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It’s common knowledge that Henry VIII had six wives. But the cataclysmic love triangle between Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn gets all the airtime, while wives three to six are an afterthought.
In director Alexander Korda’s rollicking film The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Katherine Parr (wife six) was reduced to a throwaway joke in the film’s last moments. Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz’s upcoming film Firebrand is the first to bring Parr to centre stage – and not before time.
Right on cue, new evidence has come to light giving an intriguing glimpse into Parr’s relationship with her capricious husband. Namely, the discovery of Henry’s notes in a book authored by his wife.
Katherine Parr was unlike her five predecessors. Aged 30 and already twice widowed in 1543, the king made her an offer she couldn’t refuse, forcing her to break off another planned marriage. The increasingly disabled Henry had finally stopped pursuing nubile broodmares and sought out a companion instead.
Parr deftly navigated the tangled politics of the royal family, brokering a reconciliation between the king and the two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, he had declared to be bastards. She may even have helped in restoring them to the line of succession.
Henry certainly came to trust her judgment. When he set off for his final, futile war in France in 1544, he made her regent in his absence. Part of the appeal, it seems, was her bookish piety. Parr was the first English queen to publish a book and the first English woman to publish under her own name.
Her three books were pious exercises, beginning with a safe collection of translated texts titled Psalmes or Prayers (1544) and becoming more daring thereafter. The Lamentation of a Sinner (1547) was written during Henry’s husband’s lifetime, but its theology was too assertively Protestant to be published until he was safely dead.
The earlier books, though, seem to have delighted the king. He inscribed the queen’s own copy of Psalmes or Prayers: “Remember this writer / when you do pray / For he is yours”. He had always been theatrically pious and in his last years – brooding, in pain, nurturing his many humiliations – he turned to religion with melancholy intensity.
We know what Henry thought religion should mean to his subjects: a tough, moralistic faith without much room for forgiveness, whose keynote was obedience to himself. But what about his personal faith?
Enter a new discovery by Canadian literary scholar Micheline White.
Queen Katherine ordered a few luxury copies of Psalmes or Prayers printed on vellum, with delicate hand colouring. One of these, now in Buckinghamshire’s Wormsley Library is festooned with marginal markings and “manicules” – little doodled hands with fingers pointing to a passage some reader wanted to emphasise.
White has established, by meticulously comparing these distinctive manicules with others whose provenance we know, that this attentive reader was none other than Henry VIII.
It’s no surprise Henry should have taken comfort in the Biblical psalms. They were supposedly the work of a pious but lecherous king, David, with whom he strongly identified.
The passages Henry marked are a telling glimpse of the extent – and the limits – of his self awareness. His illness and other troubles are much on his mind: he marks prayers to “take away thy plagues … turn away thine anger”.
He is also drawn to prayers lamenting sin and asking God for wisdom. “Give me a new heart, and a right spirit, and take from me all wicked and sinful desires.”
The sentiments indicate a man who was serious both about his kingly responsibilities and personal spiritual predicament. Unlike many other murderous narcissists, Henry VIII did know he was a sinner who needed forgiveness. But his confidence “that my sins may be purged” suggests tension between the eagerness with which he sought grace and his refusal to countenance mercy – royal or divine – for his subjects.
Queen Katherine, as the popular rhyme tells us, “survived” her marriage, but it was a close run thing.
In 1546, the last summer of Henry VIII’s life, she was suspected – on good grounds – of nurturing a nest of religious radicals at court. Henry allowed himself to be persuaded that all her pious talk was actually an attempt to allure him into heresy.
According to a late but well-informed account by the martyrologist John Foxe, she got wind of the danger and immediately threw herself on his mercy. Katherine protested that she, a “poor woman so much inferior in all respects of nature unto you”, had simply been seeking his religious guidance.
“Not so, by Saint Mary,” Henry replied. “You are become a Doctor, Kate, to instruct us (as we take it) and not to be instructed, or directed by us.”
No, she protested: she had only sought to distract him with talk during “this painful time of your infirmity” and had in the process learned a great deal from his wisdom. With someone else, that might have been laying it on too thick, but she knew her man.
“And is it even so, sweetheart?” Henry replied. “Then perfect friends we are now again.” The arrest warrant was cancelled.
Months later, the king was dead. Unfortunately, Queen Katherine married the man she’d kept waiting with almost indecent haste – only to be cold shouldered when she fell pregnant and left to die in childbirth. History is thin on happy endings.
Alec Ryrie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
In the evolving relationship between technology and society, humans have shown themselves to be incredibly adaptable. What once left us breathless, soon becomes integrated into our everyday lives.
The astonishing functionalities of large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT were, just a few months ago, the epitome of cutting-edge AI. They are now on course to be mere add-ons and plugins to our text editors and search engines.
We’ll soon find ourselves relying on their capabilities, and seamlessly incorporating them into our routines.
Yet, this rapid acclimatisation leaves us with a lingering question: what’s next? As our expectations shift, we are left wondering about the next innovation that will capture our imagination.
People will try to achieve all kinds of smart – and not-so-smart – things with AI. Many ideas will fail, others will have a lasting impact.
Our crystal ball is not much better than yours, but we can try to think about what’s coming next in a structured way. For AI to have a lasting impact, it needs to be not only technologically feasible, but also economically viable, and normatively acceptable – in other words, it complies with the values that society demands we conform to.
There are some AI technologies waiting on the sidelines right now that hold promise. The four we think are waiting in the wings are next-level GPT, humanoid robots, AI lawyers, and AI-driven science. Our choices appear ready from a technological point of view, but whether they satisfy all three of the criteria we’ve mentioned is another matter. We chose these four because they were the ones that kept coming up in our investigations into progress in AI technologies.
