‘One of the stupidest things in an earnest but stupid school of culinary thought is that each of the three daily meals should be ‘balanced’.” So argues American food writer MFK Fisher in her 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf. She goes on: “In the first place not all people need or want three meals each day. Many of them feel better with two or one and one-half, or five.”

Fisher wrote her book ostensibly as a guide on how to feed yourself pleasurably and nourishingly during a period of food shortages caused by war, but there is much in her insightful advice to inspire and provoke us today. More than 80 years later, threats to the sacred breakfast-lunch-dinner mode of eating can still make the news: “A nation of snackers: Britons no longer eat three meals a day”, gasped one recent headline in the Times. Deviations from the “standard” model are the subject of research by academics and health professionals, and food retailers commission studies in an attempt to understand (and shape?) when and how customers consume their food.

The idea that we should sit down for three meals at roughly the same time every day has become such an essential part of how we organise our lives – even when we’re failing to do it – that we forget it isn’t the natural order of things. Instead, it is a regime that was created not to serve the needs of our bodies or to give us pleasure, however much we may have managed to adapt it for these purposes – but to fit in with a day of labour. Like many of the ways that we live now, it has its roots in the Industrial Revolution: that was when breakfast became a brief meal eaten before the working morning, lunch something light but fortifying to be wolfed down quickly in the days before breaks were paid, and dinner a final sitting when everybody had finished in the evening. Before this people had of course eaten meals but they were made up of different foods and historically slipped around in terms of timing.

The last time I ate three meals a day, I was still in high school. This has caused relationship issues over the years, given that "I only eat when I'm hungry" seems nonsensical to many. I generally like to eat a decent meal sometime in midafternoon to evening and otherwise snack as needed.

The simplest definition of loneliness is a state of longing for more connection and intimacy than you have. It is not the same as solitude, which can be pleasant and satisfying, and nor does it require total physical isolation. You can be lonely at a party; lonely in a marriage. The sensation is acutely painful, and brings with it profound physical consequences. Loneliness raises blood pressure, accelerates ageing and cognitive decline. It causes insomnia, weakens the immune system and predicts increased morbidity and mortality. To put this in ordinary language, it can prove fatal.

As to whether other people experienced it, I quickly realised that the lonely city was a very populated space indeed. I conducted my investigations by way of visual artists, among them David Wojnarowicz, Andy Warhol and Henry Darger. While we assume loneliness is the result of personal failure, a lack of attractiveness in some way, what I discovered by way of examining their lives is that loneliness is often a consequence of larger social forces of stigma and exclusion, which serve to isolate vulnerable populations of many kinds. Being poor, an immigrant, ill, transgender, a person of colour or of divergent sexuality: these were the drivers of isolation. If The Lonely City had a takeaway message, it was that loneliness is political and should never be a source of shame.

At least some of that shame has fallen away since my book was first published in 2016. Loneliness is no longer a taboo state. It is widely discussed, both as an emotional experience akin to depression or anxiety, and as a social problem, the subject of academic research and government policy. It is even regarded as a global public health concern. The 2024 Health Survey for England reported that 22% of the adult population felt lonely at least some of the time, with 6% – around 4 million people – feeling lonely often or always, while the 2025 World Health Organization report on social connection found that one in six people around the globe are lonely.

One of the most interesting findings of the 2024 Health Survey for England was that loneliness shows a strong correlation with area deprivation. The practical solutions put forward by bodies such as the Red Cross, the Campaign to End Loneliness and the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness focus not on dating or friendship so much as community assets such as transport, green space, social centres and activities.

These are places where people can experience what sociologists call “weak ties”, a sense of being connected and visible, a person who matters inside a sustaining community. But these spaces and resources – from mother and baby groups, parks and libraries to rural bus routes, youth clubs and surgeries – have been decimated by austerity and years of systematic underfunding.

What I've learned (and I'm not stating an epiphany here) over the past few years is that there are social gatherings all around us. We're simply unaware of them until we are.

