The tension reflects the paragraph’s curious history as a punctuation mark and unit of thought. In fact, my opening question—what is a paragraph?—only gets more complicated as we gaze further and further into the past, as the paragraph gradually dwindles to a thin line in the margins. This backstory explains why it is so hard to say what exactly a paragraph is and, in turn, why we struggle now to legislate its parameters. But this isn’t an entirely despairing story: To recall the paragraph’s past lives is also to consider how previous generations have put their thoughts in order and to gain thereby a vantage to reconsider our own writing practices.
Grief debilitates us. It releases us. It fills and drains us. Grief is an emotion so fantastically real and powerful that it can easily take over all others. We have all encountered narratives of grief—the depression, the rage, the self-destruction. But what about the other things grief does? What about the layers that are not just private sorrow and darkness? What about the unforeseen ways it transports us out of our own lives and into something bigger?
One of my favorite horror movies is Poltergeist. I first saw it at nine years old, probably too young. The scene in which a character is induced by the house’s malevolent spirits to hallucinate peeling off his own face is with me forever. But what I find even more indelible is the ordinariness of the site of all that paranormal phenomena.
The book is just the latest entry in Moshfegh's current rise to literary fame. Over the course of the pandemic, her second novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, about a woman who tries to drug herself into sleeping through an entire year, became a hit – particularly among the bookish on TikTok. A Hollywood adaptation of Relaxation is in the works currently, but first the film adaptation of her debut novel, Eileen, is set to come out. But the come up hasn't stopped her from digging even deeper into what's become something of a signature style – writing in beautiful detail about the gross and disgusting. Which, for her, is just a way of writing about being alive while knowing you're going to die.
The key, as with most everything in life, is to build a habit of reading. What you’re trying to do is practice sustained attention. Like any habit, the trick is in figuring out what works for you.
The question anglers should be asking is: How do we forge ahead in the information age without compromising fisheries? To answer it, you must first identify the biggest culprits—in other words, which platforms burn fishing spots the hardest. Facebook and Instagram? Sure, grip-and-grins of trophy fish that show obvious landmarks in the background don’t help. Forums? In my experience, you give away too many goods and your post will get shut down. I’d posit that fishing apps produce more burn victims than any other platform. The good news is that some developers are coming up with ways to incorporate ethics into their apps, but to understand the significance of that, we must first look at Fishbrain—the app anglers love to hate and hate to love.
There have been 37 notable Sasquatch sightings near the town of Harrison Hot Springs since 1900. Called Bigfoot in the United States, and yeti or metoh kangmi ("wild man of the snows") in the Himalaya, Sasquatch is a tall, hairy, bi-pedal, primate-like creature of disputed existence. Regular sightings have kept the popular legend alive, but now it's being told from an Indigenous perspective. The change is driven by public interest in the idea of a Sasquatch rooted in spirituality and symbolism, rather than sensationalism. The creature is considered sacred to West Coast First Nations, particularly the Sts'ailes (sta-hay-lis), who have lived in the Harrison River Valley for at least 10,000 years.
A male user swipes right. A woman is notified. There is a pause. How to respond? “Having waited a requisite number of hours after receiving the male user’s message so as to appear sufficiently busy and not desperately alone,” Jem Calder writes, “the female user pieced together a response to the male user that sounded both playful and hedging.”
Millennial malaise and self-awareness, the effort to fight through alienation despite the awful sense that nothing is natural or right: This is the taut, weird, irresistible new terrain — as evidenced by the above, from a story called “Distraction From Sadness Is Not the Same Thing as Happiness” — that helps make up Calder’s brilliant, compelling and defiantly authentic new collection of stories, “Reward System.”
Castillo, in other words, isn’t merely interested in preaching to the choir that reading is important. She knows that — and hopes we do too. Instead, she’s asking us to investigate how and why we read: to pay attention to what information we’re ingesting and how we’ve been taught to interact with it. This is a particularly high-stakes argument right now, not just because of the recent uptick in book bans but also because the conversation between people who do read so often reduces book culture to hot takes and prepackaged talking points.
Together, above the kitchen sink, we peeled
a hundred russets. You taught me how
to scoop their eyes out. If we didn’t,