The startup company DoNotPay claims to have built a legal chatbot – built on LLM technology – that can advise defendants in court.
The company recently said it would let its AI system help two defendants fight speeding tickets in real-time. Connected via an earpiece, the AI can listen to proceedings and whisper legal arguments into the ear of the defendant, who then repeats them out loud to the judge.
After criticism and a lawsuit for practising law without a license, the startup postponed the AI’s courtroom debut. The potential for the technology will thus not be decided by technological or economic constraints, but by the authority of the legal system.
Lawyers are well-paid professionals and the costs of litigation are high, so the economic potential for automation is huge. However, the US legal system currently seems to oppose robots representing humans in court.
Scientists are increasingly turning to AI for insights. Machine learning, where an AI system improves at what it does over time, is being employed to identify patterns in data. This enables the systems to propose novel scientific hypotheses – proposed explanations for phenomena in nature. These may even be capable of surpassing human assumptions and biases.
For example, researchers at the University of Liverpool used a machine learning system called a neural network to rank chemical combinations for battery materials, guiding their experiments and saving time.
The complexity of neural networks means that there are gaps in our understanding of how they actually make decisions – the so-called black box problem. Nevertheless, there are techniques that can shed light on the logic behind their answers and this can lead to unexpected discoveries.
While AI cannot currently formulate hypotheses independently, it can inspire scientists to approach problems from new perspectives.
We will soon see more new versions of AI chatbots based on the latest LLM technology, known as GPT-4. We’ll see AI that can handle different types of data, such as images and speech, as well as text. These are called multimodal systems.
But let’s gaze a little further into the future. Auto-GPT, an advanced AI tool released by Significant Gravitas, is already making waves in the tech industry.
Auto-GPT is given a general goal, such as planning a birthday party, and splits it into sub-tasks which it then completes by itself, without human input. This sets it apart from ChatGPT.
Auto-GPT incorporates AI agents, or systems, that make decisions based on predetermined rules and goals. Despite installation limitations, such an functionality problems when used with Windows, Auto-GPT shows great potential in various applications.
Humanoid robots – those that look and move like us – have significantly advanced since the first Darpa Robotics Challenge in 2015, a contest where teams built robots to perform a series of complex tasks set by the organisers. These included getting out of a car, opening a door and drilling a hole in a wall. Many struggled to achieve the objectives.
However, startups are now developing “humanoids” capable of doing tasks like these and being used in warehouses and factories.
Advancements in AI fields such as computer vision, as well as in power-dense batteries which provide short bursts of high current, have enabled robots to navigate complex environments, maintaining balance dynamically – in real time. Figure AI, a company building humanoid robots for warehouse work, has already secured US$70 million (£55 million) in investment funding.
Other companies, including 1X, Apptronik and Tesla, are also investing in humanoid robots, which indicates that the field is maturing. Humanoid robots offer advantages over other robots in tasks requiring navigation, manoeuvrability, and adaptability because in part, they will be operating in environments that have been built around human needs.
The long term success of these four will depend on more than just computation power.
Humanoid robots could fail to gain traction if their production and maintenance costs outweigh their benefits. AI lawyers and chatbot assistants might possess remarkable efficiency. However, their adoption might be halted if their decision making conflicts with society’s “moral compass” or laws don’t agree with their use.
Striking a balance between cost-effectiveness and society’s values is crucial for ensuring these technologies can truly flourish.
Fabian Stephany receives funding as part of this lectureship via the Dieter-Schwarz-Foundation.
Johann Laux receives funding from the “The Emerging Laws of Oversight” project, supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.
An Islamic State-linked group in Uganda attacked a school in June, killing more than 40 people, mostly students, in what seems to be an escalating trend of terrorism against schools. The attackers set fire to school dormitories and used machetes to kill and maim students.
This was the latest in a cycle of shocking attacks on schools around the world. The Nigerian group Boko Haram infamously kidnapped more than 200 girls from a school in 2014, and it has attacked other schools throughout the country.
Many more attacks have occurred since then. In Afghanistan, IS affiliate IS-K has repeatedly bombed educational institutions in recent years, often killing dozens of children or teens. In 2020 in Cameroon, sources suggest that separatists fighting for their own, independent state attacked a bilingual school, killing eight children.
Why would a group carry out such an attack, killing schoolchildren? These attacks are happening more frequently in recent years, and they also tend to be carried out by particular types of groups.
I recently co-wrote a book, Insurgent Terrorism: Intergroup Relations and the Killing of Civilians, with political scientists Victor Asal and R. Karl Rethemeyer, examining the use of terrorism (intentional civilian targeting) by rebel organisations in civil wars. We dedicated a chapter to understanding attacks on schools and discovered a few patterns.
First, attacks on schools are on the rise. In the years examined in our book, 1998-2012, we found a marked increase starting in the late 2000s during civil wars. In the 1990s and early 2000s, there fewer than 20 attacks per year on schools by rebel organisations. But between 2009 and 2012, there were more than 90 such attacks per year.
Examining more recent data on terrorism generally, and not only during civil wars, we see a similar increase starting in the late 2000s. The graphic below shows a massive increase in terrorist attacks on schools.
Terrorist attacks on schools, 1970-2020
The annual average number of terrorist attacks on schools in the 1980s and 1990s, according to the Global Terrorism Database, was less than 60. In the 2000s, the average year saw nearly 80 school attacks. In the 2010s, there was an average of 250 terrorist attacks on schools per year. After the early 2010s peak, the number of attacks started to decrease, but numbers are still far above what they were in the 1990s or early 2000s.
