To say I am sad, we say tá brón orm - there is sadness on me.
I am anxious, tá imní orm - there is anxiety on me.
The language recognizes these as passing states, not permanent fixtures of who we are.
our own personal happiness project
Even by Kingsolver’s standards, Demon Copperhead’s success was “of a different magnitude”. As well as the Pulitzer, she became the only woman to win the Women’s prize twice. Her sales were in a “new stratosphere”. She tells me she has given much of her income away for years. “Material success came gradually. So I had time to learn how to draw a cap on what we need as a family and what we can do with the rest.” So, when “that first royalty cheque came in and our eyes all popped wide open, I thought: ‘I could do something significant with this.’”
--The author being interviewed about a recovery center she has funded with her book sales.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/05/the-damage-is-terrifying-barbara-kingsolver-on-trump-rural-america-and-the-recovery-home-funded-by-her-hit-novel
You can make something that might not be the realization of everything that you've ever wated, but it still serves its purpose. It's still functional, and you made it, and that's fantastic. And maybe the next one will be closer to what your ideal is. It's...yeah, absolutely a never-ending process of building upon things and working not toward perfection but toward just what you want.
A now-famous study by the University of California, Santa Barbara, noted that, in a series of recorded public conversations between men and women, 48 interruptions occurred, 46 of which came from men. The 2024 Women in the Workplace survey by McKinsey found that nearly 40% of women experienced being interrupted or spoken over “more than others” at work, against 20% of men.
Men in public spaces, according to research, talk more than women, talk over women, and talk down to women, contributing to the rise of gender neologisms such as manologuing, bropropriating and mansplaining.
I was arguing about the merits of [leaving] a glass by the sink. But for my wife, it wasn't about the glass. It wasn't about dishes by the sink, or laundry on the floor…It was about consideration. About the pervasive sense that she was married to someone who did not respect or appreciate her. And if I didn't respect or appreciate her, then I didn't love her in a manner that felt trustworthy. She couldn't count on the adult who had promised to love her forever, because none of this dish-by-the-sink business felt anything like being loved.
I now understand that when I left that glass there, it hurt my wife—literally causing pain—because it felt to her as if I had just said, "Hey. I don't respect you or value your thoughts and opinions. Not taking four seconds to put my glass in the dishwasher is more important to me than you are."
Suddenly, this moment is no longer about something as benign and meaningless as a dirty glass. Now this moment is about a meaningful act of love and sacrifice. My wife knew I was reasonably smart, so she couldn't figure out how I could be so dense after hundreds of these conversations. She began to question whether I was intentionally trying to hurt her and whether I actually loved her at all.
Here's the thing. A dish by the sink in no way feels painful or disrespectful to a spouse who wakes up every day and experiences a marriage partner who communicates in both word and action how important and cherished their spouse and relationship are. My wife didn't flip shit over a dish by the sink because she's some insufferable nag who had to have her way all the time. My wife communicated pain and frustration over the frequent reminders she encountered that told her over and over and over again just how little she was considered when I made decisions.
--From This Is How Your Marriage Ends (2022)
Death is nothing at all.
It does not count.
I have only slipped away into the next room.
Nothing has happened.
Everything remains exactly as it was.
I am I, and you are you,
and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.
Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it.
Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was.
There is absolute and unbroken continuity.
What is this death but a negligible accident?
Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you, for an interval,
somewhere very near,
just round the corner.
All is well.
Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!
Memorizing a poem is like taking a work of art that you love and letting it live and bloom inside of you.
Perhaps because I started memorizing poems early, before I was forced to do so in school, I never perceived the process as onerous, but rather as a fun challenge, a way to take something I loved and make it a part of me. I love that, amid the practical information and persistent worries and memories good and bad, my mind’s archive contains these bits of beauty, lyrics that float up into consciousness, lovely echoes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/briefing/memory-palace.html
On my way to visit the corrosive art, I dropped in on another tour group, this one containing mostly Japanese Americans. On that tour, one tourist gently interrupted the tour guide to ask whether she would like a complete translation of some of the Japanese calligraphy that was written on one of the paintings. The tour guide, who was White, exclaimed delightedly that, yes she would, she would love the full translation. And now she has learned something new about the place where she worked every day, and a painting she walked past every hour.
And that is America. That is how we tell the story of America. Together. Each one of us contributing what we can, and when we learn something new, we think about how wonderful it is to learn it, rather than burying the new information down where it can't hurt us.
"I never liked the metaphor of the frog in a slowly boiling water, but it applies very well to our situation," Srđan Cvijić at the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy said. "One decision at a time, our regime has stripped Serbia of its democratic system. It didn't come overnight. First they captured the media, then the judiciary, then other independent institutions, then they started rigging the elections, and finally they are trying to strip us of the right to freedom of assembly.
"So my advice to Americans is never relax, always be on guard, democracy is not given, not even in the land of the free," Cvijić said. "Things can go backwards, you have to fight daily for your rights, otherwise someone will take them away from you.
"The most important thing to defend is solidarity and human decency," Cvijić added. "Do not allow the enemies of democracy to lower your own standards of political behaviour."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/03/europeans-democracy-advice-trump-americans