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Boston Globe
04-08-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
‘They're like living rooms.' How oversized beach tents and cabanas are taking over the shore.
Well, last Tuesday, I got my answer. I rose before the traffic, drove to Orleans, handed over $32.50 to the parking attendant, trekked across the upper lot, and finally— sweating — crested Nauset Beach. But wait. The beach — where was it? I scanned the vista, but there was no ocean. No sand. What was I even looking at? As far as the eye could see, there were only cabanas and tents and canopies and umbrellas, and more cabanas and tents and canopies and umbrellas, and more and more, until it all began to feel kind of depressing in a strange and colorful way, like suburban sprawl had finally reached its inevitable destination: the shore itself. Get Love Letters: The Newsletter A weekly dispatch with all the best relationship content and commentary – plus exclusive content for fans of Love Letters, Dinner With Cupid, weddings, therapy talk, and more. Enter Email Sign Up Some of the shade systems were striped and so big Advertisement In beach chic circles, their brand names are well-known – CoolCabana, Shibumi, Neso They can cost hundreds of dollars, and have such serious SPF ratings — 50 — that it makes you forget that people once went to the beach for the sun. Advertisement By noon, the Shade Mahals were threatening to overwhelm the old-school umbrellas, and it felt like the sand itself was being gentrified. That vibe was enhanced by the fact that the shade structures were marring the view. That was true even for the lifeguard, Adam Legg. Sitting in his tall chair, he said the tents set up on the berm were making it harder to see 20 feet of shoreline. Orleans beach safety director Anthony Pike surveyed the scene at Nauset Beach, where people's beach setups have become more elaborate. John Tlumacki/Globe Staff 'They cover the whole beach,' retired fire chief Anthony Pike said as he stood at the base of the lifeguard chair. Pike, now the town's beach safety director, scanned the beach — or rather the pop-up city of shade — and noted with a mix of amazement and resignation that in decades of patrolling this beach, he's never seen it like this. Some of the structures provide more than 120 square feet of coverage. Between the space and the amenities — people stock them with luxury beach mats, tables, sound systems, and coolers with built-in blenders — it now seems possible to be at the beach without having to interact with the sand, the birds, the snack bar, the water, or, god forbid, other people or the sun, now that it's gone into beast mode. 'They're like living rooms,' said Bob Bronson, a WROR host and a judgmental witness of shadezillas he's observed at Wingaersheek and Hampton beaches. 'What's going on inside is crazy,' he said. 'I've seen blow-up couches and easy chairs, and [full-sized] fans. The Bluetooth speakers have gotten out of control.' Advertisement The day I went to Nauset, it was nearly 90 degrees and the sun was punishing, but no matter. The only people who actually had to deal with it were the dads (and somehow they were all dads). Brian Wood from Hampden struggles as he pulls beach chairs, blankets, a cooler, and a pop-up tent in his cart across the soft sand of Nauset Beach on July 30. John Tlumacki/Globe Staff Wherever you looked, there was a man wearing an enormous backpack cooler — the $325 Yeti Hopper holds 22 pounds of ice — and sweating as he pulled a heavy and expensive beach wagon, no doubt highly rated on Amazon, that was somehow not quite gliding over the sand. 'I'm a mule,' Peter Wanamaker, a vacationer from Buffalo, said cheerfully, pointing to the enormous and overflowing cart he'd schlepped across the sand. His family was ensconced in a Kennedy-style compound, with not one but two large tents joined by an umbrella. Alas, as pleasant as a day at the beach can be, the regular rules of life and real estate are still in play, and many people sitting under seemingly ideal tents or cabanas are in fact eyeing better set-ups. The cabanas, tents, and umbrellas were out in full force on a hot day last week at Nauset Beach in Orleans. John Tlumacki/Globe Staff 'I'm a little envious,' Margaret Johnson, of Bethesda, Md., said as she looked over at a CoolCabana that appeared to be larger than the one she was in, which her sister had bought. 'You're a freeloader,' her sister, Kathie Johnson, said, mock-offended. Meanwhile, on the Vineyard over the July Fourth weekend, one group was facing an even more extreme challenge. Liza Cohen, an inside the house — including specially selected pillows for each guest — she is not a 'beach person' and hence didn't realize that the game had been upped. Advertisement The first day of the trip, they hit the beach with towels only, and even though the dad was immediately sent to town to buy a CoolCabana, there were none to be found. That meant they all had to spend the entire long weekend as if it were 1970. No shade. No gourmet meals. No blended drinks. Considering the arms race a day at the beach has turned into, the outcome was almost shocking. 'It was amazing,' Cohen said. 'We had the best time.' Beth Teitell can be reached at