The increase in terrorism against schools is in part because influential global networks such as al-Qaida and IS seem to encourage it, but also because groups learn from others that this is a good way to bring attention to their cause, to force a government to give in, or to intimidate a rival community.
Read more: Nigeria's new national security bosses: 5 burning issues they need to focus on
A second pattern we noticed was that the organisations that carry out these kinds of attacks tend to have a few attributes in common. Groups that attack schools tend to be in alliances with other rebel or terrorist organisations. These alliances provide extra resources to groups, which are essential for large-scale attacks. For example, allies might provide explosives, vehicles or recruits. Cooperative relationships with other rebels can also contribute to heinous attacks because groups learn tactics from each other, and they might pressure each other to use extreme tactics.
This seems to be the case with the group behind the recent Uganda attack, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). It has been cooperating with IS since 2017 and has received funding from it. The funds and propaganda support seem to have enabled ADF to carry out increasingly vicious attacks. Additionally, other IS-affiliated groups have attacked schools, so it is possible that the main IS encourages this, or that the groups are learning from each other.
We found that groups that had recently been subjected to government crackdowns were more likely to subsequently target schools, while groups that had recently received government concessions didn’t attack schools the following year. This is consistent with other research finding that government repression of religious freedom seems to lead to terrorist attacks on school.
The Uganda school attack, where boys and girls were killed and buildings set alight with people inside, was apparently intended to send a message to the government and its president Yoweri Museveni. Victims reported that the attackers said: “We have succeeded in destabilising Museveni’s country.”
Interestingly, in our research, we did not find that religiously oriented groups, such as Islamist groups, were more likely than other types of groups to attack schools. Certainly, some Islamist groups have carried out these attacks – such as the recent Uganda school killings.
IS-K’s attacks are intended to intimidate the mostly Shia Hazara minority community, consistent with IS-K’s extreme religious views. But non-religious groups, such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the Communist Party of India (Maoist), have also repeatedly attacked schools.
Overall, attacks on schools occur because militant organisations see that they bring a great deal of attention – including from international news media – to their cause. Terrorism is fundamentally violent propaganda, and groups that use terrorism constantly innovate, seeking new tactics to help them stand out. They also hope the increasingly extreme methods will pressure governments to give up.
It seems likely that terrorist attacks against schools are going to continue. Governments should prioritise safeguarding educational institutions, and the international community should work harder to prevent these kinds of attacks.
Brian J. Phillips does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The UK is set to roll out a national lung cancer screening programme for people aged 55 to 74 with a history of smoking. The idea is to catch lung cancer at an early stage when it is more treatable.
Quoting NHS England data, the health secretary, Steve Barclay, said that if lung cancer is caught at an early stage, “patients are nearly 20 times more likely to get at least another five years to spend with their families”.
Five-year survival rates are often quoted as key measures of cancer treatment success. Barclay’s figure is no doubt correct, but is it the right statistic to use to justify the screening programme?
Time-limited survival rates (typically given as five-, ten- and 20-year) can improve because cancers caught earlier are easier to treat, but also because patients identified at an earlier stage of the disease would live longer, with or without treatment, than those identified later. The latter is known as “lead-time bias”, and can mean that statistics like five-year survival rates paint a misleading picture of how effective a screening programme really is.
My new book, How to Expect the Unexpected, tackles issues exactly like this one, in which subtleties of statistics can give a misleading impression, causing us to make incorrect inferences and hence bad decisions. We need to be aware of such nuance so we can identify it when it confronts us, and so we can begin to reason our way beyond it.
To illustrate the effect of lead-time bias more concretely, consider a scenario in which we are interested in “diagnosing” people with grey hair. Without a screening programme, greyness may not be spotted until enough grey hairs have sprouted to be visible without close inspection. With careful regular “screening”, greyness may be diagnosed within a few days of the first grey hairs appearing.
People who obsessively check for grey hairs (“screen” for them) will, on average, find them earlier in their life. This means, on average, they will live longer “post-diagnosis” than people who find their greyness later in life. They will also tend to have higher five-year survival rates.
But treatments for grey hair do nothing to extend life expectancy, so it clearly isn’t early treatment that is extending the post-diagnosis life of the screened patients. Rather, it’s simply the fact their condition was diagnosed earlier.
To give another, more serious example, Huntington’s disease is a genetic condition that doesn’t manifest itself symptomatically until around the age of 45. People with Huntington’s might go on to live until they are 65, giving them a post-diagnosis life expectancy of about 20 years.
However, Huntington’s is diagnosable through a simple genetic test. If everyone was screened for genetic diseases at the age of 20, say, then those with Huntington’s might expect to live another 45 years. Despite their post-diagnosis life expectancy being longer, the early diagnosis has done nothing to alter their life expectancy.
Screening can also lead to the phenomenon of overdiagnosis.
Although more cancers are detected through screening, many of these cancers are so small or slow-growing that they would never be a threat to a patient’s health – causing no problems if left undetected. Still, the C-word induces such mortal fear in most people that many will, often on medical advice, undergo painful treatment or invasive surgery unnecessarily.
The detection of these non-threatening cancers also serves to improve post-diagnosis survival rates when, in fact, not finding them would have made no difference to the patients’ lives.
So, what statistics should we be using to measure the effectiveness of a screening programme? How can we demonstrate that screening programmes combined with treatment are genuinely effective at prolonging lives?