For a year, I was parked an eight-minute walk from the burner warehouse without knowing it existed. It took a friend inviting me, and integration without him around at future events was slow going.

It took a year and a half to shed impostor syndrome at the weekly gatherings, but I persevered, and this group has been key to much of my progress in that time.

Thinking back to college, meeting new people was easy. Keeping in touch past the quarter, less so, as there was a constant churn of people coming in and out of life.

I think there's a misapprehension about the speed at which weak ties should become strong ties, and a tendency to forget how much work (and time) that transition usually takes, choosing instead to just remember it as "a close friend suddenly appeared."

Joining a social circle with the explicit intent of hitting it off with someone is a fast-track to disappointment. Entering new environments with zero expectations does a fabulous job of obviating this pitfall.

Chatting online does not. I have a handful of people I consider friends who I've never met in real life, and I appreciate what they add to my existence, but they can't really make up for a sense of group belonging by bonding over activities and coming together again the next week.

Since lockdown started, I've found myself looking online more often than not. It passed the time but did little else. It wasn't until online conversation turned into meatspace meetups that I realized I'd been chasing the wrong goals.

It baffles me that societal breakdown would lead lonely people into the arms of the far right. These are the fucksticks who tore down the social contract and don't want you to have housing, food or healthcare, and -- above all else -- feel any shred of happiness or meaning.

Anger is the fuel.

And as to incels specifically, I don't even get the situation. The whole thing seems to be cart-before-horse, assuming that women inherently hate all men before testing that hypothesis for oneself. If you're a misogynistic asshole, there's your problem.

Chatting with a bunch of other ne'er-do-wells accomplishes the square root of nothing. Righteous indignation over one's own shortcomings is neither attractive (to anyone) nor a way out of the situation.

Expecting the world to change because of your desires will fail.

In the start of this 3 part series, I did some interesting research back to about 1850 to find accounts about gerrymandering to discuss how it's always been a problem, the odd problems it created as civil rights and big data come into the picture, and how the SCOTUS just decided to open the floodgates of reverse racism and partisan line drawing like never before. I suggest this is a further eroding democracy. Important to convey, this is one of many problems facing American and, by-in-large, contemporary liberal democracies but this is one of my areas where knowledge and concern intersect.

Parts 2 and 3 will continue with the rule of law and civil society.

It’s a truism that if a place is especially challenging to write about, then journalism is urgently necessary there. In our case, this was absolutely correct. Six decades of Cuban history were festering under the country’s blanket of silence, giving us a collective identity crisis. In all that time, only a handful of journalistic initiatives — it’s hard to know precisely how many; I’m aware of fewer than 10 — managed to rebel against these conditions without leaving the island. The most successful were in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Cuba Press, a news agency with six typewriters located in the house of the poet Raúl Rivero, managed to report on the national hangover, as did Habana Press, an agency directed by Joaquín Torres, who dictated his articles over the phone to the exiles running Cubanet and Radio Martí.

Without a free press, Cuba’s history and memory were at the mercy of power. Living there as a journalist was like being a zombie who knows he’s dead. I ruminated constantly on one idea: If, in the future, somebody tried to reconstruct early-21st-century Cuba from a press archive, what they would find would be the story of a country that didn’t exist. Our mission was to bring reality back. We wanted to hold a mirror up to Cuba, show the island what the hell it was. Otherwise, what had we gone to college for? Sat through all those lectures? Did we just do it to hang diplomas on our walls? We’d been so rebellious, so anti-establishment. Were we going to let our dreams of change die? If not, we needed to build our own home for the work we wanted to do.

The arrival of widespread internet made us try our luck. Without that event, which transformed the nation, we wouldn’t have had a chance. In 2015, the government installed Wi-Fi hotspots in 33 public plazas. In those parks, an hour of internet cost two dollars. For the first time in their lives, Cubans could go outside and get online. The high price meant choosing between internet and clothes or food, but before, you could only use it in hotels — which cost even more — or job centers.

