Skye's Curator Corner - BlogFlock

Tyson Fury - Cecily

2025-12-09T20:00:17.000Z

Barney Ronay | Guardian | 7th December 2015 | U

The year 2013 was a good one for Jessica Ennis-Hill, the early favourite for this year's BBC Sports Personality of the Year (Spoty) award. Already an Olympic champion, Ennis-Hill was made a CBE and offered the Freedom of the City of Sheffield. Similarly, Andy Murray, the second favourite for this year's BBC gong, won Wimbledon, watched by his wonderfully supportive family, and later became an OBE.

For Tyson Fury, the newly crowned heavyweight champion of the world and a late entrant on the list for the BBC's top award, 2013 was a bit more complicated. Rewind two years and Fury, an outsider even in an outsider sport, was busy telling an interviewer before his first fight at Madison Square Garden that he would "hang" his own sister if she was promiscuous. In March that year, he was fined £3,000 for calling fellow fighters David Price and Tony Bellew "gay lovers". In September, he was publicly pleading for the release from prison of his father, "Gypsy" John Fury, who was serving nine years for gouging a man's eye out during a street fight – albeit a man who was, according to Gypsy John, attempting to chew his face off at the time.

Little wonder the presence of Fury on the Spoty shortlist has created such friction over the past week. More than 82,000 people have now signed a petition suggesting Fury's views on homosexuality should disqualify him from the BBC awards. The trigger was an interview before his title fight with Wladimir Klitschko last month. Fury had, as he tends to, begun discussing Armageddon and the end of the world, offering up the opinion that the legalising of abortion, paedophilia and homosexuality – equivalents in his "scriptural readings" – would signify a kind of Old Testament-derived reckoning.

A week later, interviewed about his previous interview, Fury threatened to have the journalist involved violently beaten up by his entourage. In the same interview, he was asked his opinion of Ennis-Hill. "That's the runner, isn't it? She's good, she's won quite a few medals, she slaps up good as well," Fury replied. "When she's got a dress on she looks quite fit."

He was, to be fair, encouraging on the subject of female boxers, applauding their choice to enter the sport, before adding weirdly: "I believe a woman's best place is in the kitchen and on her back. That's my personal belief. Making me a good cup of tea, that's what I believe." Tyson, thanks. And on that bombshell it's back to you, Sue Barker, in the studio.

If there is something startling about hearing these kind of views voiced by an A-list sportsperson in the mainstream media, then the sense of worlds colliding, of something raw and genuinely other about the current heavyweight champ, extends way beyond the BBC's annual vicar's tea party. Those hearing that jabbering Lancastrian monotone for the first time, taking in that 6ft 9in (2.06m) shaven-headed, motor-mouthed, deeply menacing figure, might be tempted to dismiss Fury as simply a bully and a goon, a Twitter troll made flesh, Dapper Laughs with muscles. Look a bit closer and it might be easy to write him off as a damaged lot, some deep male nightmare of rage and exclusion, unformed and raw, blinking in the light, Grendel licking his chops.

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The truth, as ever, is less clear-cut. Fury is more than simply a cartoon, something other than just a tedious loudmouth. At the very least, he's an interesting loudmouth, by all close accounts that rare specimen, the tender and personable bully, a macho braggart who also admits to being terribly fragile beneath the bluster.

But then boxing is a sport that has always inhabited the margins. This is a genuinely extreme form of human activity, a matter of formalised violence and sculpted rage, practised in the main by those with little opportunity to pursue anything else.

For all the noise and violence, it is impossible to become a champion boxer without possessing supreme levels of discipline, competitive intelligence and tactical wit. Fury spoke like a dolt either side of his world title bout in Dusseldorf last month. But, in the midst of it all, he fought a brilliantly controlled, intelligent heavyweight bout to take the title, a staggering achievement for a man who, five years ago, was living in a caravan in Morecambe, and whose life has been a peculiarly extreme blend of the disorderly and the doctrinal.

Born in Manchester into a family of Irish Traveller heritage, Fury was named after Mike Tyson by his father, himself a former pro heavyweight. He has described his childhood as a kind of rolling trauma. "When I was a kid, we didn't have a family life. My mother and father were always shouting and screaming and hitting each other. My dad had different women and different kids down the road. My mum had 14 pregnancies – but only four of us survived."

Fury was trained by his father and uncles, and was a good, if not exactly stellar, junior, becoming national champion in 2008. Success now is unlikely to change a relatively humble lifestyle. Fury still lives in Lancashire. Husband to Paris, father to Venezuela and Prince, with another baby on the way, he can be, according to those who know him, a hospitable, gentle, funny, talkative, slightly disarming presence.

He has apologised for his comments about Price and Bellew. A statement put out by his uncle Peter Fury last week read: "I would like to put on record that I am not homophobic. I have homosexual friends and I do not judge them because of their sexuality. My comments that you may have read are from the holy scriptures, and this is what I live from."

If there is a degree of confusion in Fury's public attitudes, there is a clarity in his view of his own fighting destiny, which he sees as a blend of two righteous traditions. Not only was his father a fighter, Fury is also a distant relative of Bartley Gorman, the bare-knuckle king of the 1970s and 80s who fought in quarries and at horse fairs, and who remains a Traveller legend. "I am fighting royalty," Fury once said. "I have Gypsy kings on both sides of the family."

This ethnicity is, for Fury, crucial. "People have got to understand that our lifestyle is totally, totally different," he has said. "We may be the same colour, and we may speak the same language, but deep inside we are nothing alike. We are aliens." In Fury's version, this is a muscular, patriarchal world of blood ties and blood feuds, where women have "no rights" ("In our culture it is all about the men, the men can do everything, and women just clean and cook and have children and look after that man").

It was here, in the idea of noble familial tradition, that the idea of murdering his sister first cropped up in public: "That is our way. Just like the Muslims have their ways. We have our ways. There are these girls who want to open their legs to every Tom, Dick and Harry. But they are looked upon as rubbish in our community. We don't do stuff like that. If I had a sister who did that … I'd hang her. She would bring disgrace on the family. It is a very, very bad thing to do. We don't do that. Women have to be pure and respectful."

Men, meanwhile, must fight. "If you want to fight, you take your shirt off, you go outside and you have a knuckle-up, and the best man shakes his hand and they go off for a drink," Fury has said. "I've had hundreds of challenges at Traveller gatherings. They get a few beers in them and they start thinking they are Tyson or Ali; throwing punches, swearing and jumping around with their big fat bellies. I'd love to knock a few of them out."

There is almost an underdog warrior king aspect to all this, a Hollywood-ish quality, in an emissary of this fat-bellied, car-park-fighting tradition becoming the heavyweight champion of the world. That is, if you can soft-pedal the other side of this twin sense of destiny: Fury's rigidly censorious form of born-again Christianity. Like quite a few violently newsworthy young men these days, the current heavyweight champ is also a religious zealot. Fury was radicalised by his uncle Ernest, a born-again Christian and preacher. It is from his reading of the Bible that his more controversial, illiberal beliefs seem to spring, including the idea that the correct punishment for paedophiles (a recurrent theme, for some reason) would be to "let them in a room with me and two hammers, I'll smash them to pieces".

Beyond religion, beyond family, the third element in this holy trinity of outsiderdom is depression. Those who meet Fury often talk about his sudden tenderness, the startling contrast between a boxer's bombast and some genuinely open and frank dark-night-of-the-soul stuff. Others can feel disturbed by a man who talks about the world ending, and ending it all, with alarming frequency. "I do sometimes think life is pointless," Fury told the Guardian's Donald McRae in 2011. "One minute I'm over the moon and the next minute I feel like getting in my car and running it into a wall at a hundred miles an hour. I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm messed up."

As, for now, is the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award, clouded not just by Fury's presence but by a more generalised sense of confusion. Certainly, the idea that sportspeople should be ushered out of sight because a voluble majority dislike their political and religious views is unlikely to leave us with many left to look at. "Hopefully I don't win @BBCSPOTY as I'm not the best roll model [sic] in the world for the kids, give it to someone who would appreciate it," Fury tweeted shortly after the petition against his presence had been launched. Ragged, raw, funny, blinkered, tetchy, champing, dunderheaded: Fury is both a genuine sporting star and a voice from the fringes, unvarnished, untempered, unapologetic. One thing is certain: he is unlikely to go away any time soon.

Revised Definitions Of The Verb “To Google” - Cecily

2025-12-09T20:00:17.000Z

Jessica Camargo | McSweeney’s | 9th December 2025 | U

1. To look something up quickly and then spend twenty minutes fact-checking the AI summary, only to find out that it was absolutely wrong.

2. To search for directions and two hours later end up with five items in your Amazon cart.

3. To receive results as ten-second videos that present a sponsored product as the only possible answer to your question.

4. To attempt to look up basic information about someone you recently met, you have to go through a sequence of “background check” sites, each showing a dramatic loading bar while it pretends to search. After fifteen minutes, it subtly suggests that criminal records may have been found, and you can view them now in exchange for a modest $24.95 monthly subscription.

5. To ask the internet for knowledge and receive a series of articles that mostly remind you what your question was, then repeat the same three facts you already knew, padded out with more ad space than information.

6. To start typing a weird question and stop halfway through because you don’t want the algorithm to decide this is who you are now, and then immediately panic, knowing it probably logged it before you erased it.

7. To attempt to find useful information and instead take part in the solidification of the internet as an ad-delivery business, where you’re given no option but to be the product. While your attention is being auctioned off, the communities you once loved have become rage-bait and engagement traps, and focusing on anything longer than a few seconds feels near impossible. And you think about how different it all was: when pages loaded quickly, half the internet wasn’t locked behind paywalls, and the word “content” mostly lived inside tables. You used to defend the search engine, blaming users when they said it couldn’t find what they were looking for. Your friends called you the “Google wizard.” Now you can’t even find a simple news article you read last week, and you can’t help but feel deeply sad, realizing the internet that shaped you has been destroyed piece by piece.

8. To look for something on Reddit.

The Ruined Cathedral - Cecily

2025-12-09T20:00:17.000Z

Jeremy Eichler | Lapham’s Quarterly | 8th December 2025 | U

“Air Raid Damage in Coventry,” 1940. Photograph by Ernest Taylor. Imperial War Museums.