The answer is to look at mortality rates (the proportion of people who die from the disease) in a randomised controlled trial. For example, the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) found that in heavy smokers, screening with low-dose CT scans (and subsequent treatment) reduced deaths from lung cancer by 15% to 20%, compared with those not screened.
So, while screening for some diseases is effective, the reductions in deaths are typically small because the chances of a person dying from any particular disease are small. Even the roughly 15% reduction in the relative risk of dying from lung cancer seen in the heavy smoking patients in the NLST trial only accounts for a 0.3 percentage point reduction in the absolute risk (1.8% in the screened group, down from 2.1% in the control group).
For non-smokers, who are at lower risk of getting lung cancer, the drop in absolute risk may be even smaller, representing fewer lives saved. This explains why the UK lung cancer screening programme is targeting older people with a history of smoking – people who are at the highest risk of the disease – in order to achieve the greatest overall benefits. So, if you are or have ever been a smoker and are aged 55 to 74, please take advantage of the new screening programme – it could save your life.
But while there do seem to be some real advantages to lung cancer screening, describing the impact of screening using five-year survival rates, as the health secretary and his ministers have done, tends to exaggerate the benefits.
If we really want to understand the truth about what the future will hold for screened patients, then we need to be aware of potential sources of bias and remove them where we can.
Christian Yates is a member of Independent SAGE.
I first met Gina Chung at a going-away party for a mutual writer friend. In a warm back room, during the final days of summer, I wedged myself into a small circle and caught the final bits of something Chung said. She paused to clue me into their conversation. I was struck by her kindness and easy generosity, the way she openly shared her writing routine and practices with a group of old friends and new acquaintances. Months later, I heard about her debut novel, Sea Change (Vintage). The book sucked me into its effervescent, marbled world and ultimately buoyed my spirit, just like its author had at that summer party.
Sea Change follows Ro, an Asian American woman who is floating into her thirties on her own. Partly struggling, partly aimless, Ro is estranged from her mother, and grieving her father, who disappeared on a sea exhibition a decade earlier. Ro’s only companion is a Giant Pacific octopus, Dolores, the last remaining link to her father. As Dolores is about to be sold to a private investor, Ro has to reframe her understanding of past and present to make sense of her new world. Chung’s prose bubbles with delectable humor and metaphors, burrows into hard truths, and sets out to explore uncharted emotional ranges.
Chung is the recipient of the 2021 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellowship and a number of literary awards, including a 2023 Pushcart Prize. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and the Rumpus, among others. She has a forthcoming short story collection, Green Frog (Vintage, 2024).
I spoke with Chung about Sea Change over Zoom a few weeks before her book launch. We talked about the role of silence and the unsaid in Asian American families, humor’s proximity to grief, subverting conventionality in character tropes, and how to take care of oneself in service of one’s art.
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The Rumpus: I noticed that a lot of your work, Sea Change and a number of your short stories, often features the natural world. What drew you to ocean life and sea creatures as subjects and counterpoints to the characters in your novel?
Gina Chung: I’ve always loved writing about the natural world and thinking about animals that live in different ecosystems than us because it reminds me that we as human beings are also animals. I think we often forget that about ourselves; it’s really easy for us to see ourselves as being somehow apart from or above nature when in actuality we are very much a part of it. Whereas humans can and often do lie about what we need, animals can’t hide or be dishonest about their needs. Thinking about animals and what they need to survive and thrive inspires me as a writer to also try to be more honest on the page.
Rumpus: Within the characters’ environment, money is an oceanic force, capitalism as much a precondition to existence in the novel as it is in current modern life. With our protagonist, Ro, it seems there are few things that she can do in opposition to these forces, but she actively defies, withdraws from, and avoids this system in her own ways. Can withdrawal and avoidance be a form of agency?
Chung: In a lot of ways, withdrawing from or avoiding a decision can seem like a way to surrender one’s agency in a situation, but at the same time—my therapist and I always talk about this—not making a choice is still kind of making a choice as well. For Ro, avoidance is a huge part of how she navigates her day-to-day life because she’s been hurt and carries a lot of pain. That makes her feel afraid to engage directly with things that might hurt her or that she might be in disagreement with. When it comes to the impending sale of Dolores, it is one area where, even if she’s not consciously doing anything to fight back against the sale, she feels a direct kind of no in response. I wanted that to be an inciting incident for the book, too, because it gets her to understand how much this octopus means to her and how much she stands to lose if she were to lose this one point of connection.
Rumpus: This inciting incident also pits her against her best friend, Yoonhee. I was fascinated by their relationship. They grew up together with similar backgrounds but end up in very different positions at the aquarium and have different levels of motivation to rise the ranks. Why was it important for you to juxtapose their ambition and upward mobility?
Chung: I loved the idea of, as you said, pitting them a little bit against each other with this development that happens in their workplace. I wanted Yoonhee to feel like a character who has genuinely been a part of Ro’s life for a long time. They’ve seen each other through different ups and downs and phases of life since childhood. I’m always fascinated by the topic of friendship, in particular, old friendship. What does it mean to have old friends who have been with you for many years and who have been witness to all the different past selves that you’ve inhabited? It’s such a gift, but it can also be such a challenge because when you are friends with someone for that long, you both start to feel a little bit of ownership over past versions of one another. People change and grow over time. Friends can grow apart. They can also come back together.
I wanted Yoonhee to feel a bit like a foil to Ro but be a real person herself, too, as someone who has such a completely different outlook in life. She’s someone who is pretty straightforward, knows what she wants, and doesn’t hesitate to go after it. Just because she tends to be more conventional doesn’t mean that she’s a flat or two-dimensional character. I also wanted to examine what happens in a person’s life when they get to a certain age and feel like, “Oh, my gosh! Everyone is leaving me behind.” Because they’re so close, Ro can’t help but look at Yoonhee and feel, even if she doesn’t necessarily want the same things that Yoonhee wants, that she should want them and that she’s nowhere near getting them.