Cuba’s constitution declares that the Communist Party, which is the only legal political organization, has regulatory jurisdiction over all radio, TV and print media. It also prohibits journalism outside this sphere. Starting an independent magazine meant declaring war on the government.

Back in October, a couple of days after the Wolves beat the Portland Trail Blazers 118-114 on opening night, FBI agents swooped in to arrest Blazers head coach (and former Wolves point guard) Chauncey Billups for allegedly participating in a nefarious mafia-run scheme to rig illegal poker games. Immediately after Billups’s arrest, everybody’s favorite viral high-meets-low-culture meme account, @artbutmakeitsports, posted a photo of Billups from his playing days juxtaposed with a painting from the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s collection, Dutch master Hendrick Ter Brugghen’s 1623 painting, The Gamblers. It was the perfect @artbutmakeitsports post—a smidge of art history together with a little pop culture commentary, wittily rolled into a tweet.

LJ Rader, the thirtysomething New Yorker behind the account, is familiar with Mia’s collection because he has a Minnesota connection. “I work for Sportradar, a sports data and content company that has its global headquarters in Minneapolis,” he says during our interview in advance of this Sunday’s upcoming Art But Make It Sports book launch gallery tour at Mia. “I work out of our New York office, but I’ve visited Minneapolis over 15 times in the last eight years.”

As an analyst with Sportradar, it’s his job to assist major sports leagues with data and content. “We have all this historic data and we help our partners find it,” he says. “We do data collection, statistical data, and then we build research tools, graphics integrations, all this stuff. You’re watching a Twins game, and you’ll learn, Byron Buxton just became the first player in Twins history to hit three home runs in the first six innings. That’s us.”

So Rader is more of a sports junkie than a fine art junkie, but with his social media accounts and new book, he’s established himself as a unique intersectional expert. He’s only taken one art history course at Vanderbilt, but his platform is based on an almost mutant-like talent—when he launched @artbutmakeitsports on Twitter and Instagram in 2019, he discovered he has an incredible memory for fine art images. When he sees a sports photograph, he can recall, off the top of his head, a pose, or a style, or even just a figure or a form, from a painting or a sculpture. And then he posts and just lets the two images comment on each other. So when Anthony Edwards is taunting the Lakers’ Luka Doncic, he’ll make a special Easter Sunday post of that photograph next to Caravaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus, or when the Vikings sack Aaron Rodgers and toss him around like a rag doll, Rader will post that photograph next to Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa.

Inconceivable!

When I ask Wallace Shawn how he cast his latest stage work, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, the actor and playwright smiles matter-of-factly: “Well, I think that’s secret. I don’t think I’ll tell you.” It’s polite, to the point and sets a clear boundary: something that I soon discover that the charming 82-year-old is entirely comfortable with.

On an overcast Wednesday, we are in a restaurant atop the hip Manhattan arthouse cinema Metrograph, watching people trickle in a few days before a retrospective of his films opens there. Spending time with Shawn feels like stepping into his own constant sense of wonderment: something midway between a knowing shrug and puzzlement over his immediate situation. When the cinema’s publicist offers him a Twix bar, he cocks his head and asks what that is, but politely accepts one. (When she returns with more options, he opts for popcorn instead.)

Born in New York and a theater mainstay since the late 60s, Shawn has reached the farthest from his native island through memorable turns in Hollywood hits like The Princess Bride and Marriage Story. After making his first big-screen appearance in Woody Allen’s 1979 film Manhattan, he popped up in cult hits like Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz and Alan J Pakula’s Starting Over before indelible leading turns in My Dinner with Andre or Vanya on 42nd Street, both co-written with Shawn’s longtime collaborator André Gregory. Acting is a miracle, he tells me, because while actors “look like us, like we could do what they do … we can’t, really”.

It’s a curious comment from someone with more than 200 screen credits, but Shawn has been pushing himself to the limit this spring. On the two nights a week that Moth Days is not in performance, he has been restaging his blistering 1990 monologue, The Fever.

That’s what we miss. We are nostalgic for the way moments once existed without being endlessly recorded, catalogued, or shared.

