Our bodies are meant to grow old but it’s not written that way for our souls. It doesn’t ever have to get old.
Well something’s lost,
but something’s gained,
in living every day.”
(Not) reading in ... the UK
YouGov reports that:In the last year, the median Briton has only read or listened to three books, with 40% of the public not reading or listening to a single book in that time.
Interesting also that:British readers tend to favour fiction, with 55% of those who at least occasionally read or listen to saying so, including 18% who say they “only” read fiction. This compares to just 19% who say they mostly or only read non-fiction books
Well something’s lost,
but something’s gained,
in living every day.”
(Not) reading in ... the UK
YouGov reports that:
In the last year, the median Briton has only read or listened to three books, with 40% of the public not reading or listening to a single book in that time.Interesting also that:
British readers tend to favour fiction, with 55% of those who at least occasionally read or listen to saying so, including 18% who say they “only” read fiction. This compares to just 19% who say they mostly or only read non-fiction books
Are you a minimalist or a mini-librarian? Do you let your books pile up around your home, or do you treat your collection like a carefully curated gallery of your best self? Time to find out.
It was the Roman Republic's chin-stroker-in-chief Cicerowho said it first: “A room without books is like a body without a soul.” But is that really true? And what about a room with only a handful of books?
Chastity or Fornication? London Review of Books
The Blood of Exceptionally Long-Lived People Suggests Crucial Differences ScienceAlert. Underlying study not new but seems not to have gotten much notice.
The daughters of immigrants enjoy higher absolute mobility than daughters of locals in most destinations, while immigrant sons primarily enjoy this advantage in countries with long histories of immigration.
That is from a new and very interesting paper by Leah Boustan, et.al. You have pondered the implied policy recommendations, right?
By July 2000, the Africa desk at the US National Security Council was getting fed up with a little-known Russian gun-runner whom they accused of fuelling conflicts across Africa. That month, the NSC’s Africa specialist Gayle Smith summed up her frustration with “Victor Butt” in an email to a colleague, saying that her frustrated staff was demanding action: “Dick,” she wrote, “who in your office is the get-evil-arms-dealers person, that they might touch base with?”
The email initiated the manhunt and eventual capture of notorious Viktor Bout eight years later in Thailand. Bout’s career was a rollicking tale of money, guns, luxury branding and Hollywood movie script optioning, all capped by extradition to the US where he served 12 years in prison.
Sophie Ristelhueber isn’t interested in the sensationalist flash of the news cycle — now she’s won the Hasselblad Award, photography’s most prestigious prize
Sophie Ristelhueber’s pictures are characterised by reserve. She is a war photographer, but not in any traditional sense: hers is a language of abstraction. Her images are unpeopled, and their concern is with the aftermath.
Ristelhueber photographs landscapes, mostly from above: trenches and tank tracks in the desert, ballistic craters, and oil wells caught on fire. She follows twisted trees, excavated soