“I now see how much more powerful stamina can be than talent,” writes poet Carl Phillips, “or to say it another way, how powerless talent is, on its own, without stamina—rather like what is said about the body once the soul has left it, though I don’t believe in the soul. I do believe in stamina.” In “Stamina,” a piece in The Sewanee Review‘s fall 2022 issue, Phillips reflects on writing over time, imposter syndrome, urgency, perspective, and transformation.

I stopped writing for myself some years ago, not because I chose to, but because I stopped feeling that deep urge to write. I spent my 20s obsessively thinking and writing about a part of my life, but after a certain point, I kept repeating the same things. Gradually, that redundancy not only dulled my prose, but my mind. Since then, there’s nothing new I’ve wanted to explore. So I was drawn to many lines in Phillips’ piece, in which he examines that necessary, automatic, can’t-do-anything-else act of writing, and the type of stamina that’s required to keep going.

Which is to say, stamina is not just persistence; stamina, in the way that I’m thinking of it, always includes perspective, the means by which we can contextualize doubt and, in giving it context, displace it somewhat, thereby clearing room again for shaken faith. Maybe the best way to think of stamina is as a fusion of perspective and will.

Phillips describes a prolific period of urgent writing, when he was exploring his own sexuality and writing poems that would eventually form his first book. I love what he says about the “urgency of youth itself” — the window deep within us that’s wide open when we’re younger, actively exploring who we are as adults and trying to understand our world.

[W]e have a lot to say, all of it still new, and we have the energy to say it. I remember feeling, at the time, that I couldn’t write fast enough to get all of my thoughts down.

Phillips goes on to say how a “crisis of identity” was the “catalyst for a productivity” he’s not experienced since — which very much reminds me of my own journey — and that as we go, we cannot rely on crisis alone to fuel us. How do we keep writing and interrogating while continually saying something new? How, over the decades, do we become a solid critic of our own work?

At the same time, it’s encouraging to know that, with age, in tandem with experience, our sensibilities deepen, which means that we don’t have to work at constantly changing how we see the world—that changes anyway, as does the world itself. A certain amount of the work of avoiding redundancy is just part of being alive.

Last weekend, a friend forwarded me a video. I clicked on the link nonchalantly, expecting a joyful puppy or perhaps a triumphant head of lettuce. But as the clip played, I sat up straighter, a coldness creeping over my heart. It started innocently enough, with a woman browsing in a store, but something catches her eye, and the chilling wall is revealed: A wall of ’90s Halloween costumes. 

For $5, you can wrap a velvet choker around your neck, adorn your hair with butterfly clips, and clasp a fake Nokia 3310 to your ear. Ten dollars gets you a black slip dress, the kind I remember proudly pairing with purple Doc Martens for a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert back in ’96. The bomber jacket was a particular twist of the knife — at age 13, owning a bomber was my raison d’être, and I harassed my mum into buying me a particularly hideous sky-blue version I wore diligently for the rest of the summer, no matter if it rained or shined. (It really didn’t matter: puffed cloth proved equally ineffective against wet or cold.) 

If I’d felt old when my local club changed ’80s Night to ’90s Night — presumably deciding those nostalgic for eighties classics should now be in bed by nine with a cup of cocoa — the Halloween wall made me feel like I’d picked the wrong chalice. Not only had my teenage outfits morphed into vintage costumes, but they’d done so just as I was swaddling myself in a cocoon of nostalgia, blissfully unaware of just how historical it was. 

I had come across Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Disney+, and dipped in for a quick reunion. I was now on season four and in deep, reveling in all those knitted jumpers and chunky, chunky shoes. My teenage self would have been agog — whole seasons on tap was surely witchcraft only Willow could pull off. When Buffy first wielded a stake and a pun, back in 1997, I was lucky to even see a complete episode. Buffy aired on a Friday night. Since I was spending that timeslot getting rejected from bars, I would set up a video cassette to record it (you know the sort, you can buy a replica from your local Halloween store). Repeatedly instructing my parents to press record at eight, I was lucky to see half a show, with mum inevitably only remembering her mission by eight-thirty. 

Comic-loving, nerdy Xander used to be my favorite character. But clearly, I had overlooked his more misogynistic traits. During the rewatch, I noticed that, despite having minimal powers compared to his badass female friends, he oozes sexual entitlement. Not only does he constantly make suggestive comments to Buffy, but he’s prone to quips like, “Just meet me at Willow’s house in half an hour and wear something trashy…er.” The creator of Buffy, Joss Whedon, has admitted Xander is based on himself, so it is of little wonder that, years later, some of the Buffy actors went public with the toxic work environment Whedon created. 

Sadly, no one called Whedon out at the time, and perhaps it’s misleading to say I missed Xander’s misogyny. It would be more accurate to admit that I accepted it. After all, in ’90s England, that sort of behavior would have been labeled as “banter” and ignored — laughed at even. It was an age in which shows such as TFI Friday had a “Freak or Unique” and “Ugly Bloke” spot, and FHM could project an image of Gail Porter’s behind onto the Houses of Parliament (without her permission, as a joke). The ladette was queen, and the king was a Bantersaurus Rex. Taking anything too seriously was deeply uncool. The Xander/Whedon-style snark was the tone of the decade. 

So maybe I was too quick to complain that the ’90s — butterfly clips, sexism, and all — had been unfairly relegated to the realm of Halloween costumes. Before mourning my youth too deeply, I needed to spend more time considering this decade beyond the scrunchies and acid-washed jeans. I had rewatched Buffy; now, it was time to reread Rebecca Schuman’s thoughtful 2018 Longreads series, The ’90s Are Old. Schuman is a wise guide, one that could help me unpack the confusing cultural legacy of this decade, and decide if it really was time to let go. 

You’ve Reached the Winter of Our Discontent 

The first installment of Schuman’s series looks at the “mopey, tortured Gen X man-child who embodied … cool.” Her analysis takes the form of an experiment: she shows the film Reality Bites to several people born the year it came out (1994). Her focus group is not impressed with “cool, loser dream boy” Troy Dryer, clearly lacking the perspective to understand that “in the nineties, every sincere emotion had to be conveyed through at least six layers of hair grease and spite.” Reading this, long-dormant teenage angst determinedly bubbled to the surface. It had been a confusing time; the rotation of boys on my pedestal ranged from Troy Dryer types to Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid. (Both of whom thought speaking for a woman was the height of romance.) It’s a tricky enterprise to examine older pop culture under the light of today’s values, but Schuman handles it here with aplomb and humor. But be warned: Your teenage crushes may come crashing down.

The other crucial facet of nineties emotional intelligence, such as it was, was that while caring about things was not cool, caring about people was, so long as you displayed your care for them by being as damaged as possible and then letting them know that your damaged self had, out of all the other damaged selves in the world, chosen them. Hence, how, in Reality Bites, Troy gets to say this:

I’m sorry Lelaina, but you can’t navigate me. I might do mean things and I might hurt you and I might run away without your permission and you might hate me forever, and I know that that scares the shit out of you because I’m the only real thing that you have.

It’s Like This and Like That and Like What?

In this essay, Schuman explores the “white-liberal narrative” of ’90s hip hop. As she explains, in 1990, just one hip-hop single made it to the top spot on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100: the squeaky clean (vanilla if you will, with my apologies) “Ice Ice Baby.” By 1999, Schuman states, “what had heretofore been called “hardcore” hip hop was so ubiquitous in ‘mainstream’ (read: white) culture that its ubiquity became a bit in Mike Judge’s 1999 cult classic Office Space.” She renders a fascinating look at this progression — which, as a bonus, led me to quietly sing Snoop Dogg’s “Who Am I?” to myself while reading. 

Biatch — its offensiveness, its ascendance in the (white) mainstream — is indeed something of a microcosm of why Doggystyle was as scandalous as it was wildly popular. In the ’90s as now, all humorless old people knew that the best way to impede an album’s popularity was to be very offended by it (ha) — and, as such, ’90s hip hop was also largely defined by the older generations’ aversion. If you were an American over the age of 45 in 1994, there was no question that you loathed “the gangster rap.” The only question was how you hated it, and that defined your place in the cultural milieu.

When The Real World Gave Up on Reality

I have to admit I have never watched The Real World, but I have wasted countless hours on the genre it spawned. In 1992, things were different, and as Schuman writes, “the very thought of someone going on television for no other reason than to live in an apartment with a bunch of randos was extremely novel.” Producers had not yet come to the realization that “trauma equals drama.” It didn’t take long for the penny to drop. Schuman deftly explains how The Real World “went from a sanitized, but largely sincere documentary of young adulthood in the ’90s, into a grotesque spectacle of young-adult pain” — a model followed to this day.

Even with a stilted flirtation between be-girlfriended Neil and fencer Kat Ogden thrown in, the London flatmates simply refused to devolve into dramatic bickering for the cameras, instead often seeming to temper their behavior instead. Their very presence in the dungeonesque Notting Hill flat was so weighed down by decade-appropriate irony that all anyone did was, well, nothing — which, being the Nineties’ most important activity, made the London season the realest of all Real Worlds. Not even doofus St. Louisan race-car driver Mike Johnson and his Quixotic search for ranch dressing could provide enough clash to cramp the London season’s style.

Bridget Jones’s Staggeringly Outdated Diary

In one of my favorite essays from the series, Schuman takes on ’90s chick-lit and “dick-lit,” looking at two classics of the age: Bridget Jones’ Diary and High Fidelity. I devoured both books at the time, so it was a little disconcerting to look back at them with a more critical eye. However, willing Bridget on as she attempts to navigate “the Rules” and secure a man — while getting skinny to boot — does now seem a little dubious. Schuman does not mince her words: “these books — despite their cool Gen-X setting, cool Gen-X props (cigarettes), and cool Gen-X openness about failure — are some inveterate Baby Boomer bullshit.” However, Schuman also read them back during their original heyday, so some residual fondness for Bridget and High Fidelity’s Rob Fleming creeps in. It’s a fun read.