Adapted from Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War, from Knopf Doubleday, August 2023.

Tensions were already running high in the wood-paneled rooms of Bletchley Park estate, the elite British code-breaking operation, when technicians intercepted a curious transmission from the German Luftwaffe. The encrypted communiqué, sent from occupied France at 2:00 p.m. on November 9, 1940, appeared to speak of a “Moon-light Sonata,” yet it was clear the senders were not sharing opinions on Beethoven. There was in fact talk of an “operation” involving “Target Areas” and “Air fleets.” The cryptanalysts grasped that an air raid was under discussion, but the question of precisely when and where eluded them.

The name of the operation itself held a critical clue, at least to the timing of the raid. On Thursday, November 14, the moon was indeed full over the city of Coventry. This West Midlands industrial hub was home to many munitions factories densely crowded around the medieval city center, and residents had already become grimly accustomed to the rituals of wartime life, with nightly blackout restrictions and sirens routinely sending them scrambling for air raid shelters. From the outset, the vulnerability of the city’s crown jewel, its medieval cathedral dedicated to Saint Michael, had been a grave concern. Built in a perpendicular style, the cathedral’s tower and spire stood some ninety meters high above a vast flat wooden roof coated with lead. After occasional bombing raids of a smaller scale had started up that summer, concerned parties had considered painting the German word for church—KIRCHE—on the roof in enormous letters, but the idea was ultimately abandoned as unlikely to deter attacks.

The frost on that roof was sparkling in the moonlight on November 14, when at 6:30 p.m. air raid sirens pierced the quiet. Within minutes, 509 German bombers had converged above Coventry and commenced an attack of a concentrated ferocity unlike anything that had been seen in the war. In the hours that followed, the Luftwaffe planes rained down 30,000 to 40,000 incendiaries and 16,000 bombs carrying more than 500 tons of explosives.. Then came parachute-borne mines, which looked to one civilian observer like floating dustbins. The raid continued through the night, lasting an excruciating twelve hours.

By its end, 568 people had been killed and 863 injured. With more than half of Coventry’s medieval city destroyed, the cathedral had not stood a chance. At around 8:00 p.m., it had been struck by multiple incendiaries. One penetrated straight to the interior floor, landing between the pews. Another penetrated the lead-lined exterior roof and lodged itself above the vast interior oak ceiling, directly above the organ. Then a second wave of incendiaries hit the church. Then a third. The cathedral’s provost, R.T. Howard, was one of four men on fire watch that night, and he left behind a chilling record of the affair. By 11:00 p.m., having rescued many valuable artifacts, books, and pieces of furniture, he was forced to abandon the site and watched from nearby as “the whole interior [became] a seething mass of flames and piled-up blazing beams and timbers, interpenetrated and surmounted with dense, bronze-colored smoke.” Through the wreckage, he noted a particular area burning with a heightened intensity: feeding the flames was the cathedral’s historic organ. By the next morning only the exterior walls remained, now open to the sky. They framed a sea of smoldering masonry, mangled girders, blackened beams. At one end, however, the church’s medieval tower, capped by its spire, still stood defiantly intact. In fact, Howard later recalled, throughout the night its bells had tolled on the hour, ringing out into the flames.

On November 15, 1940, the morning after the bombing raid that destroyed Coventry Cathedral, Provost Howard stood by the church’s still-smoldering shell, pointed to a pile of rubble, and declared to a reporter from the Coventry Standard, “We shall build it again.” The church’s symbolic importance to Britain was reinforced the following day when King George visited the ruins, and on Christmas Day the next month, when Provost Howard delivered the traditional broadcast to the entire British Empire as a “Message from the Ruins,” assuring his listeners across the globe, “Even now the ruined cathedral keeps much of its former majesty and beauty unconquered by destruction.”

Mustering the resolve to rebuild, however, proved to be the easy part. The process quickly became bogged down in all manner of bureaucratic and planning disagreements, and after several false starts, it was not until a decade later, in 1950, that the final call for new cathedral designs went out to architects. In the intervening years, and in fact before the war had even ended, the question of what to do with the country’s bombed-out churches had been discussed on a national level. Among the most eloquent pleas for preservation came in August 1944 from a group of distinguished citizens, including John Maynard Keynes, T.S. Eliot, and Kenneth Clark, who wrote a collective letter to the Times voicing their support for saving some of the ruined churches as freestanding war memorials. To do so, they argued, would ensure that the memory of the Second World War would remain firmly represented within the heart of the urban landscape. Without such bold reminders of recent terrors, they cautioned, cultural amnesia would quickly fill the void.

It is doubtful that the Scottish architect Basil Spence saw this letter when it was first published, because he was still enlisted as a soldier, but he nevertheless arrived at a similar conclusion. By June 1950, the Coventry design competition had been announced, and it included a dramatic letter from the bishop and Provost Howard assuring the future chosen architect that “prayer will be with you from the Cathedral Crypt and from the Diocese of Coventry.” Spence was intrigued enough that on a gray autumn afternoon a few months later, he drove from Edinburgh to Coventry, a distance of three hundred miles, to see the site with his own eyes. What he found there shocked him:

This first visit to the ruined Cathedral was one of the most deeply stirring and moving days I have ever spent…. As soon as I set foot on the ruined nave I felt the impact of delicate enclosure. It was still a cathedral. Instead of the beautiful wooden roof it had the skies as a vault. This was a Holy Place, and although the Conditions specified that we need keep only the tower spire, and the two crypt chapels, I felt I could not destroy this beautiful place, and that whatever else I did, I would preserve as much of the Cathedral as I could.

One year later, in 1951, Spence submitted a design for a new edifice in a modernist style, to be built perpendicular to the ruins of the old cathedral. The two buildings were to be linked structurally by an elevated porch over the adjacent St. Michael’s Avenue. The new building’s exterior would be clean and unadorned, while its interior would showcase religious art by some of the country’s most established craftsmen. In August of that year, Spence’s vision was selected from among two hundred competitors, and work began on what would become one of the most iconic modern cathedrals in the world.

Seven years later, when it came time to plan the Festival of Arts that would celebrate the opening of Spence’s bold new edifice, the organizers sought to make a statement by commissioning a major new musical work. Benjamin Britten was in many ways the natural choice. Over the previous decade, his own international and domestic fame had grown. His body of work had emerged as one of the twentieth century’s great examples of public-facing modernism, a musical language that could still be broadly understood even if its syntax was new. It also embraced a certain ethical outlook in a way that remains inseparable from its sounding surfaces, its lean harmonies and jagged edges, as if only a cracked mirror could accurately reflect a broken world. As a lifelong pacifist and gay man across an era when homosexuality was criminalized, Britten in his art remained particularly attuned to human suffering, to the plight of the outsider, to the violence lurking beneath the veneer of civilized modern life. Now hailed as “the greatest synthesist since Mozart,” he had revived a seemingly long-extinct tradition of English opera and risen to the very top of the British musical establishment.

The composer had long been awaiting an opportunity to compose a requiem, a setting of the Latin Mass for the dead, and once approached in 1958, he agreed immediately. It was not until 1961, however, that he was able to focus on composing the work, and by then he had already made the crucial decision to deploy Wilfred Owen’s poetry within the Latin Mass. This contemporary approach would instantly distinguish his requiem from older models on which he also leaned, including, with particular transparency, Verdi’s Requiem.

By the 1960s, Owen’s reputation in the UK was in sharp ascendance. Like Britten, he had been a staunch pacifist (and also gay) but, unlike Britten, he had honed his beliefs in the crucible of combat. He accepted war in defense of freedom but opposed any violence spurred by empty nationalist vanity. Born in 1893, Owen had enlisted in 1915 and worked his way up the ranks. By January 1917, he was commanding a platoon fighting on the Somme. A grueling nine days in April of that year nearly undid him, as a shell exploded close to his head, lifting his entire body off the ground. He recovered from his shell shock over several claustrophobic days, as he put it, “in a hole just big enough to lie in, and covered with corrugated iron.” He was not alone in the hole: the mutilated remains of a dismembered fellow soldier “lay not only nearby, but in various places around and about.” Some two weeks later, Owen was sent back from the front to recover at a war hospital, where he had the good fortune of meeting the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who in turn deeply influenced his views on war, pacifism, and poetry. After recovering, he returned to active combat in September 1918, writing to his mother (with whom he used a secret code to convey his battalion’s location) a touching description of why he had gone back to the front: “I came out in order to help these boys—directly by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can. I have done the first.”

One month later, Owen was dead, shot by machine guns while his men were attempting to cross the Sambre Canal close to Ors in northern France. The telegram with news of his death is said to have arrived at his home in Shrewsbury as the bells were ringing on Armistice Day.

Owen’s desire to plead on behalf of his boys was fulfilled many times over by his poetry, most of it published posthumously. Sensual in its physical attention to the minute details of soldiers’ bodies, both pristine and maimed, it was also deeply compassionate about the life essence wasted, “the undone years.” Spurred on by the scenes of tragedy he witnessed daily on the battlefield, Owen grew determined to challenge the profound ignorance he saw on the home front, to shake awake decision-makers and expose the patriotic lunacy that was leading to men’s bodies being “melted down to pay for political statues.”

In the War Requiem, Britten was able to deploy Owen’s verse like small detonations placed perfectly at key fulcrum points in the requiem text, thereby creating a work that simultaneously honors the dead in solemn tradition-minded tones and refuses to naturalize their deaths, to airbrush the brutality of war, or falsely separate institutional religion from the patriarchal power structures that made war possible in the first place. As a result, the War Requiem never lets the listener escape into a facile “rest in peace” sense of consolation. Britten seems to believe, as with Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw, that to say a peaceful farewell to the dead is to forget them. Or conversely, as Nietzsche wrote, “only something which never stops hurting remains in memory.”

The work itself is immensely scaled, lasting ninety minutes and requiring a vast composite ensemble. The traditional Mass setting is mostly sung by a mixed chorus, its forces amplified at key moments by a solo soprano, and accompanied by a full orchestra. The interlaid settings of Owen’s poetry are in turn sung by tenor and baritone soloists, accompanied by a separate chamber orchestra. Finally, there is a boys’ choir, typically positioned offstage, which sings portions of the Latin Mass set in an older style, at once archaic and celestial, as if representing a more ancient and uncorrupted relationship to faith. Britten once described the boys’ choir as “the impersonal voices of innocence.”

