November 16, 2017

From Harper's:

Unborn fiddler rays are traumatized by their mothers’ capture.

From Teju Cole's Known and Strange Things:

The music you travel with helps you to create your own internal weather.

From The Economist:

In America Amazon is showing, week by week, the havoc that an innovative e-commerce firm can wreak in a giant, mature market.

From The Guardian (Yaa Gyasi on "My writing day"):

I start working at around 10 if I’m feeling motivated, 11 if I’m not. I reread the work from the day before and/or passages that I think I got right in order to try to set the tone. I write a sentence. I read it aloud. I delete the sentence. I look at the clock and wonder if it’s too early to think about lunch. I tell myself that, if I can make it to 300 words, I can break for lunch. I write another sentence. This one I might like. If I’m lucky, it leads to a second sentence. I think: “What is the point of all of this? Is anyone truly happy?” I delete the second sentence. I check my email. I have 15 new ones. I respond to them in my head, but don’t actually respond. I write a few more sentences. I get seven new emails. These ones following up on the emails that I didn’t respond to a few days ago. I think: “What exactly does it mean for something to be ‘urgent’?” I plead with myself to write at least another 200 words. On the best days, I stop pleading, stop bargaining and watch-checking and fall into a rhythm so satisfying that I simply forget I’m working. So much of my writing day feels like well-digging. Sometimes I dig 200ft down before coming back up, dry. Every day I search for water.

From Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet:

[The] truth--even if false--is always beyond the next corner.