Yes, it is all bollocks, Rob. It really, really is. Rob’s full of it — and Marie knows it, but, being a mature ‘90s American woman, doesn’t care, and is only looking for a one-night stand herself. High Fidelity ends in a similarly bollocks fashion, with Laura and Rob getting back together even though he still doesn’t begin to deserve her. Here’s where my Sick-Boy-from-Trainspotting unifying theory of life comes in: The success of High Fidelity, just like the success of Bridget Jones, The Rules, and Men Are From Mars, is the eternal return of the same imaginary ‘50s, idealized boy-gets-girl-back wish-fulfillment bullshit that took over Gen-X popular culture, probably because we were too lazy, or unambitious, or angst-ridden, or whatever, to fight it off.

The Gilded Age of (Unpaid) Internet Writing 

Sometimes I forget that the internet wasn’t always a thing, with my excitement at Dad bringing back a second-hand computer from the university where he worked now only a vague memory. It was the size of a small car. But it was a computer! In our home! In the ’90s, that was a big deal, as Schuman points out: “In 1996 there were only 100,000 websites in the Whole Wide World. (Today there are almost two billion.)” In this homage to early webzines, Schuman takes you right back to the days of listening to “CHHHHHHHHHH BEEboo BEEboo BEEboo.” Discussing the early predecessors to the platform you are on right now, she finds that they were “the absolute perfect venue for talking shit.” Many writers found their voice in the wild west of the early internet, including Schuman herself, and this is a fittingly snarky account of those pioneer days. 

There is plenty from the late-’90s webzine era that I am grateful is now extinct, gunmetal cargo skirts and unchecked uses of the word “twat” among them. (Sorry I called you a twat in 1999, Wendy Shalit.) But I agree with Havrilesky in wishing that someone, somewhere would still bankroll “seriously freaky, opinionated, bizarre, illustrated, odd material with no timely angle or link to some fucking movie or book or product. I’m part of the problem,” she says, given that this very interview coincides with the upcoming release of her book. “But I’d love to see the Sucks and Gawkers and Grantlands and Awls of the world find a nice tolerant Sugar Daddy who keeps them alive eternally. It’s not like it’s that expensive to pay a handful of great writers to write great stuff. Popularity should not be the only metric we use to measure value.”

Blowing Up in the ’90s

In the final piece of the series, Schuman asks when the decade actually finished. Dabbling with a listicle, she muses on which precise date deserves the title “end of the era.” The winner? June 6, 1998. For Schuman, the “dishonor” lies firmly at the feet of Sarah Jessica Parker. The 1998 premiere of Sex and the City brought with it a new age: “Unlike the cool of the ‘90s, which depended upon the rejection of anything commercial and popular, you could purchase [SATC’s] cool at Barney’s and the Patricia Field store on West Broadway.” 

This felt fitting. Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy drew me back into the ’90s, and another Sarah ended it all. But I still don’t think I’m quite ready to don that Halloween costume.

The actual termination point of the ’90s required an attitudinal shift that would decentralize the role of Generation X as the admittedly-petulant target of all culture and advertising — the thawing of the winter of the bong-ripping couch-slacker’s discontent; the disappearance of gin and juice from house-party bars; the centering of the hot tub on The Real World; the sobering realization that both men and women were from Earth and just sucked; the demise, for that matter, of Suck itself.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

If I visit a restaurant alone, I always bring a book. When I’m on a plane, the first thing I do is put my earbuds in, but more often than not, nothing is running through them. Why the book? Why the silent earbuds? I use both as prophylactic to interactions with other people. And in this case, it’s definitely not you; it’s me. I find small talk difficult, almost painful. I’d rather be silent than make idle chatter. But I read something this week that sparked a memory and reminded me that I am doing it wrong, and that I need to do better.

José Vergara has an insightful interview with Svetlana Alexievich, author of Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, up at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Alexievich talks of interviewing disaster survivors, of her desire to connect deeply with the people she’s speaking with.

Sometimes I’m deeply interested in talking to an old woman in a village, who hasn’t read Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, but who speaks so interestingly. She sees the nature of things that are completely unclear to me. I cannot understand it, and I never thought about it. She did. I sometimes talk to children who are very unusual. They have a different outlook. That depends on something else: how well we live; how talented we are and how experienced in our way of thinking; how seriously we penetrate life; how far we leave banality behind, because most people live and eat banality, and that’s enough. But the thing is, to create your own creature out of yourself, without the perspective of everyone else’s life, to contribute things that have not been said in books, even in good books, to change your outlook, to offer a text that has not been experienced in the human archive — that is a great work, and you must work on it your whole life.

Alexievich is so right. Conversations with strangers can be deeply rewarding, if only I make myself open to them.

I traveled to New York City once. I can’t remember precisely what year it was or why I was going to New York. What I do remember? My airplane seat mate. I had my book closed on my lap, on the ready, but he was quick. He started to ask me questions. I began thinking about how to open my book at a natural pause. (I didn’t want to be rude.) He had a Long Island accent. He worked for some “byore-oh” (bureau) of the U.S. government and I discovered he took this same flight every week, returning home from a consulting job. He was genuine and friendly. Our conversation lasted from wheels up to wheels down at La Guardia. I can’t even remember what it was that we spoke about, just that to my surprise, I truly enjoyed talking with him. The two-hour flight literally flew by. We were just a couple of humans, overcoming the banality of existence to make a memorable connection with a total stranger.

As the son of a librarian and a college professor, I can’t remember much about my childhood that didn’t involve books. They were everywhere. Oversized illustrated ones, piled high in my arms as I tottered out of the children’s department. Mass-market sci-fi and fantasy novels, marking my adolescence and teendom. Thick boring-sounding ones with the word “Labor” in the title, stuffing the shelves in my father’s office. Midlist trade paperbacks, stacked neatly next to my mother’s bed.

When I read Freya Howarth’s guide to building your own library in Psyche, though, it made me realize how much my relationship to books has changed. Not reading; books.

At the risk of self-promotion, this isn’t the first time I’ve written about our relationship with reading and stories: here’s one at Wired, and one in a personal newsletter.

First came the purge that itinerant young adults know all too well. Every time I moved throughout my twenties and thirties — which wasn’t an insignificant number — I bemoaned the space and tonnage. Eventually, it reached a (nearly literal) breaking point. We had e-readers, my wife and I reckoned. Would we really miss fiction in physical form? That copy of The Power Broker we’d been lugging around for 15 years? So out they went went, to libraries and bookstores and tag sales and boxes marked PLEASE TAKE left on the sidewalk. Boom. Library drastically ensmallened.

But a funny thing about physical books: they have a way of creeping back in. Maybe there’s an incredible independent shop near your house. Maybe you’re on vacation and are surprised by how overjoyed you are to see a Barnes & Noble again. Maybe, after enough days reading warmed-over takes online, you’re so desperate for something with heft you find yourself with a cart full of translated French avant-garde. Or Japanese murder mysteries. Or Nigerian godpunk. Or maybe all three.

The point is, you might have done something much like I did once upon a time. Your library might be a quarter of the size it used to be. That’s not something to regret; it’s something to rejoice. Because now you get to buy books again. And Howarth’s piece might just spark a new spree.

In his essay ‘Why Read the Classics’ (1991), Italo Calvino sets out an itemised list to define the idea of classics and explain the value of reading them. What emerges from this is not a definitive and universal list of books that all people should read; instead, Calvino creates a framework for deciding on a far more personal list of books that have an enduring place in your own reading life. These are the books that you keep coming back to, keep thinking about, and that are points of comparison for everything that comes after. Some of these books might be widely acknowledged as classics – for instance, anything published in the distinctive black-clad Penguin Classics, the Penguin Modern Classics or in their orange Popular Penguin series. On the other hand, some of your classics might not feature on these types of lists. What matters is that they matter to you.

It can be helpful to group your classics on a shelf together for ready reference. In their book The Novel Cure (2013), the bibliotherapists Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin recommend dedicating a shelf to your favourite books as a way to (re)affirm your tastes, and also to give you something to reach for if you are in a reading rut and need to be reminded of how good reading can be. ‘If you want to have a few series that are comfort reads for you, that you are going to reread during down moments or times when things are a bit hard, then it might be worth having those on hand as well,’ Dew, the librarian, suggested. Your old favourites can be a reliable source of solace.

Finding your own classics also means that you can break free of any prescriptive ideas about a limited canon of ‘great books’. You might gain a lot from reading some of the books on those lists, but it can also be rewarding to broaden your canon (see The Paris Review’s ‘Feminize Your Canon’ series, and sources for books by BIPOC and LGBTQ+ writers, for examples of how you might deliberately expand your reading).

Read the story

By Chloe Walker

In the days of classic Hollywood, the private lives of movie actors were zealously guarded — and often downright fabricated — so the viewing public would believe their carefully calibrated onscreen personas. There was little faith that audiences could keep public and private in separate boxes, so the private box was deeply buried, often not seeing the light of day until after the stars’ deaths.

The things we know about Tom Cruise would have sent these Hollywood publicists to their own early graves. The innumerable strange, sinister stories from his very long, very public, embroilment with Scientology. The divorces and separations from his fellow A-list actors. The whole couch-jumping incident. Various other embarrassing viral videos. Anyone who spends four decades as one of the world’s biggest movie stars might rack up a few scandals along the way, but with Cruise, the baggage is on a different level. 

The whole time, however, he’s kept working, and we’ve kept going to see him. As he moved from the charming young hero of ’80s hits like Top Gun and Risky Business, through his “serious actor” period in the ’90s, to the action hero of today, his movies have continued to make impressive money at the box office; even his few disappointments — War of the Worlds, The Mummy — wouldn’t be disappointing by most actors’ standards. His longevity, especially in the face of all those negative headlines, is formidable. His megawatt smile remains undimmable. His energy just as dauntingly intense as when we first met him, as a teenager. Cruise turns 60 on July 3, and it seems eminently possible he’ll still be flinging himself onto moving airplanes and scaling skyscrapers in a decade’s time.