The work begins with a somber, outwardly calm yet inwardly tense setting of the traditional Requiem aeternam prayer, the plea for eternal rest. Britten’s forces and his writing style here stand on the shoulders of the great requiem tradition, but the composer, once dubbed a “revolutionary conservative,” has filtered this tradition through a modern scrim. The bells that toll from deep within the orchestra form a dissonant tritone, an effect that is picked up in the chorus and instantly destabilizes the atmosphere. Irregular meters catch the ear off guard. The string lines have a lurching quality. Britten layers in the archaic-celestial voices of the boys, whose initial entrance has meter changes in every bar, and the chorus quietly intones the prayer, “Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord.” But scant rest follows, as some six minutes into the movement the tempo suddenly quickens, textures thin out, intensity builds, and the tenor bursts in with words that shatter the music’s already taut surfaces: “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” The line, from Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” brilliantly positions the soloist as if he were a fellow listener alongside the audience, now rising up bitterly to interrogate the music we have just heard. Those bells of piety, faith, and tradition, the sonnet suggests, only mock the gruesome slaying of men sent to their pointless deaths on the battlefield:

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons

No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

The tenor’s commentary also marks this music and all the other Owen interpolations not only with their own sound world but also with their own temporal reality, as the poetry disrupts, estranges, and stands outside the flow of the Mass. Its Latin words are ancient and timeless; Owen’s poetry is time-bound and linked to a moment of cultural rupture after which the Mass itself cannot—or should not—sound the same. Thus, from the work’s outset, the Owen texts in combination with the Missa pro defunctis prompt a kind of double awareness from the listener. Before the first movement has even concluded, we realize this will be a requiem unlike any others, laying claim to the older tradition while at the same time forever altering its meaning.

Perhaps the work’s most celebrated passage appears in its final movement, the “Libera Me,” in which the choir and soprano soloist have pleaded for deliverance when the tenor soloist enters, “slow and quiet” in Britten’s marking, his voice rising and falling in melancholy half steps. From Owen’s poem “Strange Meeting,” he tells of a journey down a curious tunnel beneath the battlefield. The dead were there unstirring, until one soldier rose “with piteous recognition in fixed eyes” to reveal himself:

I am the enemy you killed, my friend

I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned

Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

The soldiers acknowledge their parallel fates and share a moment of profound regret for “the undone years / The hopelessness… the truth untold, / the pity of war, the pity war distilled.”

Owen’s text, so piercingly set by Britten, lays bare the bankruptcy of a system that created hatreds between men who shared the same hopes and dreams in life. And while many have noted the homoerotic undertones beneath the watchful compassion of Owen’s verse, this poem also captures something of the improbably intimate connections of a different sort that occurred across enemy lines. During his experience in combat, Owen once devoured an untouched meal abandoned by fleeing German troops. He had held in his hand letters scrawled by enemy fingers and halted mid-word. These experiences brought home the sense of common humanity that in turn stoked the poet’s pacifism. As the journalist Philip Gibbs later put it, the British soldiers lucky enough to survive realized they had been unwitting pawns in a massacre of human beings “who prayed to the same God, loved the same joys of life, and had no hatred of one another except as it had been lighted and inflamed by their governors, their philosophers, and their newspapers.”

But it is too late for the pair who have found each other in the tunnel of Owen’s poetry. The text of “Strange Meeting” includes four lines that make clear they are in fact already in hell—though, interestingly, Britten chose to exclude these lines from his setting. Perhaps this was the restrained English gentleman in him, tactfully withholding this ultimate insult to his ecclesiastical patrons, or perhaps the composer wanted to deny listeners a kind of theological escape hatch from the poem’s indictment of how the innocent have paid the ultimate price. Whatever the case, the setting ends with the tenor and baritone singing, “Let us sleep now.” The boys’ chorus and the rest of the singers conclude:

In paridisum deducant te Angeli;

Into paradise may the Angels lead thee

. . .

Requiescant in Pace. Amen.

Let them rest in Peace. Amen.

In the score’s closing bars, the haunting tritone bells return. Despite the music’s sweeping journey, this dissonance has persisted. And likewise, while the score’s disparate instrumental groups have on occasion found common dramatic cause, there has ultimately been no reconciliation between the public register of the Mass and the private testimony of the poet. The music, by turns beautiful and deeply unsettling, serves its memorial function most palpably by preserving this tension. As long as nations continue perpetuating senseless wars, Britten’s score insists, the peace in which the dead rest will remain shallow, provisional, and dissonant.

Over the decades since its premiere, the War Requiem has become a staple of the repertoire for large orchestras around the world, and given its massive dimensions and expressive heft, every performance becomes a civic occasion. Despite its enduring success, however, one particular criticism of the War Requiem has also lingered. While the Owen texts confer on the work a First World War orientation, at least Britten formally acknowledged the Second World War through the work’s dedication to friends who had died fighting in it and through his comments and letters prior to the premiere. But there is no similar acknowledgment, even nominally, of the Holocaust. The absence is striking, and from today’s perspective, it narrows the work’s ethical scope, for it says precisely nothing about a twentieth-century barbarism that makes Owen’s tales of “bugles calling for them from sad shires” sound of a different world. Nor in fact do the Owen texts seem particularly pertinent, ironically, to the types of aerial bombing campaigns that killed thousands of civilians, destroyed Coventry Cathedral, and terrorized London, to say nothing of the bombings of Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. In Owen’s “Strange Meeting,” there is a rough equivalence between these two foot soldiers from opposing nations in that both are tragically (and equally) captive to bankrupt systems of politics and belief. But the Second World War had no such parallels. Would the poem’s ethical vision extend to a sequel meeting twenty-five years later between an air force pilot and a victim of indiscriminate aerial bombing? Does it matter if one side is fighting on behalf of fascism? And in a more basic sense, how should a pacifist philosophy approach the phenomenon of state-sponsored genocide?

It is difficult to imagine Britten seriously considering these questions without straining the purity of his pacifism. He did feel compelled to witness the suffering brought about by the Nazi regime —by visiting Belsen, for instance. But when it came to creating his War Requiem, he clearly sought to make what he regarded as a universal statement; in so doing, he left the darkness of more recent history unrecounted and unreconciled, and left these broader questions not so much unanswered as unasked.

In a way, however, these absences may also be called to speak, or, as Henry James observed, “there is a presence in what is missing.” Just as musical memorials may carry forward the memory of events their composers sought to memorialize, they also open windows onto the eras of their own creation. In Britten’s case, the story of the War Requiem in fact brings into focus not only a larger British impulse to nest the public memory of the Second World War within the memory of the First. It may also be seen as carrying forward the broader history of the delayed recognition of the Holocaust in British society.

One might imagine the wartime British government taking an interest in publicizing the truth about Nazi atrocities in order to strengthen British resolve and support for the war at home. But as the historian Tony Kushner has clarified, the government was aware of having lost the public’s trust in its atrocity-reporting during the First World War. This time around, the argument went, it had to be especially judicious with such reports, or as one Ministry of Information memorandum from July 1941 stated, news of atrocities or “horror stuff” was to be used “sparingly and must deal with indisputably innocent people. Not with violent political opponents [that is, socialists and Communists]. And not with Jews.”

After the British liberation of Belsen, this government policy came face-to-face with the shocking realities discovered within camp walls. As the British media began disseminating the horrifying news, there was concern in many quarters that it would not be believed. Simple narratives were required. The ethnic identities of the victims were de-emphasized and often effectively airbrushed.

Collectively, these wartime and early postwar efforts had the effect of deracinating the victims and misrepresenting the nature of Nazi evil, both of which may have further delayed the British understanding of the Holocaust as such. Against this backdrop, the War Requiem begins to emerge as both art and artifact, in other words, a creation very much of its time. The UK was hardly unique in its grappling with these challenges, and popular myth has further muddied the waters in many countries by suggesting it was in fact Holocaust survivors themselves who did not wish to speak about what they had endured. This notion may have been useful in assuaging whatever collective guilt had accrued for not providing survivors enough opportunities to be heard, but recent scholarship has roundly debunked the myth of silence. The cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, for one, possibly the only survivor whom Britten knew personally and certainly the one he knew best, recalled her own disbelief at this lack of interest in the stories of survivors during the early postwar years. “I thought we would change the world with our experiences,” she told me. “But nobody asked.”

“There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.” Eliot’s bleak verse from The Waste Land felt almost made to order for the moment on a dismal October day when, after navigating the dense maze of downtown streets in the cold rain, I finally caught sight of the majestic ruin at Coventry. I had seen countless images of the old cathedral’s hollowed shell, but nothing quite prepares you for encountering it in person: its scale, its starkness, its aura. The exterior walls enclose what is now a large courtyard-like space dotted by a few benches and memorial sculptures, with the cathedral’s original tower and spire looming high above. In the former apse, vast openings once filled with stained glass framed a view of the dark gray clouds. The rain seemed to keep other visitors away, so I stood alone in the vast space, watching the raindrops making tiny splashes in the puddles on the stone floor.

To its parishioners over the centuries, the old cathedral, once the largest parish church in England, must have seemed like an impregnable fortress of God. Now it could not repel a raindrop. Perhaps the unsettling power of ruins has always flowed from this encounter with the radical finitude of history, the fragility of all that once seemed permanent. “Our glance lingers over the debris of a triumphal arch, a portico... a palace, and we retreat into ourselves,” wrote Diderot in 1767, responding to a painting of ruins. “We contemplate the ravages of time, and in our imagination we scatter the rubble of the very buildings in which we live over the ground; in that moment, solitude and silence prevail around us, we are the sole survivors of an entire nation that is no more.”

It was easy to imagine the architect Basil Spence on his first visit, standing on this same site and responding to the very pull of the ruins that Diderot describes, their way of revealing the deep vulnerability of the present often masked by its pretense to the eternal. Spence after all had lived through two world wars and fought in one of them. He had the wisdom to realize that the ruins at Coventry should be preserved, but how could he not have also feared on some level that his grand successor edifice—conceived barely a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and at the height of the Cold War—would end up in a similar state of ruin? Indeed, the cement fortresses and bunkered styles of modernist brutalism so popular after the war, it has been observed, were in part a response, conscious or unconscious, to the anxiety of bombing, the fear of death and ruination from above.