Rumpus: Craft-wise, how do you write someone who might fall into some of these tropes but also honor their individuality?
Chung: One thing I wanted was to have them interacting and bickering over small things—the way you do with siblings, old friends, or anyone you’ve known for years—and just see the ways in which they are both able to call each other out. That’s what really felt like the core of Yoonhee to me, this person who deeply cares about her friend. Sometimes there’s no other way of expressing it than, “Why are you this way?” in this exasperated but also deeply loving way. I also wanted to show, with the flashback sections of earlier versions of themselves, how vulnerable Yoonhee is. Just because she seems to have her life together doesn’t mean she doesn’t experience pain or doubt or fear.
Rumpus: Through flashbacks, the book alternates a lot between the past and present. How did you kind of conceive of this structure? I felt very taken care of as a reader to get into the story in this way.
Chung: I’m so glad to hear that. I love an alternating structure in a book, and there are so many books that do this amazingly well. One that was particularly close to my heart at the time of writing was Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things, which is also a later-in-life coming-of-age story, against a backdrop of family dysfunction that shows how she’s gotten to this point in her life. In that book, those scenes from the main character’s childhood and upbringing really helped me as a reader anchor the choices she was making in the present day. I wanted to do something similar with Ro: give the reader a vivid picture of not only who this person is today and how she is navigating the world but also what has led her to this point, including her parents’ choices. In those past sections, I especially wanted to excavate who Ro’s father was, since he’s not around in the present day of the novel. I wanted to give the reader a chance to get to know who he was and what he meant to Ro.
Rumpus: As you mentioned, the men in Ro’s life, her father and also her ex-boyfriend, are a bit more phantom than flesh. They are bigger figures in her head through her memories than they are in the present. They exist through their absences. What did you want to portray about absences and the stories we conjure about the people who are no longer in our lives?
Chung: You’re so right in saying that a person’s absence, once they’re no longer in our lives, can almost become stronger than their presence was back when they were around. There’s a kind of danger in that, since the person who is mourning might get caught up in imagining that things were better than they actually were with that person. Maybe they think that in losing that person, they’ve lost some irretrievable part of themselves too. With Ro, the book starts off with her having gone through this breakup with her boyfriend, who is leaving her for a privately funded mission to colonize Mars. As anyone who has ever been through a breakup knows, the things that you didn’t quite appreciate about that person when you were together seem to come back in full relief when they’re no longer in your life. That’s what she’s going through, in the process of mourning that relationship, and also the loss of her father, who was hugely influential in how she sees the world. Her father introduced her to this love for animals that they both share, and he encouraged her to be curious about the world. His absence is so clearly felt throughout her later adulthood. I wanted to show just how searing that kind of loss can be and how in the process of mourning someone, whether it’s because you broke up with them or because they’re literally gone and you will never be able to connect with them again, the mourning is never linear. Of course, it’s not that we shouldn’t remember or grieve the ones we’ve lost, but I wanted to explore what can happen if you get too caught up in that mourning.
Rumpus: I feel like silence, too, is more of a presence than an absence, in the way it pervades relationships between family, friends, and romantic partners in the novel. Silence feels particularly pertinent in my own Asian American community, especially in how it persists in the first generation and is continuing to manifest in other ways in future generations. What roles did you hope for silence to inhabit for the characters in the book?
Chung: I feel that so deeply. The silences of ancestors, the silences of our parents and grandparents, as well as the silences that we inherit as children of immigrants. It’s hard to ask folks about the past because there’s a lot of pain within those memories. It’s definitely something that I’ve noticed a lot in my own family. In many Asian and Asian American families, there’s an acute awareness of what it would cost for the other person to relive their story just by telling it. That’s something I’m always thinking about and living with. I don’t want to perpetuate the trope of the silent, sad Asian American family either, but I do think that silence exists for a good reason, and a lot of those reasons are bound up in pain and trauma. With Ro, I think we see it most with her mother because she and her mother have never been able to talk about things like her father’s disappearance. They’ve never really been able to process what they’ve both experienced and been through. In writing Ro, I wanted to investigate what it would be like to grow up with that silence and not even know how to broach it with your mom, your friends, or even yourself. Ro doesn’t have the language to name any of the feelings that she’s grown up experiencing.
Rumpus: One of my favorite passages in the novel is: “I used to wonder if we would take better care of our bodies if our skin was transparent, if every little thing we did and said and ate was observable. If every hurtful or careless thing we ever said to one another manifested itself visually in the body.” It’s interesting how everyone has their own version or perception of self-care, especially when we consider the juxtaposition between what we think we need and what others think we need. Could we talk about your intention with writing about self-care?
Chung: Ro is not very good at taking care of herself throughout most of the book. I think taking care of yourself—and I mean real care, not just the commodified ideas of self-care that we’re all sold nowadays—is actually very difficult, and it’s a practice. As someone who also struggles at times to take care of myself, I wanted to explore a character who has never really learned how to do this, and this is something I feel like I haven’t really seen much of in contemporary literature when it comes to portrayals of Asian American women and women of color. There is a sort of larger cultural moment right now around what I’ve seen some people refer to as “the disaster woman trope,” but I feel like those characters are almost always white women, and their meltdowns are still usually played for laughs. But I wanted to show what it would look like to have a character who is so afraid of everyone leaving her behind that she can’t help but leave herself in all these ways, whether it’s by drinking way too much and driving home afterward or avoiding important conversations with the people in her life that she loves. I wanted to show all the small and big ways that we as humans abandon ourselves when we’ve been abandoned many times before.