Is that why he’s never seemed to exist in the same realm as us mortals? Or does this constant need to impress prove such a relatable aching vulnerability that it hurts to acknowledge it? While there are infinitely more deserving recipients of sympathy — those who don’t have endless money and aren’t the figureheads of a decidedly dubious religion/cult — I still can’t help but feel a little sorry for him. The pressure of being “on” all the time. The knowledge that the whole world knows your most embarrassing eccentricities. All celebrities must have moments of feeling like animals in a zoo, but it’s hard to imagine when Cruise would ever be able to escape that feeling. The gilded fishbowl of his particular fame is a place many would drown. He keeps right on swimming. 

Some of the authors cited in this reading list are dazzled by Cruise’s grin or wowed by tales of his oft-lauded work ethic. Some find him a disconcerting figure, or a silly, pitiable one. Several of the pieces are solely concerned with his screen roles; others find patterns in those roles and draw conclusions about Cruise’s thinking and motivations, or even parallels between the trajectory of his career and America as a whole. Taken together, these 10 articles paint a kaleidoscopic picture of a complicated, fascinating, unique kind of stardom.

I don’t know if I’d really want to solve the riddle of Tom Cruise. Perhaps there’s no riddle to be solved; maybe he’s just an empty vessel behind a shiny surface, reflecting back at us our own ideas about the nature of celebrity, and what we require from our superstars. Maybe, despite all we’ve learned about him over the years, there are depths yet to be plumbed. We might never know for sure, but that’s okay —  the contemplating’s all part of the fun. 

Crossing the Line to Stardom (Aljean Harmetz, The New York Times, June 1987)

Cruise is one of many ’80s actors profiled in Aljean Harmetz’s New York Times piece, which discusses the differences between stardom in classic and ’80s Hollywood. Harmetz asks which of the then-current crop of young talent has the best chance of making it big, and what exactly is a star anyway? Published the summer after Top Gun cemented Cruise’s A-list status, Harmetz questions him, and various Hollywood executives, as to what it is that put him over that titular line. Their answers underscore how consistent his persona has remained over the past four decades. 

”That guy has the most winning smile of anyone I have seen except Eddie Murphy,” says Mr. Katzenberg. ”His smile says, ‘We’re going to have fun.’ ” Adds Ellen Chenowitz, a casting director, ”He has that killer smile that Nicholson and Redford have.”

”I don’t worry about whether I’m making the right decision,” says Mr. Cruise. ”I’m one to believe that everything I do is right, that I can make it right.” That kind of confidence is part of Ms. Chenowitz’s recipe for stardom. “Actors can’t apologize for themselves,” she says. ”You can’t get the impression they feel, ‘I’m not really good. You don’t want to see me.’ ”

No More Mr Nice Guy (Neil Strauss, The Guardian, September 2004)

Though Neil Strauss’ interview is ostensibly concerned with Cruise’s transition from the heroic roles of his early career to his more complicated characters in Magnolia and Collateral, more words are spent just on the strange experience of being in the actor’s presence. Describing their time touring various Scientology hotspots and riding motorbikes in the Mojave Desert, Strauss presents Cruise warmly, yet as a total oddball: charming, sincere in his interest in other people, but as something akin to an alien wearing a human skin suit.

And now, here it comes: the famous Tom Cruise laugh. It comes on just fine, a regular laugh by any standards. You will be laughing too. But then, when the humour subsides, you will stop laughing. At this point, however, Cruise’s laugh will just be reaching a crescendo, and he will be making eye contact with you. Ha ha HA HA heh heh. And you will try to laugh again, to join him, because you know you’re supposed to. But it doesn’t come out right, because it’s not natural. He will squeeze out a couple of words sometimes between chuckles – in this case, ‘Wouldn’t that be awesome?’ – and then, as suddenly as he started, he will stop, and you will be relieved.

Tom Cruise: The Fixer (Cal Fussman, Esquire, June 2010)

Cal Fussman’s interview with Cruise is written as a first-person piece from the hand of the megastar and is perhaps the closest thing to an autobiography we might ever get from him. Although a sanitized account of his personal life — his relationship with his abusive father is mentioned in such a tangential way, it’s almost confusing — the attempt to present a relatable side and the self-mythologizing of his underdog story, from the bullied working-class kid of divorced parents to Hollywood luminary with a peerless work ethic, carry their own fascination. 

These small steps of personal awareness came with the work. You know what else I found out? The better I became at the job, the better I could do it. The better I got at delivering newspapers, the more clients I got. And if I missed delivering the paper to a certain house one day, it was: Wow. This guy’s pissed. Then it becomes: What do I do here? And I realized, Oh, I gotta talk to this guy. Handle it. Then you see: Oh, I can fix this. By taking responsibility, I can fix this.

What Katie Didn’t Know (Maureen Orth, Vanity Fair, October 2012)

Published a few months after Cruise’s divorce from his third wife, Katie Holmes, Maureen Orth’s bombshell Vanity Fair piece details the many ways his romantic life has become entwined with his status as Scientology’s Superman. This cover article — ardently refuted by the organization —  is packed with juicy tidbits that powered their own headlines for weeks, most prominently that Scientology held auditions to find Cruise an appropriate girlfriend following his split from Penelope Cruz. Orth’s piece describes in detail the brief, troubling relationship between Cruise and younger actress Nazanin Boniadi that sprang from these auditions.

Though the first month on the project was bliss, by the second month Boniadi was more and more often found wanting. Cruise’s hairstylist, Chris McMillan, was brought in to work on her hair; in addition, says the source, Cruise wanted Boniadi’s incisor teeth filed down. Finally, she was allowed to tell her mother that she was involved with Tom Cruise. Her mother, a hairdresser, did not like the fact she was now out of the picture, not even allowed to do her daughter’s hair, and she frowned upon the age difference between her daughter and the then 42-year-old actor. She reportedly also had to sign a confidentiality agreement, but she never reached the point where she qualified to meet Cruise.

A Grand, Unified Theory of Tom Cruise Movies (Ryan McCarthy and Jim Tankersley, The Washington Post, October 2014)

Ryan McCarthy and Jim Tankersley’s ambitious, amusing discussion attempts to discover a throughline between all of the leading roles that Cruise played up to 2014. While they don’t quite manage to find something all-encompassing, the different categories they assign his roles (“The Working-Class Guy Caught in the Middle of Bad Institutions,”’ “The Cool, Unemotional Specialist Who Saves The Public”) are instructive, as are the parallels between the types of men that Cruise plays and the concurrent state of American society.

[McCarthy:] One of the interesting things about my thesis of the three major Cruise movie categories is that it’s semi-chronological. He started as the devil-may-care Maverick of the 1980s, moved to a guy being held back by bad institutions and now is mostly the dry-cool specialist fighting aliens or disembodied stateless terror organizations.

Which is weird, right? In a time of relatively tame job creation, wage stagnation, income inequality and general economic negativity, shouldn’t we be seeing more of the guy getting held down by bad institutions? Why did the relatively happy ’90s featuring a leading man always being held down by society? Why are Cruise roles basically counter-cyclical?

Cruise’s Oscar Years: One Decade, Three Nominations, Myriad Lessons (Mark Harris, Grantland, July 2015)

Cruise has been in action hero mode for so long now it’s surprisingly easy to forget that for a while he was a serious actor who looked for challenges more emotional than spectacular. He worked with esteemed directors like Paul Thomas Anderson and Stanley Kubrick and even garnered a few Oscar nominations along the way. Film critic and historian Mark Harris analyzes his three nominated performances — Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire, and Magnolia — looking at a time when the irrepressible energy and manic charm that still personifies his acting was directed at characters with depth, and how those characters were a perfect fit for the actor. 

Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire is essentially an essay on Tom Cruise that Cruise coauthors by enacting it. Everything we feel about him — how can he be so unbelievably charming, why is he always selling, can we possibly trust someone who asks for our trust that nakedly, does his need make him more human or more scary, shouldn’t that irresistible surface count for something, why does it have to be quite so polished? — is embedded in this character, who is either trying to be a better person or trying to convince you he’s trying.

How YouTube and Internet Journalism Destroyed Tom Cruise, Our Last Real Movie Star (Amy Nicholson, LA Weekly, May 2014)

In her LA Weekly piece, Amy Nicholson argues that Cruise’s move away from his artistically interesting ’90s output toward his safer action-oriented work was precipitated by the ruinous reaction to his infamous 2005 hijinks on Oprah’s couch. Detailing the confluence of events that allowed an initially innocuous-seeming interview to become one of the internet’s earliest and most indelible viral moments — primarily the firing of his experienced publicist, and the recent creation of YouTube — Nicholson laments that such a trivial incident could have cost us many years of Cruise at his most interesting.

Post-2005, we’ve lost out on the audacious films that only Hollywood’s most powerful and consistent star could have convinced studios to greenlight. Cruise was in his mid-40s prime — the same years when Newman made Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting — and here he was lying low, like the kid who’d run away to London. Imagine the daring roles that he hasn’t dared to pursue. Cruise’s talent and clout were responsible for an unparalleled string of critical and commercial hits. We gave that up for a gif.

Tom Cruise Vs. The World  (Nicholas Russell, Gawker, August 2021)

Responding to the leaked audio of Cruise screaming and swearing at the crew on the seventh Mission Impossible movie about their lax COVID safety protocols, Nicholas Russell contemplates the opaque nature of “our least relatable celebrity,” and how Cruise stands so very far apart from his fellow superstars, who still yearn for said relatability. Russell considers how Cruise’s longevity — the sheer volume of years he’s spent as Hollywood’s most successful weirdo — has given him a degree of impenetrability. The rules just don’t seem to apply to him.

It’s disturbing to think of Tom as a person because it gives way to the possibility that he has an inner life and emotions. What could he possibly, ever, be angry about? What does that mean for the people around him? Is it even possible to talk about the desires of someone like Tom Cruise? He has existed for so long in a state of having every need, every whim, met immediately and without effort. Can a person like that be said to know what it means to want anything anymore?