Traces of this anxiety may be detected in the cathedral Spence designed for Coventry, in its mass and solidity, its unornamented exterior (he likened it to “a plain jewel-casket with many jewels inside”), its series of angled stained-glass windows protected by external walls as if to guard its flank in the manner of a medieval castle. These features date Spence’s building and, in so doing, call the bluff of modernism’s own imagined break with history. The new cathedral today in fact stands like a monument to modernist architecture of the 1950s, and to that moment’s own fantasies of the future and its hauntings by the past. Tellingly, this mid-century modern style of design has now aged enough to become fodder for its own wave of nostalgia. “Modernism is our antiquity,” the art historian T.J. Clark has written, “the only one we have.”

If the exterior of Spence’s cathedral presents itself as a jewel casket, the jewels inside are indeed vibrant. Upon entering the space, one is immediately struck by Graham Sutherland’s enormous tapestry (seventy-two feet tall), which hangs behind the altar and depicts a resurrected Christ on a throne. And John Piper’s abstract grid of stained glass in the bowed baptistery window creates a beautiful blend of primary colors even on a cloudy day. But perhaps Spence’s most remarkable stroke is the enormous Great West Screen at the rear of the nave, a glass wall stretching floor to ceiling across a span of forty-five feet, mediating the view from inside the new cathedral onto the ruins of the old. On this screen, the artist John Hutton engraved sixty-six images of saints, angels, and Old Testament figures.

On the day I visited, these wispy figures had taken on a translucent, ghostly air as they hovered against the light gray sky, the bottom rows offset by the dark silhouette of the old cathedral. Interestingly, in Hutton’s design, the saints appear as stiffly posed icon-like figures, each confined within a single glass rectangle, but the angels, by contrast, are a whirl of motion, wings and limbs askew, cutting across the screen’s precise grid-like geometry. Many of them are blowing horns with a fervor that seems to possess their entire bodies.

The angels’ songs are clearly directed into the church, forward toward the altar with the image of the enthroned Christ. Spence, as if fearing the contrary pull of the ruins, was especially concerned that his site retain this forward orientation. When the Great West Screen was first installed, the architect was dismayed to discover that when one stood outside the cathedral and looked in through the glass, the engraved saints and angels were in fact blocking the view of the altar with its triumphant Christ. Spence then insisted that Hutton ascend his scaffolding once more and painstakingly modify the etchings to make them more transparent. For Provost Howard, who worked closely with Spence throughout most of the planning, the relationship between ruin and rebirth was more theological yet equally forward-oriented. “As I watched the Cathedral burning,” he had written, “it seemed to me as though I were watching the crucifixion of Jesus upon His Cross.” The new cathedral, then, risen from the ashes, represented nothing less than Christ’s resurrection.

Yet when it came to creating the one work of music now forever associated with the new Coventry Cathedral, Benjamin Britten found the courage to turn the music around, to take the retrospective view, to angle his art toward the wreckage. In the War Requiem, Owen’s poetry haunts the Mass for the dead just as the ruins of the old cathedral haunt Spence’s modern edifice. Both serve as constant reminders of the thinness of civilization’s veneer and of the human capacity for self-destruction. For the composer in 1962, after two world wars and all they had revealed, the traditional Mass for the dead could no longer be authentically rendered in its original form, which is to say, as theology divorced from history. By disrupting and puncturing the Mass, Owen’s poems render it as a series of fragments. The blood-soaked history of the twentieth century, this music tells us, has left established religion itself as a kind of ruin.

At the same time, Britten was too spiritual a man to simply walk away from the ruins of theology. In the War Requiem—just as Spence did at Coventry—he chose to preserve them. His commission had given him the freedom to choose any text, “sacred or secular,” yet he chose the Mass for the dead, and his music carries forward its fragments without ironic distance; his settings speak with compassion and sympathy, and in the “Dies irae” with genuine terror. Traditional rituals of communal mourning still have a place, this music suggests, but they are no longer remotely sufficient. In short, there are angels in Britten’s musical memorial, but unlike those wispy specimens on Hutton’s screen, we might call them “angels of history.”

The term comes from Walter Benjamin, who in 1921 purchased a monograph by Paul Klee featuring a rather curious and awkward angel. Its wings appear clipped, tangled, and unequal to the task of flight; its hair is made of scrolls; its body hovers in a state of suspension. Benjamin hung this image near his desk and drew from it philosophical and mystical inspiration. Klee, who had himself fought in the First World War, had titled his work Angelus Novus. For Benjamin, this was the angel of history.

In the ninth of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written only months before his suicide after being turned back while attempting to escape Vichy France, Benjamin famously describes this angel as facing toward the past. His eyes are open and his mouth is agape. Where we may see history as a chain of discrete events, Benjamin writes, the angel sees only “one single catastrophe” whose ruins are piling upon ruins. Benjamin suggests that the angel would like to redeem this broken world, to “awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.” But he cannot do so, because “a storm is blowing from Paradise and [it] has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky.” Humans have a name for this storm, Benjamin adds as a coup de grâce of his devastating allegory. We call it progress.

If Hutton’s angels are inscribed in glass, playing for Christ on his throne, Britten’s angels are inscribed in sound, playing for the ruins. His angels of history would see the two world wars not as a chain of related events but as “one single catastrophe.” They too would have a dream of making whole what has been smashed. Or in Britten’s own words, the entire War Requiem was meant as nothing less than “an attempt to modify or to adjust the wrongs of the world or the pains of the world with some dream.” It is an enduring dream still present whenever the work is performed with sincerity and received in the same way, and also a portable dream. One has to travel to Coventry to see Hutton’s angels in person, but Britten’s angels come to you, along with his Requiem. They pass by, like the music, in a single extended moment, blown forward by progress while facing the past, seeking to awaken the memory of the dead, asking us (in Owen’s phrase) to “love the greater love.” Our task is only to listen, and to hear.

Angelus Novus, by Paul Klee, 1920. Wikimedia Commons." title="Angelus Novus, by Paul Klee, 1920. Wikimedia Commons." class="media-element file-media-original" data-delta="4" typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sites/default/files/paul_klee_angelus_novus_1920.jpg">

The rain had stopped by the time I finished exploring Coventry Cathedral, and the soft gray light had begun draining from the sky. Before I could set off for the train station, however, I discovered the site had one last surprise in store. The surviving medieval tower still has its own set of bells, and just as I was stepping out of the church onto St. Michael’s Avenue, they began ringing out, joyfully clangorous.

I stood transfixed as the sound echoed off the stone and fanned out: over the broken ruins, over the fortresslike cathedral, over the streets of Coventry. The sound of these bells seemed to carry within itself the resonance of all those older bells. I thought of the dissonant orchestral bells in the War Requiem that had once rung out on this very spot, and of the bells that had rung out as the old cathedral stood intact across the centuries. I imagined the night of the bombing, and the bells that still rang even as the cathedral burned. I saw the audience on the night of the premiere, shuffling out in reverent silence. Music’s memory had cast its spell. And for a few fleeting moments, the sound was everywhere, the years melted away, and the past drifted free from the sovereignty of time.

Adapted from Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and The Second World War by Jeremy Eichler. Copyright © 2023 by Jeremy Eichler. Published by arrangement with Vintage, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Jeremy Eichler

An award-winning critic and cultural historian, Jeremy Eichler served for 18 years as chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe and now teaches at Tufts University. Time’s Echo, his first book, was chosen as a notable book of 2023 by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and NPR and named “History Book of the Year” by The Sunday Times and “the outstanding music book of this and several years” by the Times Literary Supplement. In 2024–25, he served as the first Writer-in-Residence of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

I Took A Rat Taxidermy Class - Cecily

2025-12-09T20:00:17.000Z

Blair Braverman | Outside | 7th December 2025 | M

Published December 7, 2025 03:17AM

I first encountered taxidermy because I wanted fresh meat for my sled dogs, and I heard of a taxidermist in town with a dilemma. He often discarded bear parts in the woods—which is, by the way, perfectly legal—and hikers kept stumbling upon the skinned bear hands and calling the sheriff, thinking they’d found a murder victim. It turns out that skinned bear hands look human—and murder, the sheriff told the taxidermist, is bad for tourism. So, upon meeting, we struck up a solution: the taxidermist would save the meat that he’d otherwise dump, and my dogs would have a great source of local, free-range, wild-caught protein. I got used to entering the taxidermy shop for bins of venison and bear scraps, admiring whatever mounts were in progress, but I rarely stuck around. So when I learned of an urban taxidermy course in Chicago—a six-hour marathon in which students would skin, scrape, stuff, and ultimately take home their own dead rat—I was distinctly curious. What was this taxidermy process actually like, anyway? And who were these city folks who wanted to stuff rats?

The course was held in a place called The Insect Asylum, a self-described insect museum that also hosts classes, dances, poetry readings, and a pet possum named Opal. The first thing that struck me, upon entering, was the smell: part chemical, part beast, and thick as the air in a sauna. Each shelf in the place was covered in skulls, bones, crystals, posed scorpions, and curiosities that only revealed themselves when I leaned close, like what appeared at first to be a bouquet but turned out to be squirrel heads on sticks. I lifted one, horrified and fascinated in equal measure; “Oh,” chirped an employee, “you found the squppets!”

A fox on display at the museum (Photo: Blair Braverman)

The squppets—squirrel puppets—were made from roadkill; like much of the contents of the museum, they were aggressively ethical, but still left me feeling faint. I had wondered why the class, which went from 3 P.M. to 9 P.M., didn’t include a dinner break. Now I understood that I wouldn’t possibly be hungry.

The squppet (Photo: Blair Braverman)

The taxidermy instructor, Rob, led me down a hallway (“Be sure to close the gate—there’s a tegu, but he’s bruminating”; I thought I had misheard until I spotted a massive lizard half-buried in a pile of wood shavings) and into the basement, which held a small table and four chairs. Rob, who uses it/its pronouns and wore a purple mushroom-print shirt that looked like it had been left in the sun for six months, sat down in front of a mount in progress: a hollow rat skin, which looked like a deflated velvet balloon, and a metal kidney-shaped bowl with the skinless rat himself, a gentle curl of muscle and bone. Rob lifted its skinned rat gently. “I call him Aladdin because he’s a street rat,” it said, adding that Aladdin had been killed by a terrier and that, at our latitude, he could carry at least 35 diseases, but it would probably be fine because he’d been frozen for months.

