Stress is an essential survival mechanism in response to acute risk — but constant exposure takes its toll on physical and mental health. The continuous activation of stress hormones can contribute to conditions ranging from high blood pressure to depression and addiction. Cooper says that humans cannot absorb the long-term, sustained threats of environmental disasters. Climate stress and anxiety are more persistent and more chronic than are other stressors that humans experience, Cooper says. “And that is not the way our biology is wired.”
In the interwar years, it is estimated that a total of half a million acres of new garden were created. By the outbreak of the Second World War, around 80 per cent of English households were involved in some form of gardening activity. So for all the widespread criticisms, this was the real birth of the reputation of Britain as a ‘land of gardeners’. This was a time when the world war-weary, grey nation was being colourfully transformed, inch by hard dug inch. The spirit-uplifting nature of the humble flower was used as a weapon to raise horizons when the concept of beautification was twisting its way, like honeysuckle, into the thinking of another network of grassroots radicals fighting for a more egalitarian nation.
We celebrated when the cancer was gone, a party at home. In the summer, we went to Freeport, Maine, to watch our favorite singer, Mindy Smith, perform at the L.L. Bean Store Discovery Park. We ate hamburgers on a picnic blanket as the sun went down; I thumbed the handle of my new blue backpack, which I would carry to fourth grade in the fall. Mindy Smith’s mother died of breast cancer. We listened to her song about missing her mom—Please don’t go/ Let me have you just one moment more—with a strange sense of relief. “We don’t have to worry about that anymore,” my mom said to me.
My dad has since told me that that wasn’t true: They were worried all the time. It was one of those secrets that adults have to hold.
We had decided to brave Paris Plages, a citywide effort renewed during the 2024 Summer Olympics to set up temporary public beaches along the Seine. This canal spot was one of six locations where swimmers could directly enter the water (and not a floating pool) for the first time since 1923. We were a bit nervous, of course; we were submitting our bodies to the question of whether one of the largest urban water cleanups in recent history had worked. Had France’s operation to detox the river Seine and its canals succeeded? How clean was the water, really?
An astute portrait of trauma rippling down the generations, No Small Thing suggests that limited choices cause McDonald’s female characters to repeat the same mistakes. The author has a background in arts education for young people, and poignantly conveys how the grinding cycle of poverty takes its toll on the vulnerable, wreaking havoc on youthful lives, stifling expression. Although stark, this is an invigorating read, and certain threads hint at the possibility of redemption.
A Hand Made Life is a quietly political book; it is determined to remember the great scars of the 20th century, and to ask what inheritance violence leaves. But it’s also an elegy for a north that’s long gone now; a world of canals, cooling towers and lung-busting rambles on Stanage Edge that Elena came profoundly to love.