Charly Cox is explaining why she thinks her poetry is so popular with young women. “It’s a really difficult age to articulate how you’re feeling,” she says. “We’re all so stressed out. We’re so confused, so lonely. Poetry is an incredible form of solace. If you encounter something in a poem that you feel you’re feeling, it is a freeing, lovely experience.”
The problem is in full focus this week after news of layoffs at three major media companies. While a lot of the attention is focused on national players HuffPost and BuzzFeed, the cuts at Gannett are the most worrisome, because it is one of the last big newspaper chains that has properties in markets of all size.
That the Gannett news is not a red-alert story in the U.S. reflects a misunderstanding of the major problems facing American newspaper companies, an economic story that goes back further than the advent of the public internet in the 1990s. But it’s a story Americans need to know and understand better, because the news crisis you keep hearing about is a local problem. If you think there’s corruption in D.C., what’s happening at City Hall is often worse—and in more and more places, there’s no longer anyone paid to root it out.
“Could I get a program, please?”
You can feel the bafflement percolating in the audience when ushers have nothing to give out before a performance in New York. We theatergoers have gotten used to the fact that some shows don’t want us getting our paws on a playbill until afterward — they don’t want us distracted, maybe, or a surprise spoiled — but the new twist is no program at all.
At least not one we can hold in our hands.
For all the millions of words that have been written about the second world war, there is an extraordinary level of agreement about much of the story. The rise of nazism in Germany in the 1930s, for example, is nearly always seen as inexorable and unstoppable. This account is, however, challenged in this book, which was the surprise winner of the 2017 Prix Goncourt – the most prestigious French literary prize – but which was already a bestseller by the time that jury came to make up its mind. It sold so well partly because it is a tightly paced and gripping read, but also because – as Vuillard has made clear in interviews – it is supposed be a book about the present as well as the past.
For Rajesh, the romance of train travel does indeed live on, “in the passengers who would always tell their story to strangers, offer advice, share their food, and give up their seats”. Unexpected acts of kindness and generosity of spirit create a unique sense of community, “like we are a train family”, as one traveller tells her in Thailand.
She glimpses an enthralling swirl of cultures and landscapes on a journey filled with memorable brief encounters: “Trains are rolling libraries of information, and all it takes is to reach out to passengers to bind together their tales.”
I picked up All Systems Red on a Wednesday morning, meaning to read for five minutes, maybe ten. I'd picked it because there was a mean-looking robot on the cover and, obviously, I have a weakness for robot stories. Also, because it had the word "Murderbot" right there under the picture. All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries. And I was thinking to myself, "Well, hey. If someone is brave enough to put the word Murderbot right there on the cover — so unafraid of the schlock connotations, so willing to be lumped into the shallow end of the sci-fi trope pool — then I'm gonna have a look."
Weird thing happened next: The book, somehow, glued itself to my hand. It was short, sure, but it was also ... compulsive. Novellas, when done well, are like the oversized appetizer of the literary world — like a giant plate of chicken wings or some little fried things with crab. They're fun, They're fast and they offer simple, easily digestible pleasures.
The belittling of needlework clearly rankles with Hunter, who points out that although textile-production has been crucial to industrial development and embroidery was a well-recompensed high art during the Middle Ages, sewing has since been trivialised precisely because it's been relegated to the female and domestic spheres. By Victorian times, the once prestigious craft of tailoring was being ridiculed as effeminate and even the great Bayeux tapestry was derided as “rudely worked with figures worthy of a girl's sampler”.
Yet as Hunter points out, the unobtrusive nature of sewing meant that oppressed women have often used tapestry and embroidery to make their voices heard. The exiled Mary Queen of Scots displayed her regal birthright by embellishing her clothes with emblems, ciphers and coats of arms. Much later, the painstakingly crafted banners held aloft by suffragettes were a deliberate subversion of the “gentle” feminine arts.