A short but comforting poem for these trying times (“Let July be July, let August be August”)
Four women on what it’s like to live alone during stage 4 lockdown (“My family checks in on me but I always give them the same answer: I’m fine. I don’t want them to worry about me being lonely. But it does get to me sometimes. I’m napping a lot.. I’ve also started drinking a lot. It was really bad the first week of lockdown – maybe a bottle a night – but now I have half a bottle a night, mostly as a sleeping aid. My self-imposed rule use to be no drinking on a school night. Now it’s no drinking before 4pm.”)
We’ve recently discovered this guy who makes cooking TikToks in the woods and tbh we’re a bit in love (this is our fave)
The new dating timeline
This brilliant Wired article profiles a group of Flat Earthers (aka people who legitimately believe the earth is flat) and the difficulties they face when looking for love and being in a relationship. Prepare to be seriously, seriously gobsmacked (“Some flat Earthers married globers years before they ‘woke up’. Rob Mackenzie, a 50-year-old former aircraft engineer, met his wife in 2000 but became a flat Earther in 2016. His wife doesn't get angry about the subject but the two of them don't discuss flat Earth in the house. When he watches a flat Earth video, he does it alone and with headphones.”)
Stories of people who texted their exes during lockdown
The brilliant Lisa Taddeo on the complexities of parenthood, and what it’s like to be called a ‘bad mother’ (“Last year I took my then four-year-old on my book tour, and was often asked why I didn’t leave her at home. I gave a number of valid reasons, and was perplexed by how incredulous people were at my choices, at others’ choices. I was surprised by how very many of us – both men and women – can simply not help commenting on someone else’s motherhood. Calling women bad mothers is an international pastime.”)
This dreamy, honest, exquisitely written essay about what we dream about when we dream about Rome is the travel writing we all need right now
If you don’t follow already Grece Ghanem on Instagram, you’re seriously missing out
Tiny love stories
Where can you be safe in this world? (“We all know, deep down, that we can never be safe. Don’t we? Searching for safety is a panicked thrashing around that drags you deeper and deeper into the quicksand. For a while in my 20s I went to the doctor once a week – four different doctors: so, as far as they each knew, I went to the doctor once a month – just to check whether I was safe from dying. They would say yes, and I’d have a day of relaxing, and then I’d think, well, yesterday I was safe, but how about now?”)
You don’t have to wait for someone else to create your happily ever after
Gwyneth Paltrow does a pretty good job of explaining that whole conscious uncoupling thing in this article for Vogue (“In those early, dark days, I struggled to imagine what my life would be. I wasn’t sure how a mother goes about untangling herself from the man with whom her DNA has co-mingled. It seemed impossible, that kind of extraction or extrication. I had not grown up around a lot of divorce, and the divorce I had been privy to had been bitter, acrimonious, unending. With all my heart, I did not want that.”)
Love this home tour on Man Repeller (the art wall! that mirror!)