A young woman, Sofia, leaned forward from across the table, inspecting Aladdin. I sat down beside her. At that moment, the third and final student—22-year-old Anthony—burst into the room. “Are we just going to do standard poses,” he asked with some urgency, withdrawing a small metal bicycle from his backpack. “Because I want to put my rat on this bike.”

“You can do anything!” said Rob cheerfully. It pulled out three ziplock bags, which featured the three rats we’d be working on: one blonde, one piebald, one gray. Sofia reached for the blonde, and Anthony the piebald. I took the gray. Rob had skinned our rats ahead of time, but we’d be scraping off the fat and sinew ourselves. I poured my rat out of his ziplock and he fell to the table with a wet thump.

His skin was tough but stretchy, and scraping it with a blade felt oddly satisfying: fat gathered in strands and gelatinous lumps, and I pinched it away with my fingertips, time and again. After a few minutes, I stopped feeling nauseous, entranced by the precision of the work: the paper-thin ears, the lips that flapped open, the sandpaper scales of my rat’s tail. In my mind, I named him Meatball, in honor of my one-year-old daughter’s current favorite word. It just felt right.

Part of Meatball’s inner form, made with air dry clay, sphagnum moss wrapped in twine, and poly-fil (Photo: Blair Braverman)

As we hunched over our respective rats, Rob talked about its journey to taxidermy. At six, Rob’s grandfather gave it a bag that he said was a gift, but that turned out to hold 12 dead rats. “He wanted me to man up and be less afraid of death,” Rob recalled, but the effect on the child was the opposite: the bag of rats spurred a phobia so severe that from then on, whenever Rob encountered a dead animal, it was so terrified that it lost its vision. “It happened once in a crosswalk,” Rob said, gently flopping Aladdin onto his back. “I saw roadkill and my vision went black, and then the light started to change. I thought I could actually die if I didn’t face the fear.” Rob signed up for a pigeon taxidermy class at a local museum, hoping for some exposure therapy, and within ten minutes had learned more about bird anatomy than in an entire college class about animating animals. A beautiful thing about taxidermy, Rob said, pulling Aladdin’s tail out of its skin with a schloop sound, is that you could connect with the animal, being as respectful as possible. “I find myself talking to the animals a lot, explaining the process. I try to make as few marks as possible. When kids ask what I’m doing, I say, ‘This is an animal that reached the end of its time here in life, but that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the time that we can appreciate and learn from it.’”

The hardest part of the process was sculpting the form. We used air-dry clay to mold heads, lichen wrapped in twine to form the shapes of a pelvis and ribs. I measured each dimension—ribcage, skull, forearms—against Meatball’s body, trying to do him justice with wire and moss and clay. When I finally slid the scraped skin over the form, fitting the head and arms and tail into place, it felt like bringing the dead back to life.

And at some point, a funny thing had happened. I loved Meatball.

“That’s the whole point of the Asylum,” Rob told me. “We’re reclaiming what’s beautiful and interesting about the things we’ve been told are bad or gross.”

Meatball, posed with pins and styrofoam. In about a week, when his skin had dried and hardened, I’d be able to remove the pins (Photo: Blair Braverman)

I don’t expect to take up taxidermy as a hobby. But something real changed over my many hours with Meatball’s skin and body: it stopped feeling aversive. Here were the muscles he’d used to play, to eat, to chew; the tail he used for balance, and wrapped around himself to sleep. When I brushed his tiny hairs in place with a toothbrush, it felt like I was giving him his last tongue bath. And in the way that loving one dog can make you feel love for all dogs, I felt almost hopeful, when I left that night, that I’d see a rat or two scurrying down the gutter outside. Any friend of Meatball’s, I decided, was a friend of mine.

Reading Lolita In The Barracks - Cecily

2025-12-09T20:00:17.000Z

Sheon Han | Asterisk | 8th December 2025 | U

In the summer of 2012, under the watchful eye of a drill sergeant, I found myself learning to throw a hand grenade — decidedly not how I preferred to spend the summer after my freshman year of college. I pulled the safety pin from the small mango-shaped explosive and hurled it in a high arc. It landed in the water with a soft plop, followed by an erupting geyser and a deep rumble.

The city of Nonsan lies among the strawberry fields of the southern Korean Peninsula, a pastoral lowland quilted with rice paddies and vinyl greenhouses. Yet for Korean men of a certain age, its name is a dreaded synecdoche for the country’s Army Training Center. It’s a sprawl of barracks and drill fields that has processed, since its founding in 1951 — a year into the Korean War — upwards of seven million men, with some 120,000 new recruits still passing through its gates each year.

There, alongside a hundred or so other young men with freshly shaved heads, I was acquainted with the machinery of conventional warfare, on the theory that this might make me useful against North Korean aggression.

As everyone who knows me would agree, I am not exactly combat material. There are two kinds of men: those who feel a certain thrill upon hearing words like “AK-47” or “Hellfire missile,” and those who find the first kind embarrassing. This is not to say I’m a wimpy milksop. I have cycled across a country (Japan) and run several marathons, which of course means I am superbly equipped to outrun anyone when it's time to flee.

It was the same eventful summer “Gangnam Style” galloped toward its first billion views, giving my country a spike of cultural relevance that has somehow yet to recede; Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps pulverized records at the London Olympics. Facebook had just IPO’d, and Tesla had released its Model S. Looking back, it was a prelapsarian time all around, set against the gentle drama called the American presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

For those who care, CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson.

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The Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953, never ended with a peace treaty, only a ceasefire. This meant, as we were insistently told growing up, the country is technically still at war. Hence, all able-bodied South Korean male citizens from 18 to 28 are required to serve in the military for about two years — “about” because the length of service depends on the branch: Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marines (twenty-one months for the Army during my time). After finishing my first year of college in the U.S., I enlisted to serve from 2012 to 2014.

Despite what Ridley Scott would have you believe, a typical soldier’s life anywhere is, I suspect, neither exciting nor glorious. In the South Korean version, it unfolds as if Kafka and Solzhenitsyn had gotten a joint book deal to adapt The Gulag Archipelago into an absurdist tragicomedy set on the Korean Peninsula.

What every South Korean man agrees on is that serving in the military is a dreadful experience. The chief agony reported by draftees isn’t the plutonium-happy neighbor to the north but the hazing and abuse — physical, mental, and sexual — that have long defined military life.

A telling statistic: In 2024, of 44 deaths in the army, 41 were suicides. (The remaining three deaths were accidents; the enemy to the north claimed no victims.) The essence of South Korean military life remains a blend of cruelty, dark comedy, and sickening monotony — a slaughterhouse of boyhood, where even the gentlest young man learns to hurl profanities and is coaxed into acts of casual cruelty.

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The long tradition of carceral creativity goes back centuries: John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim's Progress, Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy, and Oscar Wilde De Profundis all while behind bars. The lineage continued into modern times with Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, and, of course, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o wrote an entire novel on toilet paper in his prison cell.

Confinement in the military, it turns out, can also be a boon to literary output. James Salter packed a typewriter to write between flight missions, and Ludwig Wittgenstein drafted the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in the trenches of World War I.

Because I'm no genius, writing philosophical treatises would be a tall order. But I figured I could at least read them. The bleak summer before enlistment felt less grim when I realized I could make it a reading retreat. Twenty-one months of service were ninety-one weeks — in my economy, six academic semesters, or three years of college.

With the naïve optimism that smacked of a college sophomore (which I was), I declared that with books, any hell could be turned into a Walden. And with a mortality rate about five hundred times lower than a real Gulag's, I figured I'd manage.

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No Korean man forgets the date of his enlistment — mine was August 20th — which feels simultaneously like a second birthday and a funeral. After waving goodbye to the family and friends who traveled to Nonsan to see you off, you step inside the barracks. You’re handed a crisp camouflage uniform, and you stuff your civilian clothes into a plastic bag to be mailed home. You squeeze your feet into leather military boots that, by the final week’s march, will have chewed your heels raw.

On your first night, you lie sleepless on a two-inch-thick sleeping pad. The next morning brings the particular shock you feel the day after something awful happens — the kind that follows the death of a loved one, maybe: You open your eyes and, for a few seconds, the world feels normal again, then the staggering realization that your life has irrevocably changed.

A bugle call jolts you awake, bringing the dislocation of waking up in a strange place. You’re expected to spring up and fold your sleeping pad. If there's a straggler, the entire platoon must hold a punishing pose resembling a downward dog, often for a full hour. To this day, you still don’t understand why people pay to do yoga.

Herded like cattle, you march to the mess hall for your first taste of military food. With the same rascally smile you come to recognize on drill sergeants everywhere, one tells you that you must be well fed, because you now belong to the Republic of Korea Army. You’re served on a five-section steel tray, where the food is at least portioned out with utilitarian exactitude.

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The last day of the five-week training had a graduation-day feel to it, since we would soon be sent off to different bases. While I was sad to leave the friendships I'd forged in that blitz, I was suspicious of this orchestrated intimacy — one that must be reliably reproducible in Nonsan, under the engineered conditions of shared misery and resentment toward our drill sergeants. Was this kind of ready-made camaraderie the particular fiction that underwrites the enterprise of war? In the end, I’d never see most of them again. Perhaps friendship is what’s born of shared sensibilities, and we reserve the word camaraderie for what’s born of shared hatred.

A couple of months earlier, I’d passed the test qualifying me as a military interpreter, which meant I was more likely to be assigned to a military high command where the U.S. military was also present — South Korea being a close ally — than to a field unit where manual labor, artillery drills, and winter patrols awaited. But this didn’t rule out the possibility of being stationed at the Korean Demilitarized Zone, where one would be facing North Korean soldiers who had no particular need for interpreters.

Assignments are more or less random. This prevents the corrupt practice of buying plum assignments for sons through back channels — a racket once rampant — but it also results in colossal misapplications of talent: an oncology researcher with a Ph.D. patrolling the DMZ, a cartoonist driving a battle tank, and a poet operating a self-propelled howitzer.

