We Are the Robots SHE WAS THE third girlfriend to ditch me this year. ‘We went to this club,’ I told Gary, ‘and at the end of the night she’d completely changed. She was distant, hostile.’ He looked at me over the rim of his spectacles. ‘Did you dance?’ ‘Well,’ I poked at a beer mat, ‘at one point I did throw a few shapes.’ He tilted his head towar

Because of the careful censorship of the news, I don’t think any of us, including our parents, realized how real a threat offshore shelling was, for there actually were german submarines in Long Island Sound.

In my head on this particular day are Tomasini’s String Quartet in B flat major IV, the sound of a thousand butterflies dancing in a field one late summer, the cover illustration from a Penguin edition of Our Mutual Friend, a recipe for Key Lime cheesecake, the text of an A-level Geography book, and a pocket watch.

QUINCY: I hear Richard’s has a stash of lithiums, and ten of those super powerful camping flashlights, and they’re going to do a dusk to dark showing of A Streetcar Named Marge, with a spotlight finale at the end. A bit of a pause. JENNY: They can’t keep that up for long. MARIA: Long enough though, right? MATT: It still kills me they’ve got Streetc

When you find out a friend has recently returned from a trip (or got a new job, moved to a new city, etc.), ask your friend for the director’s cut. Inquire about the details they haven’t posted online. Ask questions about the things that don’t make it into the photos: moments that were difficult or tinged by worry or moments that were just flat-out

The hall was the primary milieu of poetry and of its masters, the skalds. In a sophisticated oral society such as that of Vendel, and later Viking, Scandinavia, one of the poets’ main tasks was to find memorable language in which to distill what was necessary to know, enabling people to retain what they needed of their collective past.

it allows us to focus on how—rather than if—our racism is manifest. When we move beyond the good/bad binary, we can become eager to identify our racist patterns because interrupting those patterns becomes more important than managing how we think we look to others.

devoted coterie of admirers. Edmund Crispin was among them, enthusing over Write on Both Sides of the Paper (1969): “her insights into human behaviour are tethered, wonderfully effectively, to the availability of spending money and the frequency of buses…