In many ways, the ‘90s weren’t better. But I think we’re longing to move through the world without being endlessly mirrored back to ourselves. We want things shared from one person to another, not processed through a screen.

This came with some inconvenience, for sure. Being unreachable can be annoying. Not having information was frustrating. But there was freedom in it too, and the quality of the experience was richer.

You could arrive quietly. There was no pressure to convert your experience into proof for someone else. You didn’t have to optimize your time in a place, check off a list of must-dos, compress Bangkok into a 30-second reel detailing the perfect itinerary.

Perfect sucks.

I climbed over the chain-link fence to my neighbor’s yard, a fistful of twenties in my hand. My neighbor, Al, had replaced some rotting boards on my deck while I was at work. His apartment was tacked onto another house, enclosed but flimsy and without a real foundation. Al worked for his landlord’s roofing company, and I’m pretty sure he got the apartment in lieu of pay.

Al was smoking on his doorstep. His big, leathery, tanned shoulders—Al was shirtless for nine months of the year—were drooping, his head hanging between his knees. “Thanks for your help today,” I said, holding the cash out to him. But he shook his head.

I pushed the cash toward him again. He brushed it away.

“Why not? It looks great!” I said, nodding toward my deck.

“Because I pawned your circular saw.” I had left my tools out for him to use.

“Dude, that was my dad’s saw!”

Carefully stored away in Jesse Holland’s condo in East Brunswick, New Jersey, are the totems of a culture that nearly killed him.

When I visited his place on a cold afternoon in December of 2023, it had been nearly four decades since Jesse first donned his dress blues as a first-year, or “plebe,” at the Valley Forge Military Academy, just north of Philadelphia. He showed me the uniform he was given at age 14, neatly folded, still hanging in his closet. Jesse’s old textbooks and academic records from the Forge were tucked away, too, as was a towel and laundry basket the school had issued him. Also, a brass badge depicting Gen. George Washington praying on the Pennsylvania Revolutionary War battleground for which the Forge is named.

As we settled on the couch, Jesse acknowledged that even most of his computer passwords play on the school’s name. “For so many years, I never left the Forge, even though I was physically removed from the property,” he explained. This insight, he added, stemmed from a passage he’d read in The Body Keeps the Score, a somewhat controversial 2014 bestseller that tries to explain how trauma can seemingly trap someone in time. Jesse and I were speaking now because he was on a journey to finally wriggle free. “The only way out,” he reasoned, “is through.”

All across the world, you will probably have read, people are having less sex. In Britain and the US, in France and Australia, frequency of sex has been on the decline (although Denmark appears to be bucking the trend). In 2018, the US magazine the Atlantic declared a “sex recession”, while last December the Telegraph ran a piece headlined “Sex is dying out. This is why it matters”.

As an ancient historian with a particular interest in the history of sex, this drought is fascinating to me – not least because some of the articles I have read seem keen to hark back to the historical period I spend most of my time researching. “Sex should be more wild and plentiful than it has been since ancient Greece,” reported the Telegraph. But antiquity was no bastion of sexual freedom – especially for women.

While in the modern world men are often perceived as the hornier sex, ancient Greeks and Romans believed the opposite to be true. In fact, I might go so far as to say that our ancient counterparts would be rather surprised by modern surveys that have found women are more likely to lose interest in sex and, when they do have it, are much less likely to experience an orgasm – two things that are probably related. Throughout the ancient Mediterranean, women were often seen as “nymphomaniacs”, their voracious sexual appetites a constant problem that needed to be solved – a school of thought that continued to be influential well into the medieval period.

One of the biggest draws of typewriter use, for me anyway, is to avoid the downside of modern technology. Everything is designed to keep users engaged and scrolling. Things are often sensationalized. AI has created this endless slop machine where now we can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t. Some technology and apps are addictive. People abuse them, stay on all the time, use it to think for them, or just flat out won’t do things themselves. Where’s the fun in that?