What Makes Tom Cruise’s Star Shine So Brightly? (Mike Fleming Jr., Deadline, May 2022)

For Deadline, Mike Fleming Jr. talks to directors whom Cruise has collaborated with throughout his career, gathering glowing tales about the various ways in which working with him was a pleasure. Whilst they discuss specifics of his craft, and the various kindnesses he has shown colleagues over the years, more than anything else the piece portrays a man whose love of movies and moviemaking is the driving force in his life. If there’s a singular answer to be found as to why he remains so widely adored despite all the baggage, perhaps it’s that. 

[Douglas Liman:] I mention to Tom, ‘Are you thinking of going away for your birthday?’ Tom says, ‘No. I was thinking since we have the day off on July 3, we can use that time to have the eight-hour aviation meeting that we’ve been having trouble scheduling.’ I am beyond tired and I’m like, ‘You want to have an eight-hour meeting on your birthday?’ He said, ‘Yes, that’s what I want for my birthday. I want to be making a movie. That’s the best birthday present.’ There was no blowing out candles, either.

Tom Cruise’s Last Stand (Bilge Ebiri, Vulture, May 2022)

Thirty-five years have passed between Cruise’s breakthrough turn in Top Gun and his appearance in the sequel, Top Gun: Maverick. In his review for Vulture, Bilge Ebiri finds the recent film awash with melancholy, and heavy with the weight of all that has happened to America and the leading man during the cavernous three-and-a-half decades that separates the two movies. He sees Cruise as the poignant manifestation of that earlier era, the shiny carapace of his stardom tarnished and dented by the heavy weight of time. Maybe he’s not immortal after all.

Even Cruise’s remarkably well-preserved face and physique add to his out-of-time and out-of-place aura. The actor has never seemed so vulnerable; Maverick might be the first time he has played a genuinely broken man, and there’s a poignant irony to the fact that he’s doing so while resurrecting his most iconic character. His tears, when they come, reach beyond the screen — they seem like a cathartic lament for everything that has changed since 1986.

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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the U.K. She is a regular contributor to Paste Magazine and the BFI.

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Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands 

By Kara Devlin 

It was only a few weeks ago that I found out cabin fever — the restlessness, irritability, and loneliness that a person feels when confined to one place for too long — was a genuine, medical term and not just a casual way of joking about isolation. I was on a hypochondriac mission, tasked with discovering exactly why I felt so completely out of my mind after only one week in COVID-positive solitude. When I searched my anxieties and fears, dozens of incredibly validating affirmations popped up: You are not alone; your symptoms are real; you can get better. I had never taken being alone that seriously. It was a common, unavoidable condition of being alive, so why would I? 

My discovery that cabin fever was a recognized ailment encouraged me to see isolation in a new way. The severity of the condition was now obvious. As a kid, one day inside had been enough to send me climbing the walls, searching for anything to do. What I didn’t realize as I grew older was that isolation crept into my brain in a much quieter way. Loneliness, shame, unhappiness, and impatience replaced the agitation and boredom I had grown up with. The more I read, the more I realize how universal, yet unique, this feeling is. Why does being alone make us feel this way? 

Technology doesn’t help. Most of us can have all our wants and needs met from the comfort of our rooms — food delivered, friends found in anonymous chatrooms, entertainment discovered on endless streaming services. Technology, ironically, has brought freedoms to confinement. We could spend our entire lives within one small space if we chose to, as the economy molds to serve our desires. The lazy day watching Netflix, the guilt-laden Uber Eats order, even the bold Instagram message, have all emerged around a generation spending more time by itself than any before.

Of course, isolation is not just found through a physical landscape. The most harrowing form of loneliness can occur in a crowded room. Edward Hopper famously explored the loneliness of living in the big city through paintings like “Nighthawks.” This ubiquitous depiction of urban isolation, a diner with no entrance and no exit, serves as a memorable illustration of loneliness. When you are inside of this feeling — the metaphorical diner if you will — there is no perceived beginning or end, and no consideration from those around you, as nothing exists beyond this world-swallowing experience.

During the pandemic, isolation transformed from a misfortunate occurrence to something so widespread it was impossible to avoid. Like most people, I spent weeks and weeks inside my house, with no contact with anyone except the members of my household. All aspects of isolation hit at once and were impossible to escape. I realized how easy it would be to continue living like this — perpetually isolated.

I wasn’t the only one who had this idea. The switch to working from home brought the overlapping isolations of technology and the pandemic together. However, this change was not an unavoidable curse cast upon working society: Only three percent want to fully return to the office now that we are able to. Solitude is not just wrought upon us; oftentimes, we choose it. The desire to be left alone by the bothers of the social world often overpowers the negative experience that isolation implies. 

I am drawn to the idea that reading can connect the isolated — that one story on loneliness can link together hundreds of confined minds to think, Maybe I’m not alone. The stories on this list do not just seek to analyze and dissect the effects of isolation; they serve as a powerful tool of connection.

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The Hikikomori couldn’t go outside for years. Then Covid-19 trapped them again (Ann Babe, Wired, March 2021)

Like many other people, the coronavirus lockdown was my first taste of prolonged isolation. It was a complete change from my regular lifestyle. But what was it like for those who were already isolated — people who had spent years of their lives locked in their rooms, having already chosen a lifestyle of reclusiveness? This describes the hikikomori, a unique subset of people, largely in Asia, who can live decades in almost complete isolation.

South Korean-based journalist Anne Babe thoughtfully explores the experience of these people during the pandemic. She sensitively lays out multiple, personal hikikomori narratives, displaying their anxieties, reservations, and fears, all without judgment. The effects of COVID on these people ran just as deep, despite the misguided thought that they should be used to it. Babe takes us into their worlds, reminding us that there’s not so much difference between us and them. 

Reflecting on the pandemic, Kim makes a comparison. “Someone who’s been living in the cold climate for a long period of time, like I have, is able to continue on in the cold weather,” he says. “But if that person is from a hot place, they will find it hard to adapt to the suddenly freezing climate. I would say I’m numb to the coronavirus situation because I am so used to being secluded in my room. But I wouldn’t say I’m completely indifferent to it, because I’ve experienced, briefly, the warmth of being part of society.”

The Future of Loneliness (Olivia Laing, The Guardian, April 2015)

As a Gen Zer, technology is an integral part of my life. It’s how I keep up with work, understand the daily happenings of the world, and, most importantly, how I talk to every single person I know. This reliance on social media for connection has potentially worrying effects, as Olivia Laing argues in her illustration of concerns for strictly virtual bonds. 

Written in 2015, Laing’s fascinating piece points out what we should have realized by then — that the internet is not the perfect tool for connection, that is just an illusion. We may believe it allows us to be seen while simultaneously supporting a level of privacy, but neither can truly be achieved. You will never be viewed for who you really are, just as you will never be concealed from prying eyes. Years later, her predicted anxieties have turned into daily reality. It is normal for every app to gather mountains of data on you, every mistake to result in a permanent “canceling,” and every relationship to spend at least half its time connecting through social media. Laing discovers the true nature of the online world and maintains tension to the last word as we discover more and more truths about our online activity. 

This growing entanglement of the corporate and social, this creeping sense of being tracked by invisible eyes, demands an increasing sophistication about what is said and where. The possibility of virulent judgment and rejection induces precisely the kind of hypervigilance and withdrawal that increases loneliness. With this has come the slowly dawning realisation that our digital traces will long outlive us.

Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture? (Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, March 2009)

I spent my lockdown days in Scotland, under the daily COVID guidance of Boris Johnson, who created laws that only permitted going outside once a day, for exercise. For years, like most other countries around the world, we could not meet anyone outside our “bubble” — the small group of people designated as our close contacts. These restrictions on freedom led to societal concerns about the power of government to forbid even the most basic forms of contact, such as a hug, and led many to come back to the fundamental question: Is socialization a human right?

Gawande delves into this concern in this piece, which focuses on the emergence of solitary confinement as a regular form of punishment within the American incarceration system. He draws us in with stories of monkeys and prisoners of war, creating a compelling argument for the inhumanity of isolation from the get-go. He keeps this level of focus throughout, putting you through the experience of solitary confinement with his illustrative depictions. By the end, you’ll be writing to your local representative, asking them to reconsider their position on this brutal prison punishment. 

This presents us with an awkward question: If prolonged isolation is—as research and experience have confirmed for decades—so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has?

On Solitude (and Isolation and Loneliness [and Brackets]) (Sarah Fay, Longreads, March 2020)

There is an implied difference between solitude and isolation. Solitude is a choice, your own rejection of the world, your own contentment with being alone. With isolation, the rejection flips; you are pushed out of society, no matter how much you want to climb back in. This peculiarity is just one that Sarah Fay explores in this piece. Subtle contradictions are her strong suit, as she walks the line between being alone and being lonely, the various subtleties between autophobia and eremophobia, and the distinction between interaction and connection. Ultimately, Fay’s personality is the driving force of this article, compelling us to read on to uncover her personal revelations on solitude.

The key to connection was not to be needy of connection with others. We have to give freely of ourselves, act as social philanthropists who donate anonymously expecting no plaques or appreciation in return. (Turkle and others have pointed to this as the reason why social media doesn’t make us feel connected. Each tweet, post, or friend request is made with the expectation of a response: a retweet, a repost, a like, an accepted request.) 

Together Alone: The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness (Michael Hobbes, Huffington Post, March 2017)

Isolation can often be interlinked with identity. People who are perpetually alone may come to the conclusion that this feeling is an inherent feature of who they are. This is particularly true with minorities, as each member finds themselves intrinsically different from the people surrounding them. Michael Hobbes reflects on this experience within the gay community, almost a year after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states. Hobbes meets each man he interviews with a deep understanding — he is a gay man himself — as he intertwines his personal narrative with that of his community. He allows their revelations to propel the article, using his own logic to back each reflection. 

