Новости за 11.05.2020

Over the last couple of weeks, I have struggled to remember the last game I watched live. Was it Atletico Madrid’s dastardly, heartbreaking victory over Liverpool in the Champions League on March 11? I hope not. It was, more likely, a quarter or two of a meaningless mid-season NBA game the same day—in retrospect, I should have known that something was wrong when the Knicks won, even if they were only playing the Atlanta Hawks. That was, in any case, the last day with real sports: The NBA that... Читать дальше...

At a press briefing in early April, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo held up a hospital-green N95 respiratory mask. He had just delivered the day’s updated Covid-19 fatality figures, a number exacerbated in New York and elsewhere by a national shortage of the masks and other protective equipment. “We talk about them as if they are very complicated,” the governor said, rolling the material between his fingers with a kind of contempt for its flimsiness. “It’s fabric, it’s material, the FDA has the specifications... Читать дальше...

Writers make for remarkably talented shut-ins and isolates. They’re famous for it—Proust sealed in his cork-lined room, Dickinson in her attic, Thoreau in his DIY cabin, relying, or so he wrote, only on himself. The life of the writer is narcissistically introverted, requiring a constant interrogation of fleeting thoughts and emotions ideally undertaken in a closed-off room of one’s own. Writers are brains floating in space, living their truer lives in the virtual space of the page, existing in imaginary worlds. Читать дальше...

I don’t experience climate grief—and I’ve always worried that means there’s something wrong with me.

About 10 years ago, I worked for a small arts nonprofit for Asian American writers that embraced a delightfully expansive definition of its target demographic. There, “Asian American” included not just people of South Asian and Southeast Asian descent—groups that tend to go missing from most Americans’ conception of who counts as “Asian”—but also extended to people of West Asian or Middle Eastern descent, like Iranians, Syrians, and Yemenis. (Once, while rummaging in a drawer at the office, I... Читать дальше...