This country is filled with light and is where the sun goes down. In the evening, when the sun enters the city, it makes a rumbling sound louder than thunder. So they always station a thousand men at the city gates to blow trumpets and beat gongs and drums to drown out the noise of the sun. If not, then pregnant women and small children would die of fright upon hearing the sun.

[Glenn-Copeland] also belongs […] in the tiny group of people whose lives could be a realistic inspiration for a young, queer artist today. I wanted to know how he did it: How did he make it to 76 years old so completely unjaded? As a young person, he explained, “I was very independent of what other people thought. I didn’t really care.” It was only in his teens that he learned psychiatrists considered queer desire “to be an emotional disease.” But he “never gave it two thoughts. I just considered they were out to lunch.”

In February, Fenomenos do Semba, an Angolan dance studio, posted a video of members line dancing to the track while carrying their plates of food and eating. The video gave the song a whole new lease of life as a pan-African African pop anthem. The Angolan clip kicked off the #Jerusalema​Dance​Challenge across the continent and soon beyond from nuns and monks in France, to a bridal party in Zimbabwe, and a flash mob in Germany

Most people now described themselves as Falkland Islanders first and British second, but it was hard to say what that meant. Britishness was easy to proclaim—the Union Jacks, the red post boxes. Symbols were enough because everybody knew what Britain was, and there was too much of it to capture, anyway. But what a Falkland Islander was, was harder to describe.

The story of my grandmother confused people, especially Jewish Americans, who understandably assume that any story about escaping the war to the US is a happy one. But individual lives are more complicated than great sweeps of history, and while Sala was alone and frustrated in America, Alex and Henri went on to live gloriously successful lives in France.

In the morning before I set out [from Harper’s Ferry], the innkeeper said to me: If you go into the olde-timey candy store in the Lower Town, the woman who runs it will ask you if you have been there before. SAY YES, YOU HAVE. This is very important. If you say no, she will start explaining the olde times to you and she won’t stop, and you will never be able to leave. She warned me this the way Marya Morevna in The Death of Koschei the Deathless warns Prince Ivan not to open a certain dungeon door in her castle, and if he does, not to do anything asked of him by a man he might find chained up inside.

“Now, let me stop you right there,” Prince said. “Why did you write that?” It occurred to me that he might have flown me in from New York just to tell me that I knew nothing of his work. “The music I make isn’t breaking the law, to me,” he said. “I write in harmony. I’ve always lived in harmony—like this.”

Women’s bodies, you realize, are the true classical tradition: for millions of years, on macro and molecular levels, we’ve done intergenerational labor of preservation, replication and loss that dwarfs scribes’ transmission of a few hundred texts. You never treated your flesh like a temple, those summer afternoons you drank life and mimosas to the fullest; never thought of chromosomal decay all those nights in smoky pubs or long-haul flights. But all that time, you’d been a secret library, tending and discarding ancient ciphers just in case one zygotic codex — like the Veronese manuscript that rebirthed Catullus — might someday burst forth, be fruitful, and multiply.

A few weeks back I decided to push back on Twitter against the idea that Freud’s work was discreditable because, as a young man, he took a lot of cocaine. I have an interest in this question because, as a young man, I took a lot of cocaine. But that wasn’t quite my point. My point was if we to discredit those theorists who have done a lot of cocaine, we will be left with the stoners, which would, moreover, be a boring monocrop to harvest.

“My grandparents’ unconditional love became abruptly very conditional when my grandfather and I had the biggest fight he’d ever had with anyone, on the birth of his great-grandchildren, my twin daughters.