In stories where characters are in grave societal peril, I believe we shouldn’t lose sight of their humanity. Indeed, in the darkest of times sweetness and beauty have a way of flourishing. Stories are empathy generators. Far be it from me to flatten my characters and destroy the opportunity for connection. More than ever, now is the time to recognize the depth and grace of our marginalized communities.
The first computery thing I do in the year 2024 is nudge a 3.5-inch floppy disk into a USB floppy drive that I bought from an online merchant working out of Singapore’s onetime hotbed of ’90s computer piracy. I’m briefly startled by the drive’s low mechanical whirring — a warm, ambient background score that instantly transports me back to my childhood. Some of my first painfully preteen journals were hidden poorly on nondescript floppies just like this one. I click on the disk’s sole file, an MP3 titled “Inability to Perform Social Activities Is Considered Inferior,” and Yasuyuki Uesugi’s growling wall of experimental noise rolls through my apartment like a rogue wave at the beach. The track is one minute, 27 seconds long, and at 1.33MB, it almost hits the diskette’s limit of 1.44MB.
However, a new study shows that humans may not be alone in their love of playing practical jokes. Animals can tease each other too. Together with colleagues, Isabelle Laumer, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), watched over 75 hours of videos of great apes interacting with each other. Great apes are our closest living relatives, and include orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas. The apes in the study all lived in zoos, and were filmed attending to their daily routines.
Members of all four species were observed teasing one another. The researchers identified 18 distinct teasing behaviours, with the top five including poking, hitting, hindering the movement of a fellow ape, body slamming, and pulling on a body part. Some apes repeatedly waved body parts or objects in front of their fellow apes' faces, or, in the case of orangutans, pulled each other's hair.
Have you ever seen a girl and wanted to possess her? Not like a man would, with his property fantasies. Possess her like a girl or a ghost of one: shove your soul in her mouth and inhabit her skin, live her life? Then you’ve experienced girlhood, or at least one like mine. Less a gender or an age and more an ethos or an ache, it’s a risky era, stretchy and interminable. It doesn’t always end. That ever-gnawing void can make you want a body to match, one that looks as hungry as your heart is.
Sobbing and throbbing, a lot of the most beloved icons of girl culture are very, very sad, and very, very skinny. They are beautiful, and their sorrow only adds to their sex appeal. Tears drip down cheeks onto supple pouts, but that suppleness never extends to the rest of their physical forms, which tend toward extremely slender. Bodies shrink to ever-smaller sizes as sad girls lose their appetites, distracted by all that emoting.
While poetry will never reach the height that the Victorians thought it would, there is no reason for this art form to die off. It is a powerful and moving form of writing that captures stories and weaves them through personal and intense emotions and it demands a home in the modern-day newspaper. After all, a newspaper is made to communicate stories and information to the masses and as T.S. Eliot said, “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood”.
In Grief Is for People, her first full-length book of nonfiction, Crosley drills much deeper to examine the greatest pain she has known: the loss of her best friend (and former boss) to suicide in July 2019. Her new book is a meditation on loss and grief that combines her verbal alacrity and mordant wit with moving descriptions that capture the ache of sleepless nights in which "the hole in my heart was like a wind tunnel that whistled straight through until dawn."
To be sure, some of the entries in “The Lede” seem dated, but only because, according to the calendar, they are dated — who today under the age of 60 remembers Russell Baker and Molly Ivins, two additional Times greats? But precisely because they seem dated, they show that good writing (and, a happy corollary, good writers, like Baker and Ivins) never really grow old. These pieces are the Dorian Grays of journalism: the writer grows older (he’s 88 now) but in a way — in the way they are written — the pieces do not.