Reading

Be warned, this “cozy” and “rustic” place to “commune with nature” is just a 10 by 15-foot room, like a wooden prison cell. Not sure if the listing used a fish-eye lens, but if I wanted a tiny house I would have filtered for one, buddy. — 1 Star

No Wi-Fi? Unbelievable. — 0 Stars

A good price, but the place is shoddily constructed. Makes sense, as I’ve since learned it was built by the owner, some Harvard liberal arts dweeb. — 2 Stars

Pretty, but hard to find. Listing just says “on the shore of Walden Pond” and “on the side of a hill.” Would it kill them to send a Google Maps pin? — 2.5 Stars

No streaming services, just a bunch of dusty books on crude shelves. When I complained, the owner just stared and said, “Books are the treasured wealth of the world.” WTF? I missed the premiere of Billions. — 1 Star

Across his first five—and now six—collections of poetry, Michael Earl Craig has developed a poetry as whimsical as it is serious, diffusing the gravitas not by leaving it out, but by building out a surface—a texture in language—that feels disarming, direct, omnivorous in its references, and impishly playful. Parataxis is Craig’s friend, but more often he’s just describing the way he sees the world, and leaving out the boring parts. There’s as much Edward Abbey in this poetics as there is Nicanor Parra. Iggy Horse is his latest book, and though much of it was written while the poet had a life-changing six-week residency in an Italian castle, the work’s roots remain in the western United States, in a deeply felt but unpredictable experience of what it means to be rural, to live in the open spaces of Montana. But this is not the rural poetry of the pure pastoral or the didacticism of Wendell Berry, but rather the gallows-tinged idiom of Charles Simic, blended with the peculiarity of a Lorine Niedecker.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods

I went to the bathroom because I wished to live deliberately, to sit on the toilet while doing the New York Times Spelling Bee puzzle, and see if I could learn the solution, and not, when I came to die—probably one week from now, smothered by a LEGO avalanche—discover that I had not lived. I would have liked to go to the woods instead, but I didn’t have a babysitter.

When I wrote these words, I lived alone, in the bathroom, three to ten feet from any family member, in a house of solitude which I had built myself, by locking the door, with the labor of my hands only, as well as one of my feet, which I used to gently force my clinging toddler out of the doorway without pinching any fingies.

The mass of men and women lead lives of quiet desperation because they are trying very, very hard to do Gentle Parenting and not yell at their children.

In his important speech at the GMB Congress in June, Keir Starmer addressed the Labour Party’s flagship A New Deal for Working People.  Launched at the Labour Party Conference in 2021, A New Deal sets out a progressive programme of workers’ rights to reset the balance of power in the workplace.  In the course of […]

France tries to make sense of a week of riots, after the killing of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk at a traffic stop.

The post A Teen Slain by Police Uproots France appeared first on The Intercept.