“There is, as Tom Wolfe, for example, has pointed out in The Bonfire of the Vanities, a currently thriving admiration for illiteracy. We reel from too much, too fast, surface communication, which proliferates into a frenzy of quick yells, while communication at any depth goes on, like an underground river, suspect but unsuppressable.”
“A poem is never done,” the writer Sandra Cisneros told me in July, over dinner at La Posadita, a restaurant in San Miguel de Allende, the Mexican city where she’s lived for almost ten years. Wearing a black-and-white huipil and her hair in two small, high buns, Cisneros ordered platters of fideo seco and nopales for the table. We had met to talk about her new poetry collection, “Woman Without Shame,” just out from Knopf. Though it’s been twenty-eight years since she’s published a book of poems, she’s never stopped writing them. “I’d throw my poems under the bed, like Emily Dickinson,” she said.
You have often said that you’re “nobody’s mother and nobody’s wife.”
I have a poem titled “Neither Señorita nor Señora” about why I didn’t marry. Some people who come into our lives are exploding cigars, and some people are North Stars, and some people are both. I am very grateful for all my exploding cigars, because if I’d stayed with them I’d be a very angry woman. I’m glad those relationships didn’t work. They were very painful at the time, but in retrospect, you know, it’s like having your hand caught in a car door. It takes a long time for your hand to heal, and it takes years before you can look back and realize, What was I thinking? You can see that when you’re older. You think, Oh, I see the pattern now.
Sandra Cisneros May Put You in a Poem
Penny Wong calls on China to use its influence to end Russia's war on Ukraine
He's well known as a mining entrepreneur, a Jewish rabbi and a former president of the AFL's Melbourne Football Club, but now Joseph Gutnick has set his sights on making a fortune in Tasmania.
Key points:
- Mining entrepreneur and former AFL club president, Joseph Gutnick, is now living in Tasmania
- He has plans for a north-west mine that he says could be worth billions of dollars
- If the mine goes ahead, he intends to financially support a Tasmanian AFL team
Inside the Documentary Cash Grab
As streaming transforms the once-sleepy nonfiction space into a money-making juggernaut of hit series, cool parties and $30 million single-title sales, THR talks to Alex Gibney, Ken Burns and other filmmakers about rising costs, ethical lapses and the very soul of their profession.
Pop Music’s Tension Between New And Familiar
For Gen Z, TikTok Is the New Search Engine The New York Times: “…TikTok’s rise as a discovery tool is part of a broader transformation in digital search. While Google remains the world’s dominant search engine, people are turning to Amazon to search for products, Instagram to stay updated on trends and Snapchat’s Snap Maps to find local businesses. As the digital world continues growing, the universe of ways to find information in it is expanding. Google has noticed TikTok edging into its domain. While the Silicon Valley company disputed that young people were using TikTok as a replacement for its search engine, at least one Google executive has publicly remarked on the rival video app’s search capabilities.
“In our studies, something like almost 40 percent of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram,” Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google senior vice president, said at a technology conference in July. Google has incorporated images and videos into its search engine in recent years. Since 2019, some of its search results have featured TikTok videos.
In 2020, Google released YouTube Shorts, which shares vertical videos less than a minute long, and started including its content in search results. TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance, declined to comment on its search function and products that may be in testing. It said it was “always thinking about new ways to add value to the community and enrich the TikTok experience.”
Doing a search on TikTok is often more interactive than typing in a query on Google. Instead of just slogging through walls of text, Gen Z-ers crowdsource recommendations from TikTok videos to pinpoint what they are looking for, watching video after video to cull the content. Then they verify the veracity of a suggestion based on comments posted in response to the videos. This mode of searching is rooted in how young people are using TikTok not only to look for products and businesses, but also to ask questions about how to do things and find explanations for what things mean. With videos often less than 60 seconds long, TikTok returns what feels like more relevant answers, many said…”
Hindu-Muslim Scuffles Lead to Heightened Communal Tension in UK’s Leicester The Wire
No 10 chief of staff spoken to by FBI about work for banker accused of bribery The Guardian