I’m always drawn to pieces that effectively communicate an experience I will never personally understand. Hobbes’ depiction is painful; it is raw; but, importantly, it is thoughtful. Each sentence takes care not just for its audience, but for the subjects it depicts. The level of consideration put into each word creates a simultaneously welcoming and challenging reading experience.

You grow up with this loneliness, accumulating all this baggage, and then you arrive in the Castro or Chelsea or Boystown thinking you’ll finally be accepted for who you are. And then you realize that everyone else here has baggage, too. All of a sudden it’s not your gayness that gets you rejected. It’s your weight, or your income, or your race. “The bullied kids of our youth,” Paul says, “grew up and became bullies themselves.”

Loneliness and Me (Claire Bushey, Financial Times, November 2020) 

Is loneliness shameful? Does it function as a reflection of who we are as people? These are the integral questions considered by Claire Bushey as she investigates the hows and whys of her own personal loneliness, which started long before the restraints of COVID. To Bushy, being alone is neither a curse nor a blessing: It is simply a way of being. She presents her findings as a blunt response to the ideas that surrounded isolation at the start of the pandemic — that this was a new, torturous experience for all. What draws me to this piece is its honesty: Bushey doesn’t hide behind convention and expectation; she lays out everything she feels and experiences as if it were essential. 

Lonely as a cloud? I am as lonely as an iceberg, an egg, a half carafe of wine. I am lonely as the body is hungry three times a day, hollowed again and again by an ache that does not ease except with the sustenance of connection. The feeling differs from the peace of solitude, which many enjoy, including me at times. Instead, it is a gnawing sadness. Even before the pandemic, a combination of circumstance and choice left me with fewer close ties than I wanted. Every day I forage for connection, and some days I go hungry.

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Kara Devlin is a writer and student based in Glasgow, Scotland. Her writing has appeared in Her Campus, Medium, and others.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

By Genevieve Fullan

Every spring there is a moment when I am overcome by the scent of the new season. Sometimes I’m outside, sometimes it floats in on a breeze through windows thrown wide open; but wherever I am, I stop, shut my eyes, and inhale. Spring smells the same every year, and that scent is sharpest when the season is new — before the smell grows familiar and is relegated to background noise. This kind of experience isn’t unique to spring. Every season has its own scent. The musty wet decay of fall. The ozonic crispness of the first snowfall. The sharp green of freshly cut grass. 

Sometimes I’ll catch a scent that evokes something I can’t quite grasp. I only know that it is familiar. Whatever experience attached to it lodged too deeply in my memory bank to be accessible. In these instances, I find myself chasing after the smell like Proust with his tea-drenched madeleine, trying to both identify the scent and hold on to the sensation it inspired. Our sense of smell has such a powerful link to memory that it will recall even these incomplete moments, in which we’re sure of nothing except that we’ve smelled that aroma before.

Despite its power, smell remains the least understood of our senses. Dismissed by Enlightenment-era philosophers like Kant as our least intellectual, by virtue of being the one that ties us most closely with animals, our sense of smell wasn’t considered worthy of study in the past. Now, that appears to be changing. We have a renewed interest in this most mysterious of our five senses. Books like Avery Gilbert’s What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life and Harold McGee’s Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells explore the science of smell in depth. A developing frontier in virtual reality technology is to make the experience more immersive by adding scent. With COVID causing anosmia (the loss of smell) in many people, sometimes for months at a time — for some maybe even permanently — it’s no wonder we’ve gained a new appreciation for this forgotten sense. (Having contracted COVID while writing this, I find myself taking deep inhales of anything heavily scented, even more obsessively than usual, to reassure myself that I haven’t been affected by this particular symptom.)

Last January, after our first pandemic Christmas, I purchased a sample set of perfumes from niche perfumery Imaginary Authors, quaintly named for the fictional personalities that inspire each fragrance. (Their sample set is aptly named the Short Story Collection.) What began as mere curiosity spiraled into an obsession, and I have since accumulated a shelf of books on the topic of smell alongside an ever-growing collection of perfume samples. This reading list explores the many facets of scent, from the science of how we smell to the link between scent and attraction, but consistent among them all is an enamored fascination with how we perceive the world through our noses.

How to Make Sense of Scents (Rachel Syme, The New Yorker, February 2021)

If you’re a Twitter fraghead (a term for a perfume aficionado), you might be familiar with Rachel Syme and her perfume genie. She gives her followers a prompt, such as relating a specific memory where you felt truly happy, and she responds with a perfume to match. It’s probably my favorite thing on the internet, not just for the discovery of new perfumes, but for the surprisingly beautiful writing that these prompts inspire. 

In this article, Syme invites you into her lifelong obsession with scent by teasing out all the strangeness of our sense of smell — the difficulty of describing fragrances, the way the acceptability of an odor changes between cultures and contexts, and the constant human practice of altering our olfactive environments. 

Our own experience confirms that smells are subject not just to major cultural changes but also to minor shifts in context: the same smell that greets you at the door of a cheesemonger has a very different effect when confronted at the door of a porta-potty. Where McGee seeks a common vocabulary for exploring the osmocosm, Muchembled reminds us that the variables of time and place may defy a truly shared language. What we smell depends on what’s in vogue and what’s valued—on what cultural forces happen to be swirling in the air.

Transcendent Compositions: On Making Perfume and Writing Fiction (Tanaïs, Lit Hub, May 2018)

Something that often gets left out of conversations about Western perfumery is its inextricable ties to colonialism. The European quest for spices is well known, but the other side of this quest was a desire for so-called “exotic” fragrant materials. It’s a history that reverberates well into the perfumery of today, most evidently in the persistent use of the term “oriental” as a fragrance category. 

Tanaïs grapples with these ties alongside her own history — cultural, personal, and familial — with perfume. For Tanaïs, both fiction writing and perfume are “ways to escape material borders.” Both offer a mode of expression and a way of understanding the world. If you enjoy this essay, be sure to read Tanaïs’ recently published memoir In Sensorium: Notes for My People.

Nanu’s tastes were village girl through and through: she loved a bright red lip and attar of jasmine, a narcotic floral with an animal stink. I trace its scent back to a memory of having pneumonia as a kid. One morning, when I couldn’t stop throwing up bitter medicine, Nanu dipped a pair of cotton balls in her jasmine attar and tucked them into my ears. I lay with my head on her lap, until the scent lulled me to sleep. Whereas a body cannot escape circumstance—in my grandmother’s case, she married at 13, did not finish school and lost her son and husband at a young age—a perfume lets us do so, if only for a moment. In one breath, I experienced illness, relief, love, and history. A single olfactory moment distills a myriad emotions and experiences, just as one line can illuminate an entire story.

Smell You Later: The Weird Science of How Sweat Attracts (Sarah Everts, The Walrus, July 2021)

Anyone who’s ever found an intimate partner’s body odor appealing shouldn’t be too surprised to find that human sexual or romantic compatibility can be determined through the smell of our sweat. Sarah Everts tests this theory firsthand by attending a smell dating event in Moscow — where participants are matched based on how much they like each other’s stench. Participants wipe their sweaty pits with a cotton pad, deposit it into a numbered jar, and proceed to smell each one before submitting their top five. Matches are made between people who pick each other’s scent, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. 

If that’s not enough to pique your curiosity, Everts also offers some insight into the surprising power of the human nose and the ways in which we use our sense of smell to suss out other humans even when we don’t realize it. (You’ll find yourself wondering about your own handshaking behavior after this.) I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. 

I note the numbers of a few samples that I’m on the fence about because I’ve got to give the organizers a list of my five favorites. And then I hit jar fifteen. It smells to me like sex epitomized. When I sniff again, trying to tease apart the aroma profile, I can detect the standard goaty, oniony background odours of another human, very similar to all the other samples. But something in that mix made me want to sniff again, ASAP. The odour didn’t send me into an erotic paroxysm, but it was fundamentally appealing: it triggered an instant reminder that there’s this great activity one can engage in with another person and it’s called sex.

The Odor of Things (Scott Sayare, Harper’s Magazine, December 2021)

We begin in Grasse, the historical capital of perfumery, with legendary perfumer Jean Carles. Carles is famous not only for creating iconic fragrances, such as Ma Griffe and Miss Dior, but for bringing some method to the haphazard madness of composing perfumes, which used to rely primarily on happy accidents. Still, as Scott Sayare points out, “His taxonomy could not say what formulas would actually smell good, or why. At best, it could help to organize the process of trial and error that would inevitably precede the discovery of one that did.”

Decades later, the top players in the flavor and fragrance industry are still attempting to streamline the process of scent composition. It’s a $30 billion-a-year industry: developing new perfume ingredients at the molecular level for everything from high-end perfumes to the cardboard air fresheners you hang on your car’s rearview mirror. The latest development in the science of fragrance creation appears in the form of AI programs that will compose scents under specific parameters. But while we’ve come a long way since Jean Carles developed his method, there remains a level of guesswork in creating fragrances, reflecting our limited knowledge of how smell works. 

At the very top of the nasal cavity, up between the eyes, sits mucosal tissue known as the olfactory epithelium. It is dense with neurons, and embedded in these neurons are proteins known as odorant receptors. Odorant receptors bind the volatile compounds we inhale, converting them into electric signals that will, eventually, register in our consciousness as smell. The nature of these receptors—how many kinds there are, which molecules they respond to—is central to our experience of scent. It is also, for the most part, a mystery.

The Many Ways COVID Changed Our Relationship to Smell (Sarah Laing, The Kit, March 2021)

It’s nearly impossible to write about smell these days without also writing about COVID-19, because of one distinct symptom: the loss of smell. In this conversation with Montreal-based perfumer Dana El Masri, Sarah Laing discusses the many ways COVID has affected the way we relate to smell. This goes beyond our increased awareness of it as we monitor ourselves for symptoms; moving back out into the world, the strong connection between smell and memory will affect how we perceive the odor of sanitized spaces, potentially shifting our association from one of safety and comfort to one of anxiety and paranoia. 

