Far out on the Arabian Sea one night in February, 2018, Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum, the fugitive daughter of Dubai’s ruling emir, marvelled at the stars. The voyage had been rough. Since setting out by dinghy and Jet Ski a few days before, she had been swamped by powerful waves, soaking the belongings she’d stowed in her backpack; after clambering aboard the yacht she’d secured for her escape, she’d spent days racked with nausea as it pitched on the swell. But tonight the sea was calmer, and she felt the stirring of an unfamiliar sensation. She was free.
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What is “creative nonfiction,” exactly? Isn’t the term an oxymoron? Creative writers—playwrights, poets, novelists—are people who make stuff up. Which means that the basic definition of “nonfiction writer” is a writer who doesn’t make stuff up, or is not supposed to make stuff up. If nonfiction writers are “creative” in the sense that poets and novelists are creative, if what they write is partly make-believe, are they still writing nonfiction?
YES, IT’S STILL the weekend here, so to speak, as today is a holiday, but we thought we’d still bring you the Weekend Links as usual, since you might be around and looking for something to read while you’re home or at a café or pub somewhere.
FOR SOME strange reason, springtime always makes me feel like completely renovating the powder rooms. What seems to be fine in the winter, suddenly feels oppressive and in dire need of a makeover when the days get longer and the sun fills everything with its warm golden light. Can't wait until it's warm enough to throw open all the windows again and let the fresh air in, fluttering the gauzy curtains in the bathrooms here at the cottage.
What is a newspaper? Though a few decades ago the answer might have been obvious, it’s no longer so easy to say. Newspapers have long been about more than just news; they appear less and less on paper and, despite their geographically inflected names, aren’t firmly rooted in any particular place. The New York Times is probably the first thing that comes to mind when you think of an old-fashioned extra-extra-hear-all-about-it newspaper, but it’s also the poster child for the medium’s metamorphosis.
JUST FOUND OUT about Joanna Goddard (A Cup of Jo)'s divorce today and was completely shocked. She has been running her site for nearly as long as TIG and Alex has been a part of the narrative for as long as can remember. Thirteen and a half years and two children later, and it's all over. Began making a tally of all the bloggers I knew of who were now divorced and it's a lot. Occupational hazard? Perhaps.
ON SUNDAY morning, I ate the worst breakfast of my life. We'd left the house just after 8:30 in the morning for a burdensome road trip that would take us five hours south for business. It was an unpleasant obligation, a necessary evil, even, but the drive up was fun, just the two of us. That is, until we pulled over at a Services along the way, somewhere near Sheffield, and stopped for what would be the worst breakfast ever.
IF YOU'RE ever in Edinburgh, remind me to tell you about a new little natural wine bar that just opened in the old hi-fi shop on Haddington. We stopped in late Tuesday night of last week, after P told me at the hotel that he'd made reservations. We ate some delicious snacks and a glass of Lamoresca Rosato for me, and P ordered a homemade soft drink.
THE RARE BEAUTY Blush. A Stanley Travel Tumbler. Olaplex shampoo. The Diesel Belt Skirt. Dior Lip Oil. L’Oreal Telescopic Lift Mascara. Any of the Skims Sets. While this might seem like a nonsensical list of products, on TikTok, each of these items has been the focus of a viral spending frenzy. Once known for dance videos, TikTok’s growing user rate has promoted the app from social media site to thriving marketplace — where a product can go from new offering to cult favorite in days, and drive thousands of dollars in sales.
If you suspect that 21st-century technology has broken your brain, it will be reassuring to know that attention spans have never been what they used to be. Even the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger was worried about new technologies degrading his ability to focus. Sometime during the 1st century CE, he complained that ‘The multitude of books is a distraction’. This concern reappeared again and again over the next millennia. By the 12th century, the Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi saw himself living in a new age of distraction thanks to the technology of print: ‘The reason people today read sloppily is that there are a great many printed texts.’ And in 14th-century Italy, the scholar and poet Petrarch made even stronger claims about the effects of accumulating books ....
This past December, the physics Nobel Prize was awarded for the experimental confirmation of a quantum phenomenon known for more than 80 years: entanglement. As envisioned by Albert Einstein and his collaborators in 1935, quantum objects can be mysteriously correlated even if they are separated by large distances. But as weird as the phenomenon appears, why is such an old idea still worth the most prestigious prize in physics?
TOMORROW is already the last day of the first month of this brand new year⏤how has your new year been so far? Have you been a whirlwind of new goals and accomplishments, or have you been having trouble getting motivated? Tomorrow is also the day that a new phone and tablet are set to arrive, just one part of some life admin tasks getting crossed off the list.
“Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive.” ―Ernest Hemingway
THIS WEEKEND we watched Aftersun, the 2022 drama written and directed by Charlotte Wells, starring Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio and Celia Rowlson-Hall. We talked about it for quite a while after it was over, analysing what it could mean, discussing our own interpretations, processing the feeling of sadness it left in us afterward. It's about memory⏤more specifically, our memories of those we love after they are gone, the people we remember them as, sometimes as opposed to how they really were.
THERE IS an axiom that states something to the effect of: Be careful with your words when you're with others, and with your thoughts when you're alone. It's not on my list of resolutions this year, but it might as well be, as these words are something have been thinking about quite a bit lately. In fact, one of the resolutions that didn't make the list this year was to go easier on myself, which is very nearly the same thing.