There’s a reason why screen time, social media, and LLMs have such a massive conversation around them. So, I’d say that avoiding distraction is definitely a reason why people would want to use one right now. Most “typewriter enthusiast” articles and videos online like to use this as a talking point to convince folks to use them. In early 2025, the BBC wrote about people who repair, manufacture, and use typewriters in the 21st century. One of their examples was a woman who was just trying to type something in a word-processing program but grew increasingly frustrated with the pop-ups, suggestions, hints, and all the notifications that happen when using certain programs. The funny thing is that she’ll write the drafts on the typewriter, then scan them into her computer. Another person mentioned in the article uses them to type letters instead of using a computer.

But even they admit that typewriter usage requires a lot more effort than most typing (duh). Some people feel that using a typewriter can enhance creativity. Makes sense. But I think the most obvious tech-related draw of these old machines is that they offer a way to create something genuine and avoid so-called artificial intelligence.

Valerie Fridland writes in her new book, Why We Talk Funny: the Real Story Behind Our Accents, that humans instinctively to use accents to categorize those around us. “We learn to recognize other people as being like us through the way that they sound,” Fridland says. It happens early: studies suggest small children, when choosing friends, favor those who share their accent.

In one study, for instance, five- and six-year-olds were shown pairs of kids on a computer screen, one with a local Canadian accent and one with a British accent. Asked who they wanted to be friends with, they picked the kid with the local accent – even though they lived in Toronto and are exposed to a huge range of accents every day.

Our accent-based judgments lead to serious problems, fueling stereotypes about class, ethnicity and regional background. That can take a toll in a range of high-stakes scenarios, including job interviews, when someone with a posher accent might be deemed more capable than someone with a more working-class one. It can lead to assumptions about how someone thinks, as in a study that found subjects assume politicians with southern accents are making conservative arguments. It can even affect the way juries react to witnesses, as Fridland believes happened in the trial of George Zimmerman.

I have been thinking about knitting bullshit now for quite some time, but I was alerted to a particular type of it while listening to Jamie Bartlett’s excellent series Everything is Fake and Nobody Cares (available wherever you get your podcasts). The first episode includes an interview with Anne McHealy, head of product at Inception Point AI, a podcasting company founded by Jeanine Wright, formerly COO at Wondery. Until its dissolution (by Amazon in 2025 at the cost of 110 jobs), Wondery was known for producing high quality, human-authored, narrative content. Inception Point AI, on the other hand, is a slop factory employing just 8 people which, according to Anne, publishes “about 3000 podcast episodes per week, hosted by AI personalities.” Anne tells Jamie, that, to date, Inception Point AI’s podcasts have accumulated “12 million lifetime downloads. And we’re averaging about 750,000 downloads a month.” Stunned by these extraordinary figures, Jamie asks Anne about the editorial oversight of the content which she produces. Does she, or any of her colleagues, actually listen to any of these 3000 weekly episodes? With only 8 employees, who on earth has time to check the accuracy or quality of these podcasts? The answer, is, of course, that no one checks or edits the podcast content– but, Anne tells Jamie blithely, this really doesn’t matter because the topics under discussion are so low stakes:

“most of our content sits squarely in topics that aren’t life or death necessarily. So gardening, for example, knitting, cooking, these things we can afford to be wrong. And it’s not necessarily the end of the world.”

I'm not entirely sure if this belongs here, and I'm a bit hesitant to offer this up to the community. But I feel quite strongly about using what education and understanding I have through my humanities, sociology, and political science training to dissect and analyze what's happening in the US, and around the world really with right-wing movements. I welcome your ideas, critiques, and food for thought.

The six children sit together at the waterline in roaring wind. Seagulls dip and strain, beating their wings against the gusts as, far below, waves crest, thump, whisper. A girl, scarcely three years old, stands suddenly and looks out towards that horizon. Striding past them in the distance, his immense feet hidden beneath the rim of the horizon, is a giant.