But it’s not all bad. El Masri also speaks of perfume as a mood booster: “I noticed people would buy perfume as this small pleasure to bring them joy during this time.” As someone who regularly dons a spritz of El Masri’s Neon Graffiti, I can attest to the effectiveness of this practice. The blast of fizzy citrus and sharp green leafiness that mellows into a sweetened jasmine heart brings to mind the first warm days of spring and offers an escape from pandemic drudgery. 

Most of our interactions these days are virtual, meaning we’re missing out on olfactory cues that we’ve been subconsciously leaning on all our lives. It’s yet another reason why Zoom meetings feel deeply unsatisfying—and why they’re so exhausting, as your other senses try to make up for that information deficit. “We smell with our brain,” says El Masri, noting that the brain processes smell, memory and emotion in the same area, known as the amygdala. “The nose is a tool, and there’s a reason it’s in the middle of our face.”

Can a New Perfume Rekindle Eroticism? A Proposition for 2022 (Laura Regensdorf, Vanity Fair, January 2022)

If smell is central to how we relate to other people — whether or not we’re aware of it — then it stands to reason that the pandemic has altered our interactions with one another on a far deeper level than we may have realized. Laura Regensdorf wonders about the effect not just of anosmia, which has been linked to depression and lowered quality of life, but of our now-limited chance encounters, and the way our sense of smells dulls to what is familiar. “You’re unlikely to bury your nose in a lover’s perfume-tinged scarf (or armpit) if you’ve eaten breakfast, lunch, and dinner with her,” she reasons. “This flattening of the sensory landscape might add to a feeling of monotony, a dullness of desire.” The solution? Perhaps it’s found in a new perfume.

Perfume is difficult to pin down. In the case of Spell on You, my imperfect nose, only recently liberated from chronic allergies, catches a hint of Haribo peach that softens into a moody rose—practically begging for a hotel bathrobe. My boyfriend, after sniffing unbidden at my head, told me I smelled “as if a fancy lady sent you a note card.” The comments section on the fragrance website Fragrantica swings from pronouncing it a “summery nonchalant chef d’oeuvre” to something surprisingly demure, given the name. “You could easily wear this at the office or as a clerk wanting to smell well-groomed, but nothing too noticeable,” the person writes, with a twinge of disappointment. But isn’t there subversion in cosplaying a prim stereotype, rule-abiding here, something-something there? I think of Maggie Gyllenhaal slow-licking an envelope in Secretary. Office-appropriate? Every bit.

Engineering Replacements for Essential Perfume Ingredients (Courtney Humphries, Wired, October 2021)

The perfume industry is constantly changing, sometimes to keep up with shifting trends and sometimes because it has to contend with restrictions on ingredients. These restrictions, regulated by the International Fragrance Association (IFRA), and influenced by the much stricter EU, have caused an uproar among perfumers, especially where oakmoss is concerned. Oakmoss provides the base for two major perfume types — chypre and fougére — and without it, a fragrance changes substantially.

Courtney Humphries dives into the complex world of fine fragrance design and outlines the challenges faced by perfumers as they contend with losing some of the building blocks of classic perfumery. Though this article is a decade old, the debate around oakmoss and other restricted (or outright banned) ingredients rages on. Some perfumers have adapted to these restrictions, reformulating their fragrances with synthetic replacements, or finding new combinations of ingredients to achieve a similar olfactive effect. Others, like perfume writer Luca Turin, have a more drastic opinion, asserting that such restrictions render the art of fragrance “officially dead.”

Although IFRA restrictions affect both natural and synthetic ingredients, they pose a particular problem for the natural ingredients, which can’t simply be tweaked at the molecular level to make new compounds with almost identical scents. For example, IFRA limits levels of methyl eugenol, a chemical component of many natural materials, because it was found to act as a carcinogen in rodents. Not only is methyl eugenol a component of rose oil, one of perfumery’s most prized ingredients, it is also found in spices such as clove and pimenta berry. The amount of methyl eugenol in a perfume must be controlled across its entire formula, so one material that contains it may have to be sacrificed for others. To replace a natural ingredient that traditionally has contained methyl eugenol, makers like Mane have to return to the raw materials, trying to find a new means of extraction whose result complies with the rules.

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Genevieve Fullan is a writer based in Toronto and is currently at work on a Young Adult novel.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

By Sascha Cohen

I once saw Britney Spears at Jerry’s Deli in Westwood. I was 20, and the two of us were in line for the bathroom. I cannot tell you a single detail about what she was wearing, the expression on her face, or how tall she seemed. My brain could only process two things: the jolt of recognition at beholding a celebrity who had defined pop culture during my adolescence, and her golden blonde hair, which made her look like a whole sunbeam, a glowing flashbulb, too bright to stare at too closely. 

I had been lightening my own hair since age 14, first with sprays of Sun In and later sitting in a salon chair on Melrose Avenue, while a stylist dabbed bleach on sections and folded them into foils. I flipped through Cosmo and People as the color processed, looking at photos of blonde celebrities: women like Holly Madison and Jessica Simpson imitating the style of women like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield — all of us, in the Baudrillardian sense, copies of copies of copies. Hollywood blondes never really go out of fashion — they only shapeshift to meet the psychic and aesthetic needs of each generation. 

Our current moment has us revisiting an array of platinum icons from both the distant and more recent past. Documentaries, podcasts, and television shows, about figures from Traci Lords to Pamela Anderson, attempt to tease truth from artifice and interrogate the figure of the “bimbo” more broadly — to varying degrees of success. The best of these projects rehabilitate the Hollywood blonde, who has been historically maligned as a ditz or a slut, without necessarily rewriting her as a legible feminist in the modern sense. 

Essayists and journalists anticipated this trend starting a few years ago. Some gave us dark fables of doomed blondes thrown upon the merciless gears and levers of the show business machine. Others wrote triumphant American stories of metamorphosis, of the second act, of the potent mingling of beauty with commerce. Part of the fun of reading about Hollywood blondes is immersing oneself in the language of glamour, sex, fantasy, and occasionally transgression. The pieces on this list explore themes of “eroticized stupidity,” feminine excess, and the crafting of public personas. Like their subjects, they seduce and confound.

“Looking at Photographs of Marilyn Monroe Reading,” (Audrey Wollen, Affidavit, February 2019)

Marilyn Monroe’s iconography includes the infamous Playboy nudes, the billowing white dress from The Seven Year Itch, and several photographs of the actress posed with open books like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. What to make of the pictures of Marilyn reading? They suggest a depth and intelligence starkly opposed by the image of her in our popular imagination: the breathy, empty-headed sexpot whose body telegraphed post-war desire. Like Whitman, she contained multitudes. In 1955, she broke her 20th Century Fox contract and settled into a community of Jewish New York intellectuals, while the FBI kept tabs on her leftist politics. Audrey Wollen’s essay explores this paradox, describing Marilyn’s “passage from pop culture to high culture.”

She fled the castle, or she kept conquering territory, depending on who you ask. From the height of Hollywood, she went to the theatrical stage; from the beloved baseball star, she went to the acerbic playwright; from the front page tell-all interview, she went to the psychoanalytic couch. The press, the public, and the studios all thought she had gone crazy. In the United States, in 1955 and now, nothing screams insanity like shacking up with a Marxist, believing Freud, and reading Dostoevsky. 

“Get the Idea, Boys? Mae West’s Shoes,” (Sabina Stent, Majuscule, December 2019)

Mae West, whom the press called “the Babe Ruth of stage prosties,” inspired at least two Cole Porter songs and Salvador Dali designed a sofa based on her lips. But the voluptuous blonde with the quotable come-ons (“is that a gun in your pocket or…”) was also an artist in her own right. She wrote and starred in risqué plays that landed her in jail on morals charges, and wielded the notoriety to her advantage. Sabina Stent writes about the way West walked — or rather, prowled and shimmied — in a bespoke pair of nine-inch heels. Just as West’s long, glittering, fishtail gowns concealed her secret “double-decker” shoes, her razzle-dazzle flirtations disguised a certain shrewdness about men.

She saunters on stage, hand on hip, purring to her leering audience. “No wisecracks, now,” she says. “A penny for your thoughts …get the idea, boys…ya follow me?” The power of burlesque, the dance of illusion. West gives them the show they want while remaining entirely in control. West sends out an innuendo-laced invitation to chase her, but she knows her value as a commodity, and how to play this gullible crowd at their own game. “Am I makin’ myself clear, boys?” she states, sauntering her way offstage. “Suckers,” she smirks under her breath.

“The Mystery of L.A. Billboard Diva Angelyne’s Real Identity is Finally Solved,” (Gary Baum, The Hollywood Reporter, August 2017)

California’s recent gubernatorial recall election was a total bore until Angelyne entered the race on a platform of mandatory Bubble Bath Day. She lost the vote but won the hearts of Angelenos, who know her as the woman that invented “being famous for being famous” — long before Kim Kardashian was a twinkle in Kris Jenner’s eye. For no small fee, the camp icon, now in her 70s will take a photo with you in front of her Benadryl-pink Corvette and upsell you autographed T-shirts. Few people knew of Angelyne’s unlikely backstory until genealogical research revealed she was born Ronia Tamar Goldberg, the Polish Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors. Making the most of Tinseltown’s penchant for reinvention and self-mythology, she donned full “shiksa drag.”

Goldberg had purely committed to the fundamental principle of Hollywood — escapism — by inhabiting the character she conjured to the point of no return. Like many dreamers, she adopted a stage name and altered her body and behavior to better position a prospective entertainment career that, like many dreamers, never panned out quite as intended. Nevertheless, far more than most, by any definition of success, she truly became the person she was pretending to be.