At the same time, I did notice throughout the course of writing the novel that whenever I put Ro in the position of having to take care of someone else, she was actually not bad at it, much to her surprise. It’s sometimes hard and uncomfortable for her, but she’s able to stay present in those moments in ways that she can’t always be for herself. I wanted to show how she is able to learn how to do those things and, in time, show up for herself too.
Rumpus: As someone who balances full-time employment with writing, do you have self-care practices that help you continue creating art?
Chung: I’m very used to thinking of myself as a brain in a jar. I don’t always remember to consider my bodily needs, especially when things get really busy or when I’m in the middle of an engrossing project. I’ve had to remind myself over the years to slow down when I need to and to take care of the container through which I experience the world.
My main tip is to listen to your body as much as you can. Take breaks and sleep when you need to. I’m someone who can easily ignore all my body’s warning signs and just keep going until the point of exhaustion. It’s just not worth it most of the time. There’s no need to flagellate yourself in the name of your art, and the wellspring of your creativity can’t be replenished if you don’t rest, no matter how guilty you might feel for not getting down a certain number of words per day. I’m still learning how to be gentle with myself in doing this. Now, whenever I feel like all the creativity is gone and I’ve lost it for good, I’ve at least learned to believe that’s not true. It’s my lizard brain panicking. I know it will come back. The only way you can care for your art is to care for yourself.
Rumpus: I laughed throughout the book, sometimes out loud, but it surprised me because some of my laughter was near moments of strife or grief. To what extent does humor and absurdity color your understanding of grief? How can humor be a tool in explaining grief, if at all?
Chung: Humor is so important to me, both as a writer and as a human being. Humor oftentimes hinges around this element of surprise. There’s this idea that writing about grief or difficult experiences can’t be funny or that it’s one note. So much of life isn’t like that, though. There have been times in my life where I’m going through heavy situations, but that doesn’t mean I don’t laugh if I see something surprising or ridiculous. Even in moments of my own despondency, I sometimes laugh at myself because of how dramatic I know I’m being. I think it’s important to be able to do that because otherwise life can be overwhelmingly difficult, and having those moments where you’re either laughing at yourself or at the situation is healthy and also lifesaving in a way. In terms of writing, I think funny scenes can sharpen the emotional quality of the sad ones, and vice versa. It’s like in cooking, where you have complementary but contrasting flavors, they heighten each other.
***
Author photo by S.M. Sukardi
My former colleague Osman Durrani, who has died aged 77, was a scholar of German literature and culture with a broad range of research interests. He wrote books on Goethe, Faust and the Bible (1977) and Faust: Icon of Modern Culture (2004), and another on fictions of Germany in the modern novel. He also edited an anthology of German Romantic poetry and had a collection of his poems, After Sunset, published in 1978.
There was more to Osman’s range than classical literature, though. He was a close observer of the contemporary literary scene, a friend of the novelist Joseph von Westphalen, and a key participant in the 1990s at conferences on post-unification German themes, one of which he organised himself at University College Durham in 1994, resulting in the publication The New Germany: Literature and Society after Unification, co-edited with Colin Good and Kevin Hilliard. To the end of his life he enjoyed reviewing books, for academic journals and the Times Literary Supplement, insisting that a review should never take more than a day to write.
Continue reading...I was lucky enough to be asked to draw these two gorgeous dogs. Both in graphite pencil on A4 paper.
Here’s my latest Dorset drawing, titled from John Masefield’s poem Sea Fever.
It’s drawn with my usual Mitsubishi Hi-Uni pencils on Daler-Rowney smooth heavyweight cartridge paper. The location is the famous Durdle Door with the Isle of Portland in the distant background.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, social media was criticized as a source of misinformation and conspiracy theories and, more recently, as a risk to youth mental health. We do not dispute these claims, but it is important to acknowledge the diverse functions of social media participation, particularly during outbreaks.
As we found in our study of digital emotions during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, people do not simply use social media to share and receive information. They also use social media to participate in what emotions scholar Katrin Döveling and colleagues term “digital affect cultures.” In other words, social media platforms function as socio-emotional spaces where belonging, solidarity, and emotion management take place.Social media platforms function as socio-emotional spaces where belonging, solidarity, and emotion management take place.During a public health threat, many emotions circulate online. Our study on social media discourse during the 2014 Ebola outbreak revealed that humor was the most common response among English-language tweets. Further, we discovered that several of the most popular humor tweets used AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) and referenced Black celebrities and/or cultural moments, forming a part of Black Twitter—an influential community and communicative style that media studies scholar and commentator Marc Lamont Hill describes as a “digital counterpublic.” This led us to ask, what various types of digital humor emerge during an outbreak? And how does humor help negotiate themes of risk, contagion, and connections with others, particularly within Black Twitter?
We analyzed a corpus of 47,955 tweets from the weeks surrounding and following the first Ebola case in the United States. One major category of humor-based tweets emphasized retreat and isolation, with references to moving “to the moon” or “I’m never leaving my house” as well as fatalistic acceptance of death (“I’m going to die,” “goodbye world,” and “Ebola victims rising from the dead . . . ok. Cool”).
