Assalam Alaykum, everyone. Welcome to the third edition of the What, a series where I share my favourite media and some of what I've been into each month (or more 😉).
Enjoy!
i. READING
Sometimes I consider the possibility that a lot of social media addiction and toxicity is born of our lack of third spaces outside of the internet. Although, not as big a problem in Nigeria, this piece on third places touches on things I've thought about the subject as well. Coupled with—
—this piece, which I read right after that one, I wondered why the third places we do have only get progressively louder and how much it's a struggle for sensory-sensitive folks like myself. What exactly about noise is appealing to the design of restaurants? (But also other places).
Everything looks the same even though we now celebrate authenticity and are quick to label things as authentic. The author proposes that internet algorithms are finding life and consumers are rewarding this homogeneity— due to a sense of exclusivity/expensiveness. The performance of wealth and its accompanying phenomena are certainly a part of the problem.
This series from LitHub and Dirt is one of my favourite on the internet right now. Writers X Money. We need to talk about it. It also helps that I enjoy pieces that get down and critical about how money moves in relatable and personal lives— pieces that we see less and less of.
“Money can’t be expunged from the text, it can only be repressed, and in being repressed, these novels become the site of a neurosis that can be endlessly discussed but never quite explained.”
Writers share how money works in their lives.
Privileged people say a lot of wrong things. We examine and learn how we too might be wrong. On what it means for only Western journalism to be considered credible.
I enjoy reading translations as much as I enjoy reading books in their original languages and I've always wondered about the influences on translation choices. How much of the author's original intent is affected by the new language, the time of translation, the identity of the translator and the sociocultural fabric? One thing that never really occurred to me was how much biases travel across time and cause stories to be perceived the same way—a reductive and very unfortunate reality.
— In her 1981 keynote speech at the American Writers Congress, she warned that the business had already tipped too far away from the work of writers and editors, so that “the vitality in the arts which promoters like to talk about is false. Beneath the headlines of blockbusters and bestsellers, underneath the froth of the book fairs,” she averred, “something is wrong.”
Longform piece on the author's experience of nearly drowning and afterwards.
“The normative role of the image in conflict and disaster zones is mired in its controversies. The Pulitzer Prize is littered with traumatic images that have come to define key points in global, political and military history. Strange, almost self-indulgent, fable-like titles such as “The Terror of War”, from 1972 Hiroshima and “The Vulture and the Little Girl” from the 90s famine in South Sudan, as well as Fikret Alić’s emaciated image, in a concentration camp in Omarska during the Bosnian genocide, were catalysts for relative change and collective action during the time of their publication.”
ii. LISTENING
Practical Tools For Tadabbur— Roots Academy YT
Pilates— Maintenance Phase
Call The Cops— Hot Take
iii. LOOKING FORWARD TO
Something low stakes— being alive by the end of the month.
Progress on work projects.
I will take writing one thing. Just something.
iv. extras: books I'm currently reading (not necessarily recommendations) + other(s).
Greek Lessons by Han Kang (a reread)
In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri
Monster- A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Federer
Critique of Everyday Life by Henri Lefebvre
Bitter Orange Tree by Joka Alharthi
Basics and Benefits From the Forty Hadiths of Nawawi by Sh. Nathim Sultan
Most of these, I haven't gotten very far in or have been reading for very long, very slowly.
I loved this TikTok because one of my favourite quotes is mentioned in it.
This Fyodor Dostoevsky is always in my head- "I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, 'I exist. In thousands of agonies -- I exist. I'm tormented on the rack -- but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar I exist! I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, I know it's there. And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there."
This dua (supplication) I found in the Quran Al-Isra' 17:80
And say, "My Lord, cause me to enter a sound entrance[1] and to exit a sound exit[2] and grant me from Yourself a supporting authority.”
Thank you for reading this dispatch. If you're interested in more, please support me and my work by subscribing and sharing this with your network.