American artist NC Wyeth painted The Giant in 1923. The low angle emphasises the giant’s immensity, and all the children’s faces are turned away from the viewer. In this way, those children become anyone we care to transpose into this magical scene. What child has not lain in the grass to watch some cloud-image, an animal perhaps, gradually dissolve into the amorphous collection of water droplets that are its banal reality?

Why has Wyeth instilled this sense of nostalgic impermanence into his painting about imagination?

Almost every corner of western society views imagination as the domain of early childhood, those fleeting years when giants made of cloud seem possible. This explains why the word “imagination” disappears from Victorian education department curriculum documents well before children reach high school – not that it appears much prior to that.

Worse, most of us know instinctively that, in many adult contexts, the word’s connotations are at best ambivalent and at worst outright negative. Even being labelled a “dreamer” is rarely a compliment; when we laugh that something might happen only “in one’s dreams”, we seem to be mocking not only an individual’s hopes, but their time spent building such imaginative constructions in the first place.

We are lucky to know anything at all about the Ubykh language. In the 1800s, tens of thousands of people spoke it on the Black Sea coast. When Russia conquered the region, the Ubykhs resisted until they were forced into exile in the Ottoman empire. Transported thousands of miles by a traumatised community now scattered across Turkey, Ubykh survived until 1992 when its last fluent speaker died. It was one of at least 244 languages that has become extinct since 1950, and soon – unless anything changes – my grandmother’s language will have joined them.

Over the next 40 years, language loss has been predicted to triple without intervention. Yet we hear about language endangerment far less often than we hear about other wounding losses to our planet’s diversity or history. Deforestation in Costa Rica is being reversed following the realisation of the enormous natural and scientific resource that may disappear with its trees. International archaeologists rallied to preserve and restore ancient remains in Syria following the destruction wreaked by Islamic State. But the efforts of those labouring to document or preserve minority languages are rarely celebrated.

The databases that do exist, such as Ethnologue, chart unfathomable cultural riches contained within more than 7,000 known living languages. But a staggering 44% of these are now classed endangered, many of them with fewer than 1,000 speakers left. One-nation-one-language narratives lull us into assuming France speaks French, China speaks Mandarin; this ignores the tens and even hundreds of regional languages, many of whose speakers have experienced everything from active persecution to bans in school to simply feeling stigmatised for speaking their mother tongue.

As is the case with so many of its forays, it’s hard to figure out the endgame of the Trump administration’s belligerent clash with the Vatican. There was more than a touch of mockery to The New York Times’ April headline “Vance Says the Pope Should Be More Careful When Talking About Theology.” The vice president converted to Catholicism (loudly) seven years ago and has not taken kindly to Pope Leo XIV’s exhortations to avoid bloodshed (or shelter the immigrant, or abide by any number of the core tenets of Catholic social teaching). The contretemps, while alternately entertaining, infuriating, and baffling, does not tell us much we didn’t already know about the current White House. But what does it tell us about the current Catholic Church? What, if anything, do the agnostic, the irreligious, or the non-Catholic religious need to know about it?

The irenic tenure of the late Pope Francis, who welcomed trans Catholics and denounced unrestrained capitalism, piqued a lot of secular interest. And secular, religious, and lapsed observers alike have been trying to read the tea leaves of this new papacy ever since the election of the first American pope last spring. His public statements have been quickly seized upon and claimed (or denounced) by various political factions; there’s an online cottage industry dedicated to interpreting them. Leo’s choices do invite these reactions. It’s hard to imagine that his decision to include Isaiah 1:15 (“Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: Your hands are full of blood”) in his Palm Sunday homily in St. Peter’s Square was unrelated to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s worship service several days earlier, in which he prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

This is by the decadelong editor of The Guardian and is a very long but worthwhile read.

It does, indeed, appear that journalists have surprisingly similar views when it comes to news.

I have a confession to make. It has taken me years to write this article.

For a long time, I have felt that something was missing in the public conversation about human connection and community and how they are being eroded. And yet I haven’t been able to articulate it. Thinking and writing have become harder. It’s as if the neurons in my brain don’t connect with each other in quite the same way. I go to check a fact and get instantly diverted by a hundred other distractions on my phone. I find myself unable to devote time to thinking and writing like I used to.

