Before we delve into the posts we’re reading and loving elsewhere on the internet, don’t miss Frank Petrisano’s intriguing travelogue about Christiania, an intentional community deep in the heart of Copenhagen.
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‘How to Write a Memoir While Grieving‘ (Nicole Chung for Longreads)
Nicole Chung’s superb memoir is out this October, but if you love process stories as much as we do, you may enjoy this piece on the experience of working through grief while also attempting to steward a book to publication.
I often wonder if I would have become a storyteller if not for adoption. On the one hand, that is in my genes: my birth father is a writer. Yet I do think it was partly feeling like an outsider — not just in my white family, but in the place where I grew up — that first made me look for a way to express who I was while searching for other worlds to escape to. My parents never understood any of this, but they did encourage my writing, and were curious enough about it to sneak into my room and read my stories when I wasn’t around.
‘The ‘exorcism’ that turned into murder‘ (Vicky Baker for BBC)
This rich multimedia feature delves into a troubling case of superstition, religion, and murder; what happens when you believe that someone is suffering, and do what you believe is the ‘right thing,’ and they die as a result?
In the depths of the countryside – where in places virgin forest is still being burned to create arable land – there are no roads, no electricity, no phone lines, no police, no doctors, not even a shop.
‘To the Point‘ (Apoorva Tadepalli for Real Life)
Bullet journals are growing more and more popular — one is open on this editor’s desk right now, actually. With the rush to organise our lives via bullet journaling has come a sort of cottage industry, but that industry has come the rise of an entire online community, and one that gets…pretty weird sometimes.
This seems part of the point of the bullet journal community too: that “stories” of self-care, whether represented by calligraphy, or lists of fitness goals, or pictures of coconut milk chia seed pudding with blueberries and bananas, become meaningful and effective when they’re sent out into the world and can function as a template. They make bullet journaling not merely a protocol but an aspiration that can be visualized, emulated. The images posit a group of peers who serve as role models and supporters.
‘Why Is It So Hard for Clothing Manufacturers to Pay a Living Wage?‘ (Jasmin Malik Chua for Racked)
Major clothing manufacturers rely heavily on low-wage labour in countries with lax oversight, with sometimes fatal consequences. Why, exactly, is it so challenging for them to meet the living wage standards their own owners are calling for?
In Sri Lanka, for instance, the basic pay averages 13,500 rupees ($197) per month, yet workers interviewed by campaigners from Labour Behind the Label in 2016 said they would require at least 33,000 rupees ($481) to support their families. The same group queried workers in India who were earning an average of 6,284 rupees ($92) per month. To make ends meet, those same workers said, they would need 13,000 rupees ($190), if not more.
‘This Route Doesn’t Exist on the Map‘ (Lauren Markham for the New Republic)
People desperate to find safety are willing to go to extreme lengths.
Their passage to supposed safety, which takes them across Libya and the Sinai, as well as the Mediterranean, has become increasingly perilous. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, nearly 150,000 people crossed the Mediterranean in 2017. More than 3,000 are believed to have drowned. Stories of detention in Libya, as well as physical and sexual abuse, are commonplace among those who manage to make it to Europe. A recent CNN report depicted a Libyan slave auction, where people were being sold for as little as $400. Even the lucky ones who wash up on Europe’s shores may end up stuck for years in transit camps and detention centers in the south of the continent, in some cases only in the end to be deported. In 2013, in an effort to curb migration and ease the burden of migrants within its borders, the European Union began ramping up deportations. In 2016, nearly 500,000 people were deported from Europe.
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Photo: Tony Hisgett/Creative Commons