Petersen believes that the bike industry’s focus on racing—along with “competition and a pervasive addiction to technology”—has had a poisonous influence on cycling culture. He dislikes the widespread marketing to recreational riders of spandex kits, squirty energy gels, and workout apps such as Strava. He thinks that low, curved handlebars contort riders into an unnatural position; that bicycles made of carbon fibre and aluminum have safety issues; and that stretchy synthetics have nothing on seersucker and wool. “The whole purpose of pro riding now is to create a demand at the retail level for the really expensive bicycles,” he said. He sees the glorification of speed—personal bests, constant quantification, metrics, leaderboards—as discouraging to entry-level riders who might otherwise enjoy life with a bike. “I would like to see the Tour de France only allow riders to ride one bike the entire tour,” he said. “Do their own maintenance, change their own flats, the way that normal people have to. Racing would have a positive trickle-down effect, instead of the way it is now. Bikes would be better, they’d be safer, and they would last longer. And the races themselves wouldn’t be less interesting at all.”
Number of Latin speakers in the Roman Empire: multitudo. Number of native Latin speakers in the world today: nil. Number of Latin speakers in the back yard of a Chelsea bar one recent sticky evening: unus.
Based on a pan-African perspective, the book documents the depth of the continent’s visual culture, dating as far back as the time of colonial rule and the postwar period, to the postcolonial era and beyond. Concise chapters illuminate significant cultural moments through the lens of some of Africa’s best, including James Barnor’s exploration of Ghana’s city life before and after independence, Ernest Cole and his visual commentary on the harsh realities of Black South Africans in the Apartheid regime, and Samuel Fosso’s gender-bending self-portraiture in 1970s Cameroon.
Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings—why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life in the hope that behind it we will find the truth of why.
But there is no truth. There is only why. And when we look closer we see that behind that why is just another tapestry.
And behind it another, and another, until we arrive at oblivion.
After love, money is perhaps the novel’s favorite subject, especially the novel in its most hopelessly (or, depending on your taste, endearingly) bourgeois form. Whether handled with Trollope’s irony or Fitzgerald’s romanticism, money in fiction challenges love’s delusion that our lives are defined by anything other than the hardest of practicalities, and that’s one reason money versus love is a venerable theme. But what if the two ostensibly opposing forces collapsed into each other, forming a sort of black hole? That would be enough to drive anyone around the bend, which is just what happens to Brooke Orr, the protagonist of Rumaan Alam’s fourth novel, “Entitlement.”
“Motherhood is a political state,” declares the poet and Cambridge academic Helen Charman at the beginning of Mother State, her provocative and wide-ranging study of “motherhood” in all its iterations, and its relationship to the wider social context in Britain and Northern Ireland over the past 50 years. “Nurture, care, the creation of human life… have more to do with power, status and the distribution of resources, both by mothers and for them, than we like to admit.” It’s a version of “the personal is political” slogan beloved of second-wave feminism, which she dissects here before going on to examine the multiple ways in which mothers have collectively organised in support of broader political causes that affect the social structures within which they are raising children.
Sarah Moss’s memoir, the story of how her upbringing developed in her a lifelong, destructive relationship to food, is full of daring. It is a complicated tale and her telling is many-sided, as full of devastation as it is wisdom.