Each of us was called up to find out our assignment. Some faces looked stricken as they learned they would be near the border; others celebrated getting cushy postings. Mine: U.S. Army Garrison Yongsan, at the main headquarters for American troops on the Korean Peninsula.

Yongsan Garrison is the strangest place I’ve ever been. Having lassoed a prime stretch of land in the now-fashionable Itaewon district, it occupied more than half the area of Central Park, right in the heart of Seoul. But on Google Maps — coordinates (37.54, 126.98) — you’ll find a conspicuous blank space where it should be.

Walk its perimeter — a concrete wall topped with barbed wire — you’ll occasionally come across nondescript gates, each a portal to, quite literally, another country: Outside, street vendors sell rice cakes and kimbap; one step inside and you're on a patch of U.S. jurisdiction. Traffic signs switch to English and U.S. dollars replace Korean won.

It was a liminal space where old military compounds built by the colonial Japanese stood next to buildings raised by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The resulting architectural dysmorphia felt like the time I went wandering through an odd corner of Berlin. The whole place could be mistaken for a standing film set in Culver City, except the tanks and guns were not props.

The garrison was a node of some military significance where the United Nations Command (UNC), United States Forces Korea (USFK), and the ROK/US Combined Forces Command (CFC) were collocated. If you have no clue what those acronyms mean, neither do I, really. The precise function of these entities remained obscure to me until the end. But they did sound terribly important.

The official motto was “Katchi Kapshida” (“Let’s Go Together”), which we were made to shout at the end of every official ceremony, a phrase our U.S. counterparts could never quite pronounce, making one unsure if we were really going anywhere together at all.

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Life in the barracks unfolded with metronomic regularity: 06:00 bugle call, 06:30 roll call, 07:00 breakfast, 08:00 to 17:00 training or office work (12:00 lunch), 18:00 dinner, 20:30 cleaning, 21:30 roll call, 22:00 lights out.

The place I called home was a two-story concrete building with peeling white paint resembling an abandoned asylum, where five platoons were crammed together. Each platoon — a mix of twenty-four men from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps — slept on the floor of a single bedless room, approximately 20 by 70 feet, packed so close our arms almost touched, which must've made us look like a box of drab crayons from above.

Privacy was a rumor, as was freedom. For two years, we moved in pairs and showered communally. A specially engineered hell for a homebody like me with an unlimited appetite for solitude, who avoids team sports and doesn’t even believe in book clubs.

There are 30 days of leave in two years. Stepping off base otherwise counted as desertion and would land you a military prison cell, as did getting caught with a smartphone. Three landlines, shared by 120 people, were our official way to communicate with the outside. But if you were low-ranking, you were unlikely to get a turn.

Military prison itself wasn’t much of a deterrent — arguably, it offered an easier existence than the anomie of the barracks. The catch was that prison time didn’t count toward your service. A day-for-day extension of the service was the most fearsome deterrent of all.

Visits were allowed, but most bases sit in rural nowhere, not places your friends can reach on a whim. Breakups were an expected product of long distance and a near-total communication blackout. Weekends were spent being dragooned into soccer or losing an afternoon at the post exchange buying snacks with a monthly salary that was about $60 — not a typo — my first month.

Yeseul, my girlfriend at the time, visited me regularly. Jaded seniors were quick to remind those of us in relationships of our precarious situation, prophesying our inevitable breakup. (Reader, we got married.)

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To put legions of young men on the cusp of manhood together is to create a petri dish of male ego. The military can serve as, to steal a phrase from D. W. Winnicott, a permanent alternative to puberty.

The hierarchy was absolute, based on ranks that were determined strictly by time served. Every six months or so, one’s station was automatically elevated: Private (0–6 months), Private First Class (6–12 months), Corporal (12–18 months), and Sergeant (18+ months).

This oppressive cardinality governed every social interaction. Even within the same rank, your month of enlistment mattered. An August recruit (me) was forever junior to a July recruit of the same year; it was common to call someone by their enlistment month. I was, for a time, simply “August.”

It is easy to mistake the military for an unimaginative institution, but a glance at South Korean hazing culture reveals that creativity is alive and well in these unlikely places. By the time I enlisted, the most brutal forms of physical hazing that had plagued the military for decades — burning skin with cigarettes, beating recruits senseless (check out Netflix's D.P. for the full repertoire) — were officially banned. Even so, there were creative offerings that could teach American frat bros a thing or two.

The more innocuous ones involved forcing new recruits to dance or sing on command. On the gastronomical front, a marine once forced a private to eat an entire box of chocolate pies (1,980 kcal). There was simulated solitary confinement, where a person could be denied all communication with the outside world — no calls, no visits, no leave.

For the low-ranking, many forms of “self-improvement” were forbidden. Going to the gym was out of the question. Lying down was considered too comfortable; one had to sit with a perfectly straight back. The privilege of changing the TV channel or adjusting the fan was reserved for seniors.

The simplest chores were inflated into laborious rituals. Every night, the most junior private from each platoon would line up with tissues. A senior would then make them squat and, with the tissue, pick up every single pubic hair from the communal bathroom floor.

Once it was reported that a newly enlisted private in our platoon had forgotten to show up for the pube-harvesting duty, I remember his immediate superiors — three other privates and I — audibly gasped. The fallout was catastrophic, not for him but for us, the designated sin-eaters, for failing to properly educate the newcomer.

Strangely, the whole ordeal was aggravating but not exactly humiliating. The philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser captured this psychology aptly. After being beaten by police during a campus protest, he was asked if he had been treated unfairly or unjustly. He responded: “Unjust, but not unfair. It was unjust because they hit me over the head, but not unfair because they hit everyone else over the head.”

Not long into my service, my plan to turn the military into a reading retreat hit a predictable snag. The issue was finding time amid all the usual nonsense of barracks life. So I turned to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, hoping for some wisdom on how my man Sasha pulled it off, only to learn the disappointing news that he didn't — he started writing it five years after his release. (Of course, you idiot, did you think the zeks ran a writing workshop while digging the Volga?)

Officially, after lights-out at 10 p.m., there were two hours of voluntary study. It's a standard policy on every base to have a 연등실 (延燈室), which has the uncharacteristically poetic translation of "the Room Where the Lights Stay On." In our barracks, this was just a decrepit room with a dozen or so carrels. There were two bookshelves where every unwanted book donated in Korea seemed to have ended up — a sad archive of titles that had never changed anyone's life.

These seats were highly coveted. Some were studying for the GED, others for the suneung — the once-a-year Korean college entrance exam — so the lowest-ranking private was always the first to be booted if someone of higher rank appeared.

There was also a general sentiment that a private had not yet “earned” the right to study, meaning that during the first year of service, even using an available carrel would draw unwanted attention. This wasn’t so much anti-intellectualism as a form of deprivation grounded in a clear understanding of education's value — they knew exactly what was being withheld.

My solution: night watch duty. Every night between 22:00 and 06:00, two men were woken up for an hour-long patrol. After getting into full gear — uniforms, cartridge belts, helmets — we would walk the building for an hour, wake the next pair, and go back to bed. A universally hated task, as you can imagine, since your sleep was interrupted by shifts that came around every two or three days. But it also meant an hour of solitude, an hour to read unwatched.

One night, loath to put my book down halfway through, instead of waking the next person, I just kept on reading. I figured I would get chewed out for the screw-up later. But the men whose shifts I covered were only too glad not to be woken up. Eureka.

I started covering others’ shifts — often three hours from 1 to 4 a.m., sometimes two from 4 to 6 a.m., when loudspeakers blared the start of the day. A fair trade. More sleep for them, more reading for me. My late nights were made possible only by military-grade instant coffee and the kick I got from my own insufferable self-romanticization as a reader by night, soldier by day.

Only once was someone unhappy about this arrangement. A corporal from another platoon, seeing me with a paperback, snatched it — “Who are you to read a book as a private?” — and threw it down the stairs.

After he disappeared down the hallway, I picked it up and continued where I had left off.

------

Two or three hours every few nights were hardly enough. I began finding ways to outwit the system during my day job. Books were too conspicuous, so I printed out magazine articles, essays, and book chapters in what was surely unauthorized use of military computers. I shuffled these printouts in with my translation tasks, all practicing, in Gulag slang, tufta — "the art of pretending to work." As long as the papers were in English, the officers didn't notice. Once I'd finished, off to the shredder they went.

Most news sites were blocked, but a few somehow slipped through, memorably Aeon and The Electric Typewriter — bless their souls — with its grandly titled list of “150 Great Articles & Essays.” It’s probably where I read my first Baldwin and Didion.

To regular rounds of drills and marksmanship training, I brought a tattered collection of printouts — an analog Kindle of sorts. I folded them into quarters and slipped them into my uniform pockets, sneaking pages with an M16 assault rifle slung over my back. During guerrilla-warfare training, I would read holed up in a tent pitched on a tundra of frozen mud.

------

Twice a year came the ROK–U.S. joint military exercises, which drove Kim Jong-un nuts with calendrical regularity. Thanks to my post at a high command in Seoul, I wasn't reloading mortar shells in the field but was stationed in a vast, nuclear-proof underground bunker called CP TANGO. I was never able to grasp its full size, only that it felt as though an entire airport had been carved into the mountain as I walked through its subterranean labyrinth, which smelled faintly of mildew and certainly of rat shit.

In practice, those war exercises in the bunker meant long hours of downtime, waiting for some simulated escalation to occur. So my main mission became sneaking in print magazines and finding which MREs contained M&Ms. Occasionally I sat in on briefings in the situation room — the kind with tiled screens straight out of a movie — so I could later spin those moments into answers for job interviews, where I could present myself as some goddamn war hero. Got me what I wanted a few times.

------

What I read early on was primed by those around me. Private Yu, a philosophy major from training camp who spoke fluent Russian, taught me a Pushkin poem I used to be able to recite from memory. The popularity of Russian literature in Korea runs so deep — perhaps because of a shared sense of bleakness and melancholy — that it’s not unusual for university theater clubs to stage, beyond the usual Chekhov, works like Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths. In the army, it felt all the more thematically apt, if only as a reliable reminder that things could always be worse.

Conveniently, one of the last courses I’d taken before leaving college was Russian literature, so in the boxes I'd brought home from school were Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, along with the usual Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Turgenev — the bulk of which I of course hadn’t read while taking the actual course. The army now provided the ideal setting to correct this educational oversight.

