RANDOM (PUBLIC)

Severance is interested in a lot of Big Ideas®, chief among them the impact of trauma on an individual. One very loose definition of trauma is feeling a sustained lack of control in a stressful or distressing situation, and the Innies certainly meet that requirement. A Kier maxim that’s often shown in print or spoken aloud on the show is “We must b... See more

Many words in pleasureis amiracle are merged. They make me think of parataxis, the pushing together of distinct ideas in writing. Messinger imagines parataxis as a physical form of adhesion. Words can stick together, and so can everything else. A new ocean to a familiar field. An image burned into a screen.

The first screen name you ever have is your first time getting dressed for the world. The amount of numbers you add after Soccergirl, and the use of an underscore when typing in Angel_Baby, are all meant to evoke something. Growing up in the 2000s and early 2010s, these screen names of mine progressed alongside the explosion of social media as a co... See more

Devotion—putting someone in an exalted position, as Pygmalion places Galatea, on a literal pedestal—feels like empathy, in their shared sense of understanding someone deeply, but is actually the opposite. When wishful thinking becomes confused with reality, the real person vanishes, as does the entire world around that person.

“I consider myself a fairly ordinary person, so perhaps I can relate more to a bottle of ketchup than I can to a vase of flowers,” she says.

At Christmas you gift me an axe, I gift you a kitchen knife, and without intending to this fact forms another layer of agreement between us which states I will not hurt you