“The Bimbo’s Laugh,” (Marlowe Granados, The Baffler, July 2021)

Not all blondes are bimbos, and not all bimbos are blondes, but the two are often linked: during the ’90s, a wave of “dumb blonde” jokes cemented the stereotype in our collective consciousness. These days, the bimbo (hair color and even gender notwithstanding) has been enjoying something of a renaissance among TikTok zoomers drawn to fluffy frivolity during what increasingly feels like the end times. The bimbo is sugar-sweet, but not altogether guileless — as Elle Woods proved at Harvard Law — and to fret that she caters to the Male Gaze now reads as hopelessly second-wave. In 2022, we can walk and snap our bubblegum at the same time.

Historically speaking, the archetypal bimbo is enthusiastic and good-natured. Bimboism does not necessarily require passivity; it is just not in the bimbo to be cruel. She only punches up. She pursues hyper-femininity to the extreme—at times to the point of drag. She’s glossy, voluminous, and kind. The bimbo counters the assumption that we would opt out of femininity if we could; in fact, she embraces it. Ultimately the desire to absorb the identity of the bimbo comes from the fact the bimbo is unburdened—whether or not this is a performance. Her respite is covetable, especially when the internet often feels like it lives in the grips of irascible snark.

“How Anna Nicole Smith Became America’s Punchline,” (Sarah Marshall, Buzzfeed Reader, February 2017)

Another rags to riches story, Anna Nicole Smith grew up poor like Marilyn Monroe. But no matter how much fame she secured (the covers and centerfolds, the Guess Jeans modeling contract, the bit movie parts), Smith could never shed her humble class background and its attendant signifiers in the eyes of Americans who deemed her “white trash.” She elicited that combustible alchemy of fascination and revulsion that makes a woman perfect tabloid and reality TV fodder. But it was Smith’s status as an unrepentant gold-digger that cast her tragic downfall as the just desserts for her larger-than-life appetites.

The woman rose up, made powerful by beauty, and then found herself falling, her beauty fading, her power eroding, her ugliness as she tried to cope with this loss providing spectators with the reassuring feeling that such power is never really worth having, if losing it looks like this. And the only person more deserving of this humiliation than the cluelessly beautiful woman is the beautiful woman who, even more unforgivably, knows she is beautiful: the woman who knows she is worth something to the world, and leverages her value to escape a life she can no longer stand. The woman who looks back at a world that always wants something from her, and asks, How bad do you want it? How much are you willing to pay?

“It’s Britney, B*tch,” (Lili Anolik, Air Mail, February 2021) 

More than anyone else, Britney Spears was the blueprint for Y2K vocal-fry teen girlhood. She was no spindly heiress like Paris Hilton; in the early years of her career, she offered something a bit more accessible. As Lili Anolik explains, “you could find half a dozen of her wandering the food court of any shopping mall in America.” If her look was ordinary, her dancing was remarkable — even better than Madonna’s. She may be best understood as the spiritual successor to Elvis, another poor white Southerner who made good, another entertainer with moves meant to titillate. If you were a high school girl at the turn of the millennium, Britney may have helped you discover the frisson of performing sexuality that you didn’t wholly mean — oops! — and that you could always coyly deny. Above all, the pop star was a study in contrasts.

Britney communicated in two ways. She talked with her mouth, and what she said was soft, flat, polite, girlish, self-effacing, devoid of nuance or interest or force. And she talked with her body, and what she said was assertive, aggressive, teasing, taunting, cruel verging on sadistic, and full of raw female power. The second voice was the louder and more insistent, and it tended to drown out the first, though not always and never entirely. And so the disparate elements that made up Britney Spears—part sweetheart, part rebel, part angel, part whore, part artist, part exhibitionist—fused together. Until they didn’t.

***

Sascha Cohen is a Boston based writer who grew up in Los Angeles.

Editor: Carolyn Wells 

By Lisa Bubert 

I’m on a mission to become human again. Not through good deeds, being in nature, or communing with the universe, etc., — no — for me the single most humane thing I felt that I could do was to get off of social media.

Deleting accounts seemed a simple, concrete action to take, but I found it anything but. I’m a freelance writer, reliant on Twitter for pitch calls, as well as the all-important Discourse of the Day. While Instagram’s main purpose appears to be to make me feel terrible, the stories remain helpful for getting eyes on my writing. While Facebook operates as my Rolodex of family and friends, my community bulletin board — increasingly, the only way to learn who’s still alive and who’s dead.

This is known as “social lock-in,” where social networks monopolize our experiences and make it impossible to live our lives outside of the purview of the platform. It’s also a feature of surveillance capitalism, a term coined by Shoshana Zuboff to showcase how capitalism no longer simply controls our purchasing power but manipulates our human behavior at scale. Every search query, every post liked, even the amount of time your eyes spend looking at a specific image on your screen is tracked, quantified, and mined to learn more about you, the decisions you make, and why. That information can then be used against you — to sell you more products, to make you more susceptible to suggestions, to know things about you before you even know them yourself. Thanks to social media, capitalism doesn’t just require cornering the market on household products; powerful, unknown players can now corner the market on democracy for the right price.

As scary as surveillance capitalism sounds, for me, the true fear resides in my slow loss of privacy, and with it my sense of sanctuary.

I’m a librarian — a notoriously privacy-obsessed profession. Librarians have always believed that it is your inalienable right to learn whatever it is you want without fear of anyone looking over your shoulder. We were some of the first to cry foul over seemingly small encroachments on digital privacy, such as individual search queries.

We like to believe that our own personal searches, such as “best exercises to improve back posture,” are small fry — too insignificant to matter. After all, we have nothing to hide. But we must look at the big picture, much the same way that surveillance capitalist companies, like Google, do. Our personal decisions about privacy are hardly private — they have always been a public affair. The more we allow tech and social media companies to chip away at our personal privacy, the more they can commercialize our privacy at scale. Everything, even our most interior sense of self, is for sale.

According to Jaron Lanier, computer scientist, futurist, and frequent tech critic, deleting our social media accounts is “the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times” — and it’s the only way to regain our humanity in an increasingly inhumane world.

Here’s some inspiration on going from Extremely Online to Extremely Offline.

You Are Now Remotely Controlled (Shoshana Zuboff, The New York Times, January 2020)

No one understands the importance of privacy as a public affair better than Shoshana Zuboff. Zuboff is the one person who has been repeatedly able to clock the tech economy and call it for what it is, before the rest of us even know what we’ve signed up for. Every time we agree to the mass of terms and conditions of a new digital service with personalization (read: data mining) at its core, we’ve agreed to what Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.” Any time I sit down to read a piece by Shoshana Zuboff, I can expect it to be engrossing, brilliant, and frankly disturbing — and this piece (which is essentially a Cliff notes version of her banger of a book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,) takes no prisoners.

The lesson is that privacy is public — it is a collective good that is logically and morally inseparable from the values of human autonomy and self-determination upon which privacy depends and without which a democratic society is unimaginable.

…In the competition for scope, surveillance capitalists want your home and what you say and do within its walls. They want your car, your medical conditions, and the shows you stream; your location as well as all the streets and buildings in your path and all the behavior of all the people in your city. They want your voice and what you eat and what you buy; your children’s play time and their schooling; your brain waves and your bloodstream. Nothing is exempt.

The Conscience of Silicon Valley (Zach Baron, GQ, August 2020)

I love a good profile. Especially one on a person as strange, enigmatic, and offbeat as Jaron Lanier — the so-called “father of virtual reality,” and according to this piece, “the owner of the world’s largest flute.” Lanier wrote one of my favorite books, Ten Arguments to Delete Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, a slim little volume that contains just 10 chapters — 10 arguments — and reads like a Buddhist manual written by the dreadlocked Berkeley hippie with a pan flute that Lanier is.

In reading Baron’s profile of him, I am reminded of my own inner child. Lanier, a futurist by nature, is one of the more curious people I’ve come upon, his mind seemingly unadulterated by outside influence — which is why I love this profile showing the weird, wily human he is.

(Lanier) seemed to live somewhere off ahead of us, by the horizon. Now here the rest of us were too.

But all that was only part of the reason I had sought out Lanier, I told him. What I really hoped to do, I said, was to talk about the future and how to live in it. This year feels like a crossroads; I do not need to explain what I mean by this. We are on the precipice of ruin or revolution or both. We are sick of looking at social media, but social media is also maybe driving the most significant and necessary social movement of my entire life. I want to destroy my computer, through which I now work and “have drinks” and stare at blurry simulations of my parents sometimes; I want to kneel down and pray to it like a god. I want someone—I want Jaron Lanier—to tell me where we’re going, and whether it’s going to be okay when we get there.

Lanier just nodded. All right, then.

It’s Not Your Fault You’re a Jerk on Twitter (Katherine Cross, Wired, February 2020)

There are a lot of jerks on Twitter. I like this article because it doesn’t just look at the damaging effects of internet pile-ons propelled by tweet after tweet, it looks specifically at the effects of what Cross calls the “third order” of harassment, i.e., the Discourse.

You know the Discourse. Usually a subtweet about a new argument of the day. A commentary if you will. You have a Twitter account. A thing has happened. You comment on it to signal which side of the Discourse divide you’re on. It’s not a pile-on; it’s just a statement about the situation. But that subtweet, which usually doesn’t directly involve the target of the Discourse, and which may even be supportive of the target, only allows the harassment to continue and grow. Commentary provides longevity, and longevity extends the harmful episode, regardless of what is being said. Twitter’s design allows users to dissociate from the very real human harm they are inevitably causing just by being active on the platform.

The attacks directed at an individual are a metacommunicative shorthand—“I hate Neon Yang” isn’t about Yang, it’s about a suite of ideas that they discursively represent; you can’t @ an idea on Twitter, only a person… This is why even the numerous attempts at “constructive” callouts or criticism in the helicopter story saga, directed at both the original story and Neon Yang in later months, merely added to the pain and fury. The sheer weight and volume of so many people bearing down on an individual all at once becomes powerfully destructive, even if many of those people are being “nice.”