The Hindu
21-05-2025
- General
- The Hindu
Banu Mushtaq: A voice of empathy and resilience
Banu Mushtaq, eminent short story writer and Booker awardee for 2025, is a writer-activist deeply concerned with gender inequalities and the patriarchal violence which is invisibalised by religion and tradition. In retrospect, her major concerns and her passionate rebellious stance seem to have emerged from the Bandaya (protest) movement in Kannada literature in the 1970s and the 1980s. This was also the time which saw the coming into maturity of the second generation of women writers who discovered their authentic voices in the midst of the churming created by the people's movements in Karnataka. The phenomenal Lankesh Patrike, a weekly tabloid edited by P. Lankesh, also proved to be a platform for writers who emerged as the major representatives of women-centric fiction and non-fiction writings. Banu also doubled as a reporter for the tabloid from Hassan where she worked as a lawyer. Keen eye for the ordinary Expectedly, she was drawn into controversies over her no-holds-barred reports. These experiences which shaped her added depth and objectivity to her sensitive understanding of the lives of Muslim women. Her short stories are written with a sense of engagement and empathy with the uncomplaining, silenced victims of moribund customs. What makes her stories distinctive is her patient attention to the details of the ordinary lives of women. At times, the narrative voice in her stories resorts to rhetoric and raw anger, but her better stories haunt the readers with the depiction of wasted and unlived lives. But the stories are also about resilience and the small acts of defiance and resistance. Most certainly, the stories do not aim at appealing to the sympathy of the readers. Blending irony with emotion In one of her stories, the last prayer is for God to be born as a woman: this led to a public controversy, with some orthodox individuals demanding her excommunication. Incidentally, the prayer is often repeated in women's writing in Kannada. It is a devastating story showing how male domination, lust, and greed subject women into servitude. Tragically, this is so normalised that no one takes notice. The protagonist can only pray to God once, to 'be a woman once, Oh lord' in case he is planning to create another world. Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal is an example of how Banu can blend irony with powerful feelings. Shaista, whose husband had waxed poetic, promising to build Shaista Mahal as a monument of his love for her, marries a young girl on the fortieth day after her death. Yes, Mahals are built as beautiful graves for dead wives. In Black Cobras, the story on which Girish Kasaravalli made an extraordinary film, the wife is turned away with her three girl children because the husband, an auto rickshaw driver, wants a male child to take up his profession later. The mutavalli, a corrupt and insensitive man supports the husband. He is one of those misinterpreting religion against women. Unlike the helpless, protagonist the mutavalli's wife decides not to be a childbearing machine for her hypocritical husband any longer. Deconstructing stereotypes Banu, as a short story writer, is an accomplished narrator and manages to employ the traditional elements of storytelling to communicate a devastating portrayal of how patriarchy operates, taking advantage of the multiple pressures on women to conform. Women's writing has treated the domestic sphere as a site for examining subjugated women who do not possess the agency to question, nor the material conditions to live independently. Banu probes into this bleak world, at times almost suggesting that there is no exit. Her stories powerfully deconstruct the stereotypes about safe, protected domesticity and of marriage as companionship. What emerges is the troubling insight that only foundational changes in society can undo gender inequality.
