Latest news with #181Renoirs
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Dating Dilemmas Young People Can't Escape
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning Dating has never been easy. When my colleague Faith Hill scoured the Atlantic archives for early accounts of romance, she found the following proclamation from the 20-year-old female protagonist in a 1888 short story: 'I wish I knew some young men! … I should like to know some interesting men!'' But young people today have come of age in a particularly complicated dating era. Dating apps have been around long enough that the swipe is losing its luster; many young daters are both dependent on apps and smart enough to see their shortcomings. Plus, the pandemic upended many people's social development. Meanwhile, some teens are moving away from romantic relationships entirely: Faith recently spoke with a college professor who spends a lot of time trying to convince her students that a partnership is worth pursuing. Romantic love is an opportunity to add beauty to one's life, and to spark growth—but that can be hard to remember when searching for it feels so awkward. On Dating Teens Are Forgoing a Classic Rite of Passage By Faith Hill Fewer young people are getting into relationships. Read the article. 'Nostalgia for a Dating Experience They've Never Had' By Faith Hill Young people are tired of swiping. Now they want serendipity. Read the article. The Most Awkward Part of Living With Your Parents as an Adult By Ginny Hogan For many young adults, living in their family's home is a new norm. Their dates still don't always get it. Read the article. Still Curious? The golden age of dating doesn't exist: Romance in America has never been easy. Faith Hill explored early accounts of dating in The Atlantic's archives. Why it's so hard for young people to date offline: Meet-cutes are difficult when nobody wants to talk to strangers, Ashley Fetters wrote in 2019. Other Diversions The man who owned 181 Renoirs An unabashedly intellectual murder mystery Lady Gaga sounds like herself again. P.S. Each week, I ask readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. In 2017 'I spent a week in Brienz, Switzerland,' J. Jourdain writes. 'When the sun set one evening, it cast this golden light on the alps. It was magical.' I'll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks. — Isabel Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
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The Literature of the Pandemic
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Not long after COVID lockdowns began in the U.S. five years ago this week, many readers and writers started to wonder, with a mix of trepidation and curiosity, what the literature about the time period would look like. Half a decade on, we now have at least a small body of work that takes on the pandemic. In some cases, the calamity serves merely as a scene-setting device; in others, it's a major plot point. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic's books section: The world can't keep up with its garbage. The man who owned 181 Renoirs An unabashedly intellectual murder mystery An all-female society, pushed to extremes As Lily Meyer writes this week, she has taken a special interest in reading these books as they've trickled out. But she's found a fairly common flaw: Many of them attempt to 'overcontrol the experience of the pandemic' by leaning on descriptions of what happened. These novels remind readers of widely promoted images of middle-class lockdown—fashioning masks out of old scraps of fabric, wiping down groceries, catching up with friends and family over Zoom—but fail to transcend these rote recitations, or to capture other experiences of the early days of the pandemic. When the world knew the danger the virus posed but didn't know how to prevent its spread, people lacked a sense of agency: All that many of us could do was wait for news about case counts and vaccines. A writer's impulse to transcribe details from that time is perhaps an attempt to make that feeling more manageable. But 'fiction that asserts too much control loses the possibility of transformation,' Meyer argues. Her point is that no matter what's happening in the world, life is always unpredictable—and good literature understands this. Meyer notes that she hasn't found a great pandemic novel yet. What form might this eventual writing take? One type of book she's hoping for is 'a great novel of the mind,' one that 'will either reject or undermine the self-controlling impulse' to describe the textures of the early pandemic and will instead examine, in surprising ways, how the catastrophe affected people's psyches. As I read Meyer's essay, I remembered Sarah Moss's The Fell, a 2021 novel that I think may actually meet those criteria—at least in part. In it, a woman named Kate is quarantined with her son in her home in England's Peak District after a COVID exposure. She quickly grows stir-crazy, and one night, violating government orders, she goes out for a hike—but at some point, she falls and can't get up. Moss leaves Kate's perspective to dip into the minds of her son, a kindly older neighbor whom Kate and her son provide with groceries, and a member of the rescue team searching for Kate in the dark and wet night. Though the novel is certainly descriptive, it might also qualify as what Meyer calls an 'interior' work. The prose is written as a stream of consciousness, evoking a sense of anxiety that sometimes tips over into the truly scary. For some, the experience of the early pandemic was not immediately life-threatening; often, it was an extended stretch of quotidian dullness spiked with moments of existential dread. But as one character thinks, 'people don't die of dread.' Moss doesn't exaggerate the stakes of the pandemic for her characters. Instead, she cleverly puts one of them in a genuinely frightening situation that has nothing to do with COVID, reminding the reader that the unfolding events of our lives are, by definition, beyond our control. The Novel I'm Searching For By Lily Meyer Five years after the pandemic, I'm holding out for a story that doesn't just describe our experience, but transforms it. Read the full article. , by Anne Carson Hardly any of Sappho's work survives, and the fragments scholars have salvaged from tattered papyrus and other ancient texts can be collected in thin volumes easily tossed into tote bags. Still, Carson's translation immediately makes clear why those scholars went to so much effort. Sappho famously describes the devastation of seeing one's beloved, when 'tongue breaks and thin / fire is racing under skin'; the god Eros, in another poem, is a 'sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in.' Other poems provide crisp images from the sixth century B.C.E.—one fragment reads, in its entirety: 'the feet / by spangled straps covered / beautiful Lydian work.' Taken together, the fragments are sensual and floral, reminiscent of springtime; they evoke soft pillows and sleepless nights, violets in women's laps, wedding celebrations—and desire, always desire. Because the poems are so brief, they're perfect for outdoor reading and its many distractions. Even the white space on the pages is thought-provoking. Carson includes brackets throughout to indicate destroyed papyrus or illegible letters in the original source, and the gaps they create allow space for rumination or moments of inattention while one lies on a blanket on a warm day. — Chelsea Leu From our list: Seven books to read in the sunshine 📚 Firstborn, by Lauren Christensen 📚 White Light, by Jack Lohmann 📚 Hunchback, by Saou Ichikawa Reality TV Just Leveled Up By Megan Garber The Traitors, in that way, might seem to be peak reality TV: all of these people who are famous for being famous making content for the sake of content. But the show has been an ongoing subject of passionate discussion because it is much smarter than that—it's derivative in a winking way. It doesn't merely borrow from its fellow reality shows; it adapts them into something that both celebrates reality TV and offers a sly, kaleidoscopic satire of the genre. It is a messy show that lives for drama. It brings a postmodern twist to an ever-more-influential form of entertainment. It's not just reality TV—it's hyperreality TV. Read the full article. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Explore all of our newsletters. Article originally published at The Atlantic