There was also Corporal Cheong, who had once worked as an undergraduate researcher for Francis Fukuyama at Stanford. He was now making his way through Kissinger's Diplomacy. This was 2012-2013, a season whose tensions were palpable on a U.S. Army base: Obama's "Pivot to Asia" coexisted uneasily with an ailing Eurozone and the long hangover of the Bush years. Still fashionable in those days were hefty "grand strategy" tomes, treatises on American declinism, a cottage industry of "Rising China" books, and the last gasps of globalization at the hands of the usual international set (Fareed Zakaria et al.), all of which were easy enough to find on a military base.

Later, books were sourced during my vacations or brought by my future wife, Yeseul. I remember her bringing me David McCullough’s The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, a talisman on my barracks locker, reminding me of the day I could travel again. I read more self-help books than I'd like to admit. (A popular book among readers in the base was Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.)

There was a steady diet of Nabokov — my vitamin N — though I later learned that Solzhenitsyn found him a disappointment. He believed that Nabokov had squandered his deep ties to a family once central to Russia's political life — his father, a prominent liberal, was assassinated — by choosing instead to retreat into apolitical literary brilliance. (Solzhenitsyn once told David Remnick, "I am pained by this. I do not understand it. I do not understand how this is possible.")

Books brought from outside required navigating the military’s censorship apparatus. There was an official list of banned books — selected with the predictable logic of the conservative administration — that included Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang’s anti-neoliberal critique, Bad Samaritans. (Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century made the list in 2016.) Every book brought onto the base required an approval stamp from a censoring officer.

As a private joke with the bureaucracy, I submitted Lolita for approval. To the censoring officer, it was just another book written in a foreign language. He stamped it without comment. My copy still bears the imprint: “Military Security Clearance Passed.”

For all its byzantine rituals, the governance itself was simple: two platoon leaders formed a duopoly, issuing rules and diktats. Every few months, new platoon leaders were selected according to some mysterious criteria set by the officers. (One clear requirement was that they had to be at least corporals.) The cliché that power corrupts seemed true. It was as if the green shoulder patch identifying the platoon leader, once sewn onto his uniform, became a kind of radioactive implant that initiated a decay of character.

Who would become a tyrant was fairly predictable, but not always. A quivering new recruit might evolve into a martinet. I remember one loyal and efficient conscript who was constantly ridiculed for his short height and a face like an oblong potato. (Side note: even in a military context, there was always an unspoken hierarchy built around certain physical ideals of masculine beauty — good looks, chiseled bodies, and, naturally, penis size.)

But once he made platoon leader, he demanded from others the same adherence to protocol he imposed on himself. He weaponized his own law-abiding virtue, making his fellow soldiers’ lives unbearable. He was a living confirmation of La Rochefoucauld’s insight that “there are some wicked people who would be less dangerous if they had absolutely no goodness.” It seemed, in the end, that many a man’s appearance of virtue was merely a lack of courage to act on his concealed aggression.

------

As much as conscripts inflicted misery on each other, we were united against our common enemy: the officers. I particularly remember a certain Master Sergeant Park who was a sadist, which I don't mean as an insult but as a clinical description. A man with a viper’s face, he made Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket seem like Mr. Rogers. Excoriating us for the smallest breaches of discipline, he had a special talent for summoning murderous rage even in the most mild-mannered privates, who had to discover that they possessed such a capacity for hatred within themselves. Managing his moods was a constant exercise in appeasement.

He often arrived at the base with his young son, whom he loved with a kind of terrible, consuming devotion that made his cruelty all the more baffling. Weren't we someone else's sons, too? (Wouldn't his son have to enlist someday?) We privately nursed an ugly hope that his son would, say, get kidnapped, not even out of any wish that Park would finally awaken to the pain he caused us; we just wanted the greatest misery to befall him.

As for why we never reported anything to the officers, as you can now see, it was because they were apathetic to our welfare. Besides, the system exacts a vow of omertà from its members. To snitch to the officers was to commit the ultimate taboo, guaranteeing retribution beyond imagination — what exactly that was, we didn’t know, because I never saw anyone try.

------

I had trouble understanding the logic that sustained the dramas of the barracks — how violence seemed to obey a transitive property, with each man inflicting what he had once endured. A cluster of privates who had enlisted in close succession — e.g., July, August, September, October — would form a natural cohort. And time and again, once a new platoon leader was selected, the man we had hoped would be our Jesus Christ turned into a Grand Inquisitor. We underlings nursed the same fantasy: when one of us became a platoon leader, we would finally bring about reform.

Among the friendships that formed, I am most indebted to my officemate, Air Force Staff Sergeant Yun, a beacon of male decorum who had an instinctive understanding that a man’s true strength lay not in exerting power but in withholding it. It was an education to watch him. Others, however, brandished the overbearing bravado that men often mistake for affection.

In the outside world there's a divide between public and private morality: the stickler for recycling who's a terror to her friends; the man kind to his neighbors but votes for tyrants. In the barracks this boundary vanished. There was no public life, only private morality in its most naked form, namely, your character.

------

It is a high orthodoxy in Western thought that literature does us some good. Martha Nussbaum, for instance, has tirelessly argued for the power of novels to cultivate "empathy," in her own narrow definition: "an imaginative reconstruction of another person's experience without any particular evaluation of that experience." In other words, to understand pain while recognizing that it is not your own.

So, does reading make you more moral? In the army, where you meet an assembly of people from all walks of life, it becomes clear that books are never a necessary condition for decency. The faith that reading does make you good, meanwhile, has its own damning counterexamples. In Language and Silence, the literary critic George Steiner posed his "brutal paradox" of how "a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning."

The philosopher Alexander Nehamas doesn't invoke the Schutzstaffel, but still finds such faith in literature misplaced: "Sometimes, perhaps. In general, no." The empathy literature fosters can be turned to any end — to help or to harm, to liberate or to oppress — as Nehamas notes, "well-read villains, sensitive outlaws, tasteful criminals, and elegant torturers are everywhere about us."

That much seems right. If we linger long enough in "literary communities," don't we all meet plenty of tasteful readers with cosmopolitan minds but parochial hearts? Those toting NYRB Classics and Fitzcarraldo editions with that terrorizing little glint of superiority? The judgmental aesthetes who weaponize their reading? Writers of some distinction who, off the page, fail to meet the ethical demands set by their own noble prose?

Comparing the contemporary literary world to a sinking raft with people pushing each other just enough to stay slightly more above water, Sigrid Nunez wrote, "If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away." Many an artist would rather make good art than be good. Admittedly, though, it is far easier to be cultured than to be decent. Many great artists may simply be failed saints.

“Most of us didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out,” writes Rachel Cusk in Outline. The dubious gift of military service is that most South Korean men are sufficiently tested. For those of us honest with ourselves, we know how petty we can be.

But — if I may brag a little — my time in the army revealed that one vice absent from my otherwise crowded inventory of vanities and flaws was a desire for power. If you reviewed the reels of my time there, you’d see me half-assing my national duty or getting caught with contraband, but you’d find nary a frame of me tormenting anyone.

I’m not under any illusion that I had a finer conscience, but rather that we each sought evidence of our strength by different means. If some men needed to confirm their toughness by inflicting pain, others perhaps needed to confirm theirs by resisting the temptation to cruelty. As someone who’d never been sure of my own goodness, I may have wanted, for once, to secure an alibi of my goodness that I could hold onto.

When it was time for someone among the 2012 summer recruits to lead the platoon, a July recruit openly coveted the position. I welcomed his eagerness to take on responsibility, as my desire to manage a zoo of a dozen grownup men was zilch. Plus, I had by then acquired a lifelong distaste for worming my way into the center of any organization. Still, the officers asked if I wanted the job. Absolutely not, I told them. Give it to him. Don't make me do it.

So they made me the platoon leader. My already low opinion of the officers' judgment was sealed by this calamitous error — one that would have been fatal in wartime. Should you ever find me your leader in a combat unit, rest assured our war will be a short one.

My edict was a simple one: benevolent anarchy.

I can’t take sole credit but by then, the work of the leaders who had come before me in my platoon — the most progressive-minded of the five, as it happened — had already shifted the culture, and I wasn’t about to let it slide back. By the end of my service, new recruits were treated with a measure of dignity: no more pubic-hair duty — just mop the floor, easy — and, likely to the scandal of our predecessors, they were allowed to go fully supine.

That was the story I told myself about my military service, until a few years ago — a neat little bibliomemoir. As I understood it, I was just a bookish, harmless presence. But it occurred to me one day that the story was in need of revision.

At a reunion, a man who had been my junior recalled me as a "nice" boss — his word, not mine — but also aloof. He mostly remembered me disappearing at every opportunity to read, saying that I was "never quite there."

I didn't have to wrestle with his observation for long to see that he was right to point out something that I'd long felt a lingering guilt about. That green shoulder patch had conferred on me, for once in my life, something unnervingly close to absolute power. I had convinced myself that my detachment from the affairs of the barracks was a form of respect for my subordinates' autonomy, which also conveniently allowed me to eke out a few more hours of reading.

But in what I believed to be an abdication of the power to harm, I had also abdicated the power to help. While I had contributed to the shift in the culture, the truly radical change came from the more reform-minded platoon leaders who took on a more activist role. By that measure, I came to see that I might've committed a sin of omission.

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty distinguishes between two kinds of books: those that help us "become more autonomous" and those that help us "become less cruel." My reading in the army was an unambiguous pursuit of the first kind — a desperate bid to "become what one is" (a Nietzschean phrase that Rorty borrows) in an environment that reduced one to a fungible unit.

Yet, as Rorty warns, in that very quest for autonomy lies a potential for cruelty: "our private obsessions with the achievement of a certain sort of perfection may make us oblivious to the pain and humiliation we are causing." Which is to say, I may not have been cruel, but that doesn't mean I was virtuous.

From the first pocket notebook I was issued at the training center, I filled six journals, recording my days with punishing devotion. Things were happening outside the gates. My friends’ lives were moving on, but inside, our lives were suspended. I wanted to manufacture a sense that this meaningless time was still life, by documenting the minutiae of routine and wavelets of feeling.

