Sarah’s House

This past summer, I booked a plane ticket to Los Angeles with the hope of investigating what seems likely to be one of the oddest legacies of our rapidly expiring decade: the gradual emergence, among professionally beautiful women, of a single, cyborgian face.

There are a lot of humans. Teeming is perhaps an unkind word, but when 8 billion people cram themselves on to a planet that, three centuries before, held less than a tenth of that number, it seems apt. Eight billion hot-breathed individuals, downloading apps and piling into buses and shoving their plasticky waste into bins – it is a stupefying…

THIS WEEKEND was the May Bank Holiday, yet, today, we’ve chosen to forgo the leisurely pace and return to our usual routine, save for a walk in the rain in the early afternoon hours. The current state of upheaval, a time of transition and change for us, is making it challenging to concentrate on work until circumstances stabilise a little.

Nilay Patel, the editor-in-chief of the digital technology publication The Verge, has lately taken to describing theverge.com as “the last Web site on earth.” It’s kind of a joke—there are, of course, tons of Web sites still in existence, including the likes of Facebook.com—but also kind of not a joke.

On a subway train not long ago, I had the familiar, unsettling experience of standing behind a fellow-passenger and watching everything that she was doing on her phone. It was a crowded car, rush hour, with the dim but unwarm lighting of the oldest New York City trains.

WHILE routine often carries a negative connotation, the film Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, 2023) invites viewers to find beauty in the mundane. It follows Hirayama, a Tokyo-based toilet cleaner who finds contentment in life’s simple pleasures and the daily rituals that lend his days structure and tranquility.