The drunk text is familiar now. It needs no more explanation than a butt-dial or an autocorrect typo or cellphones in general. (Drake’s entire career arguably hinges on his audience’s shared understanding of the universality and import of drunk dialing and drunk texting as social behaviors.) But there was a time when we needed examples, thousands of them, to understand what a drunk text was and what purpose it served.
With global temperatures steadily rising in recent years, Lake Suwa rarely freezes solid, even in the coldest months of the year. The ice, once so thick that military tanks could rumble over it, is often too thin now for the mythic omiwatari to appear.
And the lake, once so central to the town’s identity, is slowly vanishing from the everyday lives of the people who surround it. As winter nears, Lake Suwa provides an intimate reminder of damage wrought by climate change – and its ability to erase the very things people hold most dear.
But for transportation, digital maps, “only tell you one thing—how to get there,” he said. “It shows the journey from point A to point B. But an analog map allows you to ask questions about your city. Because you might know where point A actually is.”
The Crying Book is itself a physical record of crying. Bearing witness to both the physicality and emotionality of crying, Christle’s sermon is analytical, elegiac. A watercolor painting. I’m reminded of Mary Poppins’ chalk illustrations, washed away by rain. The colors cohering into something altogether new, sadder, full of sorrow.
Idiot Wind is Kaldheim’s record of that escape from New York, a journey that ends, eight months and 5,000 miles later, when he finds a job at last as a cook in Montana. Along the way, he lives from one meal to the next, hitching rides across 20 state lines, hopping trains, donating blood plasma for cash, scrounging for leftovers in bins, spending countless nights in the open.