Noteworthy reads from the last week:
“Dying Together,” Clare Coffey
“The privacy I had attributed to death, which made me feel as though only a similarly private intimacy was entitled to grief, was non-existent.”
“Our Fairy Tales Ourselves: Storytelling From East to West,” Marie Mutsuki Mockett
“Occasionally I would see something on TV that deeply captured my imagination and love, but which sent me into such a fit of tears that my mother would literally spend hours trying to console me over the injustice of a purely tragic ending while she cursed her culture for being irresponsibly sad. For in Japan, stories could be devastatingly, irredeemably wretched.”
“The 27th Letter,” Mairead Small Staid
“An editor once removed forty-four ampersands from a long poem I had written. I didn’t argue, partly because the editor had gone to such trouble, all those red ands—Track changes, as if it were that easy—and partly because I couldn’t articulate why it mattered.”
“What Went Wrong In Flint,” Anna Maria Barry-Jester
“More than a year after residents started sounding alarm bells, it’s now clear that employees at the state’s Department of Environmental Quality collected insufficient data and ignored the warning signs visible in what they did collect. In the process, they allowed the residents of Flint to be poisoned.”
“To Be and to Do,” Leland de la Durantaye
“What is yours, and how do you use it? Your body, for instance, is yours, as is the life you lead with it; but in what way, to what degree, is it subject to what restrictions? And above all how is it conditioned or curtailed by which notions of what life is, what it is for, what obligations it carries, and what tasks it may be assigned?”
Hedgehogs abroad:
“Reagan did not save NASA in the wake of the Challenger disaster.”