By contrast, Black Twitter humor—defined as tweets using AAVE, referencing Black celebrities, and/or Black cultural moments—focused on the tensions that arise when a community places high value on social relationships and is experiencing the added risk of contact with others. For example, the tweet below featuring Marques Houston brought back a memorable cultural moment in which the celebrity was roasted for his strange fashion choice. Underlying the joke is an emphasis on innovative and ridiculous fashion that allows for public life to continue despite the risks.Black Twitter humor focused on the tensions that arise when a community places high value on social relationships and is experiencing the added risk of contact with others.
In another popular example of Black Twitter humor about Ebola, a picture shows a Swisher Sweet blunt cut into small pieces, with the text “From now on there will be no more passing the blunt due to ebola everyone gets a piece of the blunt.” This humor again emphasizes the value of social connections to the point of maintaining collective smoking sessions while introducing modifications to reduce risk.
While our study focused on the 2014 Ebola outbreak, we readily found similar examples of Black Twitter humor in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, in some cases following a similar pattern of referring to Black celebrities and innovations to minimize the risk of social gatherings. In one example, an image of R&B singer, Omarion, was circulated anew as the COVID-19 Omicron variant emerged.
There were also examples of COVID-19 humor that included the use of PPE (personal protective equipment) in public spaces:
Similar to the “pieces of the blunt” tweet that circulated during the Ebola outbreak, the same idea would circulate during COVID-19, with two women on Instagram sharing a video in which they cut a joint into two pieces to jokingly minimize risk. As they cut it, they count to three, each holding a side. Both smile and laugh as they take their “mini joint.”
In our analysis of Twitter humor during Ebola, we follow other studies of disaster humor to argue that humor involves more than simply coping with the fears associated with a biomedical threat like an epidemic. Humor allowed communities to share emotional energy, reaffirm values, and redraw the lines between insider and outsider. We see hints that Twitter served a similar function during the more recent global health crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Black healthcare workers used tweets and humor in COVID-19 vaccine campaigns. Together, these findings illustrate how social media can facilitate belonging, solidarity, and emotion management in highly charged times.
Marci Cottingham is in the Sociology Department at Kenyon College. She is the author of Practical Feelings: Emotions as Resources in a Dynamic Social World.
Ariana Rose received her master’s degree in sociology with a focus on social problems and policy from the University of Amsterdam. She currently studies consciousness and neurodiversity.
We would like to hear from people who have left university without a degree classification or with ungraded work
A marking and assessment boycott has affected 145 universities, meaning that some students will leave university this summer without degree classifications, or with work ungraded. Students at the University of Edinburgh, for example, say they will be given an “empty piece of paper” when they graduate.
Are you leaving university without a degree classification or with work unmarked? How will this affect you, for instance when applying for jobs or other courses?
Continue reading...Philemon says in his watery-sage voice, Carl, you’ve neglected the tomatoes. Carl
cannot speak. Even rotted, the tomatoes are red and earnest. The rain, everyone’s rain,
falls onto Carl’s open palms. He walks like a man being reintroduced to reality.
The beds are overgrown from the months Carl spent excavating his mind, and all
for this, for Philemon to transpose from the pages of Liber Novus and into the garden.
The leaf-crunch ground is littered with post-tree apples and other forgotten harvests.
Philemon smells like parchment and smoke. Carl lags behind Philemon to indicate his understanding of his role as mentee, child, wayfarer, but Philemon matches their pacing,
moves when Carl moves. Philemon does not seem to breathe. Carl’s nose runs
from the cold. Philemon offers him the sleeve of his long robe, and gratefully,
with extreme respect, bending low to meet his wizened hand, Carl blows his nose
into the loose linens of his fully corporeal friend, Philemon, who smiles.
This was an exchange they were supposed to have: of fluids and absorption.
Years from now, Carl will become Philemon, and Philemon will go back
into the book. Years from now, Carl will be day-dreaming about a robin and
a bluebird will fly into the window of his study, misperceiving glass,
seeing it as nothing, when it is in fact a barrier, which stops bodies in motion,
that which causes abrupt death for those who see through but cannot, cannot go in.
In an unknown home in Bolinas, CA,
where the locals take down directional signs
leading into the town: Brautigan and
his flowerburgers, ghosts.
In Marfa, TX, I looked for Eileen
around every corner,
in every Donald Judd mirror cube reflection,
all plumes of cigarette smoke.
There was a Luis Jiménez bull in a gallery—
how similar was it to the sculpture that crushed him?
What manner of betrayal is it
to be destroyed by one’s own art? I should
fucking be able to answer that question.
I sipped coffee, which is not allowed in galleries—
the recognition that you are embodied,
not all mind/ transcendence/ thought forms
and ego.
In the woods of Camden, Tennessee, there’s
an area of no new growth where Patsy Cline’s
plane kissed the ground.
The time on her wristwatch read 6:20.
I went with nothing, not even flowers,
just greasy hair, so careless this close to her
resting place, that patch of woods
illuminated with nothing, the forest’s
memory of death. I longed to see
her ghost; it would be less lonely. She’ll
never know that in the backwoods of
California, there is a woman, not allowed
alone outside, who does nothing
but play Patsy Cline records.
“Stop the World
(And Let Me Off)”
A year ago, blackout drunk, an
idiot, I called you crying in the snow,
lying atop Alfred Kinsey’s grave, which is
adjacent to Clara’s grave, who wouldn’t mind;
they were open. I was doing my
Mary Shelley impression, but much less metal.
At Salvation Mountain, I took pictures of tourists,
GOD IS LOVE on the plaster hills behind the frame,
LA models sourcing Instagram content. I was sunburned,
I had not slept. I was fleeing a fire. I was fleeing
a man who claimed to know me,
and correctly referenced my grade school.
“Don’t worry, it’s me,” he said.
“I just have a new face now.”
