Author: Lex Gill
FOUR HUNDRED AND ELEVEN
FOUR HUNDRED AND TEN
From Exit West by Mohsin Hamid.
“A thriving trade in electricity was under way in dark London, run by those who lived in pockets with power, and Saeed and Nadia were able to recharge their phones from time to time, and if they walked to the edges of their locality they could pick up a strong signal, and so like many others they caught up with the world this way, and once as Nadia sat on the steps of a building reading the new on her phone across the street from a detachment of troops and a tank she thought she saw online a photograph of herself sitting on the steps of a building reading the news on her phone across the street from a detachment of troops and a tank, and she was startled, and wondered how this could be, how she could both read this news and be this news, and how the newspaper could have published this image of her instantaneously, and she looked about for a photographer, and she had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past, and she almost felt that if she got up and walked home at this moment there would be two Nadias, that she would split into two Nadias, and one would stay on the steps reading and one would walk home, and two different lives would unfold for these two different selves, and she thought she was losing her balance, or possibly her mind, and then she zoomed in on the image and saw that the woman in the black robe reading the news on her phone was actually not her at all.”
FOUR HUNDRED AND NINE
My neighborhood has been filled with some really inspiring new artwork thanks to Unceded Voices. These are some of my favourite, from (in order) Jessica Sabogal; Jessica Canard and Dayna Danger; and Elizabeth Blancas.
FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHT
Photography by Reiner Riedler of Russia’s forgotten circus culture via Huck. Has a kind of dark Wes Anderson vibe.
FOUR HUNDRED AND SEVEN
).FOUR HUNDRED AND SIX
From Being Mortal by Atul Gawande.
“This has been the persistent pattern of how modern society has dealt with old age. The systems we’ve devised were almost always designed to solve some other problem. As one scholar put it, describing the history of nursing homes from the perspective of the elderly “is like describing the opening of the American West from the perspective of the mules; they were certainly there, and the epochal events were certainly critical to the mules, but hardly anyone was paying very much attention to them at the time.”
….
The sociologist Erving Goffman noted the likeness between prisons and nursing homes half a century ago in his book Asylums. They were, along with military training camps, orphanages, and mental hospitals, “total institutions”—places largely cut off from wider society. “A basic social arrangement in modern society is that the individual tends to sleep, play, and work in different places, with different co-participants, under different authorities, and without an over-all rational plan,” he wrote. By contrast, total institutions break down the barriers separating our spheres of life…”