It could be the relentless news agenda, but the news has been relentless throughout my 11 years as editor-in-chief of the Guardian. It could be age, but I’m not that old. It could be menopause, but I’m on all the drugs.

No, I think it’s because of something that many of us feel in this moment. That our attention spans have been degraded, our thinking skills blunted. That we somehow can’t concentrate or lose ourselves in a project. Finding myself stuck, as an experiment, I asked an AI tool to write this article for me, just to see what it came up with. The result was insufferably pompous and joyless. A reminder of the limits of this technology, for now at least.

In the end, I managed to write this article thanks to some serious interventions: the force of a deadline, locking my phone in a different room, turning off the internet. But what really got me there, got me to being able to say what I wanted to say, was talking it through with friends and colleagues. The answer to my writer’s block was in front of me all along: all I needed to do was to talk to other people.

As an opinion editor, I have some notes. This is a very approachable piece, but it veers into masturbatory. After 11 years, you should be able to frame this as larger than yourself.

The £5 entry is a good start. So is the loud, lively music booming down the nightclub’s stairway. But when I finally reach the dancefloor, hidden behind a curtain, my hopes for a wild night out in Birmingham are dashed. Despite the roving disco lights and blaring pop bangers, it is entirely empty, aside from a few bartenders milling around, tending to no one.

This isn’t 9pm on a random Tuesday. I am hitting the town on Saturday night, when the city’s bars and clubs should be in full swing, but Birmingham is looking like a bust.

Perhaps this was to be expected. The nightlife sector in the UK has declined massively in recent years. More than a quarter of all late-night venues across the UK shut their doors for good between 2020 and 2025, according to the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA) – and the “second city” has been hit particularly hard. Birmingham experienced a 28% drop in the number of bars, clubs and other establishments to grab a late-night drink in over the same period, the largest decline of any major UK city.

One of my favorite pieces from the philosophy-focused webcomic Existential Comics. Usually, the comics from this guy are comedy-focused with philosophy as a theme,^[Which is not to imply he doesn't know philosophy! He absolutely does.] and only sometimes make a point. But he also just posits ideas from time to time (as philosophers are keen to do), and this was one I found particularly enlightening.

He also elaborates on the comic below it:

Amy Nash-Kille knows that not everyone would choose a polyamorous family like hers. But she called it the “greatest blessing” of her life.

Nash-Kille said she has spent the last 17 years in a committed relationship with “two gentle, loving men”, sharing the costs and responsibilities of raising four kids.

But she’s concealed her family arrangement from her graduate school adviser, co-workers and even her hairdresser. She said someone harassed her family for more than a year, and she took out a restraining order to stop it before moving her family from a Colorado suburb to Portland, Oregon, in 2011.

In March, the city became the largest in the US to pass an ordinance protecting polyamorous people and multipartnered households from discrimination in housing, jobs and public accommodation. For Nash-Kille and her partners, it was “one of the greatest relief moments of our lives”.

“People are still going to judge what they don’t understand,” said Nash-Kille, who told her story to the Guardian and in city council testimony. But the new law, she said over email, “is helping to establish the inherent worth and dignity of people who have unusual family configurations when considered by society at large”.

I've known one poly guy for over 20 years. When he pops up in Austin, it's always with a different partner, and you'd never think them to be anything other than a loving, monogamous couple at a restaurant.

The other poly couple of familiar with is the one looking to start a commune. I slept there a few nights, and nothing untoward happened.

Poly doesn't mean you think you can fuck everyone; it just means being able to hold romantic feelings for more than one person at the same time. Which, let's be honest, we've all experienced in life.

NEW YORK (AP) — If you think the life of a journalist is glamorous [eds note: it isn't], take a look at Ann Hermes’ photograph of Tom Haley from a winter day in Rutland, Vermont.