In the diner, I asked a waiter,
“Did you know Leonard Knight?”
“You just missed him,” the waiter said,
meaning, he had only just died.
The first time I saw Body Worlds
was only the second time in my life
I’d seen an escalator, a freshman in college.
“Wow,” I said, while my peers laughed.
“Wow,” I said, giving myself away; I was from nowhere.
Though I don’t wish to over-identify with nowhere. My awe
is not disproportionate to the miracle of things.
In the exhibit, there was a pregnant woman
with a nearly nine-month fetus,
see-through. This body, her body,
the origin of human life, veins,
organs, tissue, her sacrifice,
her dedication to science and art.
They’re all perfectly mortal.
All artists die, you fanboy. All gives way to
entropy and decay, to transparency,
projections. The once-alive horse
in the Body Worlds exhibit reared,
in protest, in pain, front legs suspended,
airless, never landing.
Compartmentalization is protective, which is why I keep you under cover of night, under the covers, our intermingled carbon monoxide, inhaling each others’ poison. Everyone believes their love is special. It's a sad world, isn’t it, you said, hand on my cheek, both of us too invested to acknowledge our melodrama, azure neon bedroom LEDs, both of us blurred from the world by our horizontal orientation, our bedcover camouflage, safe from intruders. Who could find us there? No one, not even ourselves. You did not know me when you horror-spasmed in the night and I held your seizing, shook alongside you, urged you to come back from gore to the land of the living, reverse Styx crossing, baby; I meant, be reborn. I wanted to be your midwife, to deliver you, as you gripped my wrist, the imagined enemy, your nails digging in my flesh, I will allow it. You’re here, you’re safe–bewildered and almost returned. Earlier you’d suggested I read The Agony of Eros to understand the self-obliteration that must occur in order to truly know The Other, and I was offended you thought I didn’t already know Oblivion, you hadn’t even asked, when of course I did, Oblivion was the third in our polycule throuple. When I first met you, outside a cafe, awkwardly asked if you’re the hugging type, and you yielded to me for the first time, sure, we discovered an unlikely refuge in the space between us, a space that was strangely, immediately, and obviously habitable–and so we moved in, Oblivion there too of course, a package deal for us both. I try not to be jealous of Oblivion’s relationship with you, to be secure in our love, to come from a surplus mindset, the world of renewable resources, opportunity, excellence. But sometimes it becomes challenging understanding whose feelings I am feeling. Are they yours? Are they Oblivion’s? Which one of you have mine? Your intimacy with death and violence could easily be mine. My longing is yours. I tied an infinity knot in cord and gave it to you. Oblivion brought it back to me. You study these knots to learn about entropy; of course Oblivion and I are in love with you. You’re the savant genius of collapse and I’ll never know your findings, only what Oblivion mentions in passing, overly casual, as if the destruction you left us with was worthy of only study.
Hi Pen Fans!
I’m very happy to announce something very unique that we have never done here at Edison!
We now have a Special Edition Collier in Garolite! This pen is part of the Production Line, so this pen cannot be purchased directly from Edison. It will be sold only by our retailers that you see HERE.
There is a lot to discuss regarding Garolite, but allow me to give a rough outline of this pen before getting into all of the finer details….
Let’s get into some details regarding this pen and material…
As stated, Garolite is a laminated glass-reinforced thermoset composite. Many people will want to call this G10. But G10 is a specific type of Garolite. There are G7, G9, G10, G11, and many other types with differing qualities. This is CE Garolite. But for the purposes of a pen, there will be no functional differences in the various types of Garolite.
Garolite is typically used for circuit boards. But most people know of its use for knife handles or gun stock handles, since it is very stable, very durable, and extremely wear resistant. It typically patinas to a darker color, leading to some nice character over the long term.
Along with this excellent wear resistance, Garolite is also lightweight. This Garolite version of the Collier is about 3 grams heavier than an acrylic version (26g vs 29g), so there really isn’t a perceptible difference.
Despite the excellent machining qualities, Garolite still won’t cut as clean as acrylic, especially when cutting threads. As you can see in the photo below, we have engineered the visible portions of outer threads from a solid butterscotch acrylic. This makes the pen much more attractive at that location compared to just using garolite for the threaded portions. This also makes the threads more accurate and feel very smooth compared to if we had threaded garolite-to-garolite.
There is roughly a 10-15% occurrence of some of these pens turning out darker. You can see how a darker version of this pen will appear by looking at the pen at the top of this photo…
We do not have control over the darker versions, and our retailers cannot honor special requests for a darker or lighter version.
Since this material is essentially a woven fabric, many people will wonder how it will react to ink staining. The short answer is that yes…the material can take on ink and show stains. However, we are finding that simply soaking the stain in water for a few minutes and then scrubbing with a test-tube brush or an old toothbrush works very well and has no negative effect on the material. The photo below shows Waterman Serenity Blue before and after a stain….
Of course, Waterman is a relatively gentle ink. But our tests are showing that just about every ink out there can be removed (we were actually able to remove Baystate Blue!). But more stubborn cases might require a household cleaner. If your pen develops stains that you cannot remove with just water, contact us for a more thorough method of cleaning.
But in the end…if you want to avoid the possibility of stains, we recommend not taking the pen ‘on-the-go’ where it might get bumped and jostled, causing ink to spurt from the nib. But if you do encounter stains, we can share excellent methods for removing them.
I think that’s everything! I’m sure that there will be questions regarding this new pen and material, so please reach out and we’ll be happy to help!
The post Special Edition Garolite Collier in the Production Line! appeared first on Edison Pen Co.
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