What actually exists in history, instead, are varying models that attempt to deal with masculinity’s dark side in different ways, by channeling, sublimating and containing male aggression. All these models are “traditional” in the sense they were forged in societies more sexist and patriarchal than ours. But they were also forged by cultures well aware of the problem of toxic, reckless, violent men, and very concerned with what to do about them.
The success of ikigai, forest bathing and Marie Kondo may indeed be telling us something. But it isn’t that Japan possesses a particular genius for good living. And it isn’t (just) the power of a consumer trend once it gains some momentum. It is that for some perverse reason, the most valuable human insights are easily lost or forgotten. Being gifted them again in some fresh form is surely good for us — we just shouldn’t get hung up on whose they are or where they come from.
One of the most cherished science fiction scenarios is using a black hole as a portal to another dimension or time or universe. That fantasy may be closer to reality than previously imagined.
It has been about a year and a half since my heart attack. And until very recently there hadn’t been an hour of any day that I hadn’t thought about almost dying. It’s always there: when I wake up, when I’m dropping my daughter off at school, when I’m telling my wife to have a good day at work, when I’m at the office, when I’m on the road.
On nights when I see my wife and daughter together, dancing across our living room floor, Beyoncé on the speaker and my baby leading the choreography, I’m almost brought to tears. It’s not that every small moment is now overflowing with emotion — I’m just more present while deciding on a board game to play or what takeout to order, less distracted, less focused on what’s happening tomorrow, or how dominant I am in a game of Uno.
Carl Phillips’s poetry makes the case that poetry’s task is not to be a mirror for what is, authoritative only in its concreteness, but a way of refracting the light. Phillips repeatedly turns the glass so that it reveals objects askew, in motion, and at the edges of the visible realm. In his poems, there is no gaze that does not become a search, and no search that does not reveal the workings of the mind.
“Being British comes with a catalogue of sea-themed cliches,” Charlotte Runcie muses early in her first book, “fish and chips on the beach, or in the car while the rain pelts down, ‘Rule, Britannia!’ at the BBC Proms, the shipping forecast playing out over and over every night, a warning for sailors, a lullaby for those of us safe in our beds and never at sea.” She doubts she would feel “this saline connection” if she had grown up in a landlocked country. Salt on Your Tongue is the story of her deepening love and longing for the ocean while pregnant, aged 28, with her first child. By the end of the book, her generic, gently nationalist appreciation of the sea has transformed into a specific, strongly feminist position: “The call of the sea is the call to the absolute strength of women, telling their stories and making music of beauty and imagination, and eternal mothers and grandmothers making eternal daughters and rocking them in the night as they sing while the tide comes and goes.”
As with Austen, whose books could be read as fun and simple romances or acerbic examinations of class and women's choices (and lack thereof), Kamal's Unmarriageable succeeds in being both a deliciously readable romantic comedy and a commentary on class in post-colonial, post-partition Pakistan, where the effects of the British Empire still reverberate.
I wanted to tell you
but decided against it
because the cut of the weekend is real—