Welcome to Airspace (Kyle Chayka, The Verge, August 2016)

In order to write well, or to create any kind of art that cuts through the persistent noise of human experience, you have to first participate in that experience. There has to be diversity in the aesthetic around you. But the pandemic year left us looking for an aesthetic in an increasingly isolated, and online, world. I scroll through Instagram despite the fact that all the photos are increasingly similar. The algorithm has zeroed in on the aesthetic it thinks I like and serves me photo after photo of the same thing to keep my eyes glued, my time monetized for someone else. By this point, I can’t even tell the difference between what I like and what I’m being fed.

Of all the things I can’t stand about an Extremely Online life, the theft of a diverse and surprising aesthetic burns me the most. (Other than our lives becoming simple data points for someone else’s commodification.) No matter where I go, everything looks the same. This is why I love this article about the increasing “frictionlessness” of the various aesthetics popularized at large — open concept kitchens, industrial design, Edison bulbs over every table — and how the curation of a single aesthetic, specifically by AirBnb, has made it possible to travel from city to city, even internationally, without noticing a difference.

We could call this strange geography created by technology “AirSpace.” It’s the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live / work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go: a profusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a certain connoisseurial mindset. Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting. Cortados. Fast internet. The homogeneity of these spaces means that traveling between them is frictionless, a value that Silicon Valley prizes and cultural influencers like Schwarzmann take advantage of. Changing places can be as painless as reloading a website. You might not even realize you’re not where you started.

Escape the Echo Chamber (C Thi Nguyen, Aeon, April 2018)

To me, social media increasingly feels like a cult. It doesn’t matter which platform I’m on; people exhibit the same linear thought necessary for cult indoctrination, regardless of topic. It doesn’t matter what I think about a topic; the Discourse has already been decided for me, for all of us. Now, virality, not facts, equals truth. Questioning out loud has become increasingly difficult. As Nguyen notes in this essay, two things are needed for cult thinking to bloom — epistemic bubbles combined with echo chambers — and social media has it in spades. So yeah, we’re in a cult. Time to call our dads.

In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. The way to break an echo chamber is not to wave “the facts” in the faces of its members. It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust.

Editor: Carolyn Wells 

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

By Pardeep Toor 

English was the first language my newborn heard after his birth in October 2021, probably something medical the midwife said, or congratulations from a nearby nurse. My wife and I were speechless, focusing only on our son’s blue skin, piercing screams, and block of black hair that overwhelmingly confirmed he was indeed ours.

As first-time parents, our son instantly became the exclusive lens through which we viewed our world. I should’ve gotten new windshield wipers to make sure we reached home safely. Next time, I will take my elevated bilirubin levels seriously. My wife swore to get the spot on her retina checked again. She couldn’t remember the last time we’d dusted underneath our bed. We’d prepared nine months for this shift, but it still shook us. Our lives were only necessary to sustain his life.

We couldn’t stay speechless for long. The nurses eventually checked on us less frequently. Poking and prodding clinicians dissipated, leaving us with the humming overhead tube lights and beeping in the hallway. It was our turn to talk to our son, but what would we say? 

English wasn’t the first language for either of us. My wife is a native Spanish speaker and I exclusively spoke Punjabi for the first six years of my life. We both acquired English through our respective educations in Colombia and Canada. We promised to give our son both our languages, despite failing to acquire them from each other. 

English is our essential language, a primary means of communication that allows us to thrive as a couple, while simultaneously pulling us away from our native languages and cultures. Each spoken syllable of English is a leap away from our rolling “Rs” in Punjabi and Spanish. I’m not demonizing English, rather recognizing the challenge of its dominance in our lives. 

In the past four months, we’ve obsessed over speaking our respective languages to our son. It’s turned into a game: My wife will say something to him in Spanish, I’ll ask what she said, she tells me in English, and then I translate it into Punjabi and say it louder and faster back to our son as if his comprehension is a race we’re each trying to win. It’s partly in fun — but also stems from a sincere apprehension. We’re trying to pass down our languages while preserving them in our own lives.   

Regardless of our efforts, English will inevitably become the common language that my wife and I share with our son. It’s the only way we can talk to him without isolating each other. In doing so I’m afraid I’ll continue to lose my native Punjabi and our son will forever lose something he could have had. 

This struggle isn’t exclusive to our family. The loss of language has been extensively explored in the following essays. 

The Pain of Losing Your First Language (Kristin Wong, Catapult, December 2021) 

This essay outlines the suffering Wong endured since foregoing her native language as a child for the sake of assimilating into America. Wong does a phenomenal job of incorporating linguistic research in her analysis, giving academic weight to her regrets. The balance of personal narrative and analysis of English language adoption and native attrition flows through the essay as studies confirm Wong’s feelings, yet don’t free her from longing for her first language. “I wonder what Cantonese words my brain pushed out when I started speaking mostly English at age six. And is attrition limited to words? What else did I lose to assimilate?”

During her pregnancy, Wong commits to re-learning her native Cantonese so she can pass it on to her child. However, despite her efforts, she feels the impossibility of her task. 

Like learning how to spell only, the more I look at Jyutping, the more the words start to make sense. But part of me knows better. I’ll never speak Cantonese the same way I would have if I’d never stopped speaking it to begin with. Like a phantom limb, the memory of my first language stays with me even with it gone, but that’s all it is: a memory. It occurs to me that trying to relearn this language is the embodiment of my bicultural identity. The American in me is determined to reclaim the Chinese part of myself.

Why Do I Write in My Colonizers’ Language? (Anandi Mishra, Electric Literature, March 2021)

Part of the struggle with English has always been its foreignness. The language either forcefully invaded foreign lands or immigrants willingly chose to move west. Mishra addresses the colonial legacy of English and how that makes her feel “queasy,” while also recognizing the language’s modern dominance in India. 

For my family, friends, relatives, and teachers, English was seen as a language of access. It could land you better jobs, remove limitations, and open up avenues. English speakers were high achievers, often conflated with the colonizers who ruled over us for about 200 years. It was ironic that the language of our colonizers was seen as aspirational, something that could lift us out of the discomfort that our parents’ mid-level jobs put us through. In reading all the subjects at school in English, we were made to understand that English was the language of possibilities. 

Mishra reluctantly accepts the realities of the English language in India and her own life. But acceptance can also be an acknowledgment of adaptation — it’s not one or the other, English or Hindi, but hybridity that can hopefully be respectful to native languages and English’s injection into them. 

Translation as an Arithmetic of Loss (Ingrid Rojas Contreras, The Paris Review, June 2019)

Rojas Contreras opens this essay by acknowledging, “When you live between languages, the conversion of meaning is an arithmetic in loss.” Thoughts generated in one language come out awkwardly in English, or sometimes not at all. This ultimately leads to a feeling of “being understood sufficiently, rather than fully.”

This loss between languages catalyzed Rojas Contreras to write her debut novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, in English, even though she thought of it in Spanish. She constructed the sentences in Spanish in her mind but then immediately translated them into English on the page. 

Why didn’t you write the novel in Spanish? This is a question I get all the time. Language is one of the things you sacrifice when you migrate. I wanted to be true to the toll of that sacrifice by making visible what exactly was being lost.

My wife loves Rojas Contreras’s writing. She sees both her own Spanish and English in the syntax. It’s how she sees the world, in a constant state of translation from one language to another. By seeing Rojas Contreras’s translated language on the page, my wife sees her worldview being expressed as a reality and feels understood as an immigrant in the United States. 

Teaching Yourself Italian (Jhumpa Lahiri, The New Yorker, November 2015) 

Lahiri, an internationally renowned fiction writer, started writing from scratch in Italian to escape the personal weight of the English language. 

Why am I fleeing? What is pursuing me? Who wants to restrain me?

The most obvious answer is the English language. But I think it’s not so much English in itself as everything the language has symbolized for me. For practically my whole life, English has represented a consuming struggle, a wrenching conflict, a continuous sense of failure that is the source of almost all my anxiety. It has represented a culture that had to be mastered, interpreted. I was afraid that it meant a break between me and my parents. English denotes a heavy, burdensome aspect of my past. I’m tired of it.

Lahiri opted not to re-engage with her native Bengali, which she spoke with an accent and admitted to not knowing how to read or write. She started anew with Italian, placing herself in a linguistic exile, far removed from her familial past in Bengali and professional life in English. Native languages, and the projected cultural expectations that come with them, can be as burdensome as chasing a distorted and romanticized memory or history. Lahiri’s fresh start in Italian vanquishes the obligation of chasing ghosts from her past and allows her to forge a novel identity in a new language. 

Ghosts (Vauhini Vara, The Believer, August 2021)

What happens when all languages fail? When you’re unable to express yourself no matter how many languages you can speak? That’s where the future comes in. Vara, unable to express grief after losing her sister, turned to an algorithm to complete her thoughts. 

I felt acutely that there was something illicit about what I was doing. When I carried my computer to bed, my husband muttered noises of disapproval. We both make our livings as writers, and technological capitalism has been exerting a slow suffocation on our craft. A machine capable of doing what we do, at a fraction of the cost, feels like a threat. Yet I found myself irresistibly attracted to GPT-3—to the way it offered, without judgment, to deliver words to a writer who has found herself at a loss for them.

What followed was an experiment in human-computer interactions. Vara feeds words into Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3)  and the remaining text is predicted, with the details Vara provides about her sister determining how the narrative ends — technology offering a borderless universal language with infinite memory.

The nine stories completed by artificial intelligence in this piece are something new, void of human attachment. Culture in an algorithm. Is this how people will one day express themselves and understand their upbringing? Then what remains of the cultural nuances embedded in our native languages? Are one or two or three languages enough for our son? Are they the right languages? What if they all fail him? The fear of losing our language and culture to algorithms and English inspires us to transmit what we have left amidst our loss. 

***

Pardeep Toor‘s writing has appeared in the Best Debut Short Stories 2021: The PEN America Dau Prize, Catapult, Electric Literature, Southern Humanities Review, Midwest Review, and Great River Review.

Editor: Carolyn Wells