Much of that writing stemmed from a more self-serving impulse: writing as as an act of compensation for life's travails, in which the writer becomes a kind of human converter, turning raw deals life hands them into words, squeezing out the juice and extracting the marrow from experience until it yields a restorative balm, of which this essay may be an instance.

In the end, the journals didn't redeem those years so much as expose their emptiness, filled with redundant observations that offered little insight. Little wonder, since the essence of military life is monotony — a force that, as Thomas Mann noted in The Magic Mountain, can "abbreviate and dissolve large, indeed the largest units of time, until they seem nothing at all." What this observation means in practice is that monotony has a peculiar psychological property: while you are living it, time stretches intolerably; in retrospect, it collapses into an instant.

My memory, like an unsparing film editor, compressed those repetitive scenes into a single blur. It is startling how little I can recall of those two years. Imposing monotony on someone is a form of thievery. Because of military service, my twenties feel two years shorter.

The yield of my reading project was modest, too. For a time, when deciding what to read, I followed my university's syllabus for a garden-variety Western canon course, but reading these supposedly great books without an interlocutor felt increasingly pointless — a hollow exercise in consuming without creating, taking in plenty but metabolizing little. Looking at the list of books I read then, it's appalling how little I retained. Much of it completely expunged from my memory.

What escaped me most was the supreme irony of trying to understand the human condition from books while being oblivious to the human drama in its rawest form right there around me. The life of a reader — certainly that of a writer — can easily become a kind of self-consumption, turning the world into a bloodless abstraction.

------

On May 19th, 2014, 637 days and 184 paperbacks later, my service was complete. I was authorized to walk out of Yongsan Garrison as a civilian. Carrying a small backpack into which two years of my life fit, I assessed my time there — nothing remarkable or valiant by any stretch. I suffered more than some, less than most.

As I stepped through the garrison's revolving gate for the final time, about to meet Yeseul waiting on the other side, I asked myself: What would my life have been without books? But as my real life was about to resume, a different question demanded an answer: What is a life then, even with books?

Post on Longreads - Longreads

2025-12-09T18:57:03.000Z

We're sharing our favorite #longreads of 2025 over the next two weeks.

Bookmark our Best of 2025 page to catch up on the latest year-end essays and lists of notable editors' picks:

https://longreads.com/best-of-2025/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

#Longreads #Reading #Nonfiction #Writing #Journalism #BestOf2025

Post on Longreads - Longreads

2025-12-09T18:50:31.000Z

"Digital twins are palliatives — they treat the symptoms, not the causes, of flagging productivity growth."

Max Hancock for The Drift: https://www.thedriftmag.com/model-employees/

#Longreads #Work #Labor #Technology #Manufacturing #DigitalTwins #Business

Post on Longreads - Longreads

2025-12-09T16:24:01.000Z

"We are surrounded by more than darkness, and transformed by more than violence." Next up in our "Best of 2025" series, Brendan Fitzgerald considers his year in reading https://longreads.com/2025/12/09/when-we-are-redefined/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social #longreads #reading #essays #journalism

Trans health protest - Some Bits: Nelson's Linkblog

2025-12-09T15:44:54.000Z

Bay Area protest against Sutter Health which has capitulated and is saying they won't offer gender affirming healthcare to kids anymore

Kennedy Center Honors - Some Bits: Nelson's Linkblog

2025-12-09T15:39:39.000Z

Hilarious skewering of the corrupted arts awards

Scientific American: AI Slop Is Spurring Record Requests for Imaginary Journals - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-09T11:50:16.000Z

Scientific American: AI Slop Is Spurring Record Requests for Imaginary Journals. “OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot and other models are befuddling students, researchers and archivists by generating ‘incorrect or fabricated archival references,’ according to the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross], which runs some of the world’s most used research archives. (Scientific American has asked the owners of those AI models to comment.)”

The post Scientific American: AI Slop Is Spurring Record Requests for Imaginary Journals first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

John Coulthart On His Latest H. P. Lovecraft Picture - LinkMachineGo

2025-12-09T11:45:58.000Z

[books] John Coulthart On Creating His Latest H. P. Lovecraft Picture … John Coulthart talks through his latest Lovecraft picture andbasically asks, “How do you draw Lovecraft again without drowning him in tentacles?”. ”

Medical Xpress: Potentially life-threatening medicine interactions combated with new database - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-09T11:41:25.000Z

Medical Xpress: Potentially life-threatening medicine interactions combated with new database. “A comprehensive webpage-based database, named as IMgateway, currently offers rigorous, evidence-based information on the integration of complementary and conventional medicine but has lacked data on Chinese herbal medicines—until now. A research team, led by Dr. Phoebe Zhou at the National Institute of Complementary Medicines, has added new data to fill this gap, detailing 540 general Chinese herb–drug interactions and 607 individual reports.”

The post Medical Xpress: Potentially life-threatening medicine interactions combated with new database first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

NBC News: At AI’s biggest gathering, its inner workings remain a mystery - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-09T11:35:43.000Z

NBC News: At AI’s biggest gathering, its inner workings remain a mystery. “For the past week, academics, startup founders and researchers representing industrial titans from around the globe descended on sunny San Diego for the top gathering in the field of artificial intelligence. The Neural Information Processing Systems, or NeurIPS, conference has been held for 39 years, but it drew a record-breaking 26,000 attendees this year, twice as many as just six years ago.”

The post NBC News: At AI’s biggest gathering, its inner workings remain a mystery first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

The Standard: Government unveils a new era of community driven tourism innovation - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-09T11:09:03.000Z

The Standard (Kenya): Government unveils a new era of community driven tourism innovation. “As part of this transformative agenda, the Cabinet Secretary noted that the Kenyatta International Convention Centre (KICC) has unveiled a Virtual Exhibition Platform, a pioneering digital marketplace that will showcase Kenyan cultural artists, products, services, and destinations to both local and global audiences.”

The post The Standard: Government unveils a new era of community driven tourism innovation first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

Technology Times (Nigeria): Guild of Photojournalists Nigeria, DTML ink partnership to digitally transform Nigeria’s visual heritage - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-09T11:05:37.000Z

Technology Times (Nigeria): Guild of Photojournalists Nigeria, DTML ink partnership to digitally transform Nigeria’s visual heritage. “Nigeria’s historic visual record is set for a major digital transformation as Digital Transformation Media Limited (DTML) and the Guild of Photojournalists Nigeria (GPN) have entered into a landmark partnership to preserve, digitise, and monetise decades of photographic work produced by Nigerian photojournalists.”

The post Technology Times (Nigeria): Guild of Photojournalists Nigeria, DTML ink partnership to digitally transform Nigeria’s visual heritage first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

Task and Purpose: Navy stands up its first information warfare squadron - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-09T11:04:00.000Z

Task and Purpose: Navy stands up its first information warfare squadron . “The Navy is the latest service to get into the information warfare fight. On Friday, Naval Information Forces stood up the Information Warfare Squadron Two, the first of a new kind of naval intelligence unit meant to support carrier strike groups.”

The post Task and Purpose: Navy stands up its first information warfare squadron first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

ACLU Northern California: ACLU Sues San Francisco Landlords over AI-Powered Surveillance in Tenants’ Homes - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-09T10:59:22.000Z

ACLU Northern California: ACLU Sues San Francisco Landlords over AI-Powered Surveillance in Tenants’ Homes. “Landlords may say ‘smart home’ devices are a tenant convenience. But the reality is, these AI-enabled systems can track patterns of tenant behavior, identify when people are home, and provide landlords with personal information that could be used to push out tenants perceived as too costly.”

The post ACLU Northern California: ACLU Sues San Francisco Landlords over AI-Powered Surveillance in Tenants’ Homes first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

Associated Press: AI-powered police body cameras, once taboo, get tested on Canadian city’s ‘watch list’ of faces - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-09T10:56:39.000Z

Associated Press: AI-powered police body cameras, once taboo, get tested on Canadian city’s ‘watch list’ of faces. “Police body cameras equipped with artificial intelligence have been trained to detect the faces of about 7,000 people on a ‘high risk’ watch list in the Canadian city of Edmonton, a live test of whether facial recognition technology shunned as too intrusive could have a place in policing throughout North America.”

The post Associated Press: AI-powered police body cameras, once taboo, get tested on Canadian city’s ‘watch list’ of faces first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

Gizmodo: Wikipedia Has Its Own Version of ‘Wrapped’ Now, But There’s One Little Problem - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-09T10:54:09.000Z

Gizmodo: Wikipedia Has Its Own Version of ‘Wrapped’ Now, But There’s One Little Problem. “If you happen to use the Wikipedia app, you can open it now and see stats like how many minutes you spent reading on the app, how many articles you visited, and which topics you were most interested in this year.”

The post Gizmodo: Wikipedia Has Its Own Version of ‘Wrapped’ Now, But There’s One Little Problem first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

Skye's Curator Corner - BlogFlock

Tyson Fury - Cecily

Revised Definitions Of The Verb “To Google” - Cecily

The Ruined Cathedral - Cecily

Contributor

I Took A Rat Taxidermy Class - Cecily

Reading Lolita In The Barracks - Cecily

Post on Longreads - Longreads

Post on Longreads - Longreads

Post on Longreads - Longreads

Trans health protest - Some Bits: Nelson's Linkblog

Kennedy Center Honors - Some Bits: Nelson's Linkblog

Scientific American: AI Slop Is Spurring Record Requests for Imaginary Journals - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

John Coulthart On His Latest H. P. Lovecraft Picture - LinkMachineGo

Medical Xpress: Potentially life-threatening medicine interactions combated with new database - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

NBC News: At AI’s biggest gathering, its inner workings remain a mystery - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

The Standard: Government unveils a new era of community driven tourism innovation - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

Technology Times (Nigeria): Guild of Photojournalists Nigeria, DTML ink partnership to digitally transform Nigeria’s visual heritage - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

Task and Purpose: Navy stands up its first information warfare squadron - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

ACLU Northern California: ACLU Sues San Francisco Landlords over AI-Powered Surveillance in Tenants’ Homes - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

Associated Press: AI-powered police body cameras, once taboo, get tested on Canadian city’s ‘watch list’ of faces - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

Gizmodo: Wikipedia Has Its Own Version of ‘Wrapped’ Now, But There’s One Little Problem - ResearchBuzz: Firehose