maigret series, I started at the beginning to see what he […]
I harbor a mild but ongoing fascination with the wild, out of the way places that British people have decided they should inhabit; the far-flung islands, the unnavigable boggy moors, the places where there’s one house every few miles and people choose lonely, hard existence for whatever reason. St Helena, Dartmoor, the Hebrides, Pitcairn and so on. Larissa MacFarquhar—one of the New Yorker writers I most enjoy—crystallizes what draws people to one of these places, […]
A REMARKABLE WEEK! I finished a book, as in properly-finished-closely-reading-for-fun, for the first time in three months. And then I finished another one! Things are pretty wild up in here. (Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson and A Man by Keiichiro Hirano, if you’re interested. Only books with “man” in the title, apparently.) The odd thing is that I’ve been totally blocked writing BRB, even though I don’t need to read new books in order to write […]
I’m a football fan, and watching Liverpool triumphant rise to Premier League champions over the last two years has often been utterly thrilling—even for somebody who is very committed to a different club. I love sport partly because it’s so kinetic, partly because it’s so in-the-moment, and partly because it’s about teamwork. Even individual sports like tennis are group efforts, with coaches and trainers and families and support networks. And football, to me, is one […]
MONDAY WAS OUR 103RD DAY IN LOCKDOWN, but the century itself passed unremarked. There are fireworks at strange hours of the day and night, which paint a hallucinatory sheen on the days. There’s a man who screeches around the neighborhood at high speed in stolen cars, the photos. But whether these noises are evidence of life outside or not, I really I don’t know: I’ve become even more reclusive than usual—something I didn’t think was […]
Is there a better writer out there than Carvell Wallace right now? I’m not sure. His essay on parenting his teenage kids through the pandemic and the protests absolutely hit me in the gut. For the fourth (and final) issue of Anxy, I managed to convince him to go and interview Terry Crews. He turned around something great for us. One day I’m hoping I’ll get to work with him again.
In March, a couple of weeks before we were due to ship the May/June issue of Technology Review, something became extremely clear: we needed to throw it away. We’d already cleared a portion of the magazine for coronavirus coverage, but as the pandemic kicked in, everything seemed irrelevant. Nobody would want to read what we’d prepared for them, at least not now, not when all they could think of was covid-19. Everybody got behind the […]
“The protests demanding that states “reopen” after all are protests demanding that working people head back into jobs that risk their health. The now-infamous “I Want a Haircut!” sign brandished by a Wisconsin woman underlined the point: These people aren’t simply protesting curtailments of their own movement. They are protesting a lack of people to serve them. They are demanding other people get back to work. And when we look at that sign and flinch […]
“Why is it that the losers of the story always have to carry their loss on their backs when they didn’t choose it?” Louis often says. “Other people are responsible for the suffering of others.” Edouard Louis in ‘I Always Write With a Sense of Shame’, New York Times Magazine
911 dispatchers are at the forefront of a head-exploding amount of stress: the definition of their job is to talk to people at the very worst moment of their life. What’s it like on the front lines? (Katie MacBride, Vice)
Start here 