Hi friends,
Lots happening in the world currently as we all know - as well as a busy week of travel for me personally - but here are a few things I’ve been consuming lately:
On Writing On Your Own Terms, a fantastic essay by novelist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: ‘When we write on our own terms, with all the specificity, nuance, complication, messiness, contradiction, emotion, confusion, weirdness, devastation, wildness and intimacy, when we write against the demand for closure or explication, we write against the canonical imperative, and instead write toward the people who might actually appreciate our work on its own terms. I mean we write toward our selves. We also write toward change. A canon is a cannon is a canon. Wait, don’t shoot me, I’m already dead.’
Who Is The Farming Left? Interesting stuff, as always, from Vittles.
The best news you’ll hear all week, truly: Meet the security guards moonlighting as curators at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
A demo of George Harrison covering Mama You’ve Been On My Mind.
Proof that design/layout/visuals can transform good storytelling to great storytelling: ‘They Carry Us With Them: The Great Tree Migration from Emergence Magazine.
Who Came To Power in our Cities, a poem by Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan and translated by Valzhyna Mort.
Two essays from newsletters I admire, both responding to the same core topic but each taking a different thread of it to its endpoint. Alicia Kennedy’s On Agreement and Helena Fitzgerald with Nothing Stops: Love is whatever slows us down in the crisis.
Yet another IPCC report (big yikes). And, by India Bourke for the New Statesman, Why the world needs to accelerate climate action, even in times of war.
Brilliantly put words from Syrian documentarian Hassan Akkad:
False Futurism: The metaverse is just another way to “go online” by Paris Marx for Real Life Magazine. Very worth reading.
Leavers by Lewis Khan, a really lovely and evocative body of photographic work in Granta.
Finally, as an incredible palate cleanser: an orangutan playing with sunglasses!!!!!!!!!!!
That’s all for me today. (If you want some real writing from me this week, may I offer this week’s dispatch of my column for Where The Leaves Fall, in which I wrote on ethics and community in documentary storytelling.)
Check you next time,
Maddy