He scribbles in a notebook, leaning back in an office chair while dressed in ill-fitting khakis and a baseball cap. His left foot rests on the one portion of a desk not covered with clutter — piles of notebooks, a newspaper, printed reports and a lanyard hanging from a stray photograph. What could be a calendar hangs askew on the wall behind him. The drab blue carpet has seen better days.

Hermes is fascinated by things that evoke a time gone by or are about to pass into history. She has photographed the last Morse code station operating in North America and department store photo booths. Lately, she’s spent a lot of time in newsrooms like Haley’s Rutland Herald.

The Brooklyn-based photographer has. brought her camera into some 50 newsrooms across the United States, many in smaller towns and cities, to document places and lives endangered by the industry’s collapse over the past few decades. Already one of the newspapers she’s photographed, in Alameda, Calif., has shut down.

My first viral personal essay was titled: “In Defense of Casual Sex”.

It was 2008. I was 24, living in San Francisco, and working at the online magazine Salon. I was responding to a series of books about hookup culture, including one warning young women that they were ruining themselves for love and marriage by sleeping around.

I had slept around and I didn’t feel ruined, and I wrote as much in my essay. I argued that young women were “putting feminist ideals of equality into sex by refusing shame and claiming the traditionally male side of the stud/slut double standard”.

Trolls filled the comments sections and my inbox with words like “tramp” and “cum dumpster”. I printed out the cruelest remarks and taped them to the fridge in my apartment: every morning, as I opened the door for milk or eggs, I smirked at these names men had called me.

My essay landed in a sex-writing anthology, which led to a reading in Berkeley at Good Vibrations, a famous sex-positive adult toy store, just a few minutes away from my parents’ house.

Frustrated by the Western media’s coverage of the war in Gaza, a small group of writers and editors banded together for the purpose of offering a more global periodical for thought and culture as opposed to what they perceived to be the provincialism of Western media outlets. Last fall, that magazine launched. It is called Equator.

In seeking to move beyond the limited coverage of Western magazines, they equally sought, in their own words, to “spur claims made on behalf of a supposedly unitary ‘Global South.’” But how can such a balancing act be achieved? And what are the intellectual influences behind such an approach? The Nation sat down with one of Equator’s founding editors, Gavin Jacobson, to discuss Equator’s political vision, intellectual inspirations, the interventions its hopes to make. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

According to the Authors Guild’s most recent income survey, which queried 5,699 book authors in 2023, the median book-related income for traditionally published trade authors was between $15,000 and $18,000. When combined with other writing-related income, the total climbed to a measly $23,329. Fifty-six percent of the respondents relied on side jobs to survive.

Today, by some estimates, the average freelance journalist is paid around $0.25 to $0.50 per word, and at the highest-paying glossies, rates have hovered around $2 per word for more than a decade, even as inflation has diminished the purchasing power of that seemingly handsome fee. Trump’s slashing of hundreds of National Endowment for the Arts grants in May 2025 may have been unique as an expression of political malice toward the arts, but otherwise it was on trend with years of cuts to fellowships of all types. Even the Stegner Fellowship has suffered from tightened budgets: in August of last year, Stanford’s Creative Writing Program, which Stegner founded, gathered twenty-three of the program’s lecturers and announced that their current contracts were being terminated.

People at all levels of the publishing industry, meanwhile, are mostly mum on money matters, perhaps even more so in private than public. At so many parties or book launches, a quick way to earn the scorn of attendees is to ask: “How do you really make a living as a writer?” How did the twenty-seven-year-old freelancer who wrote all of three New Yorker features a year buy her Brooklyn Heights two-bedroom? By what magical means did the short story author for all the hot lit mags convert pennies and prestige into health insurance? Could book reviews, even brilliant ones, pay for bicoastal lives in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, or even bohemian ones in Lisbon and Berlin?

Worse than being curious is appearing confused when no (credible) answers are given. This silence, of course, conceals the way in which cultural capital is underwritten by capital capital; the ways in which literary legitimacy is made possible because someone subsidized it. It’s ironic that we call this supposedly tactful silence “class” when one’s class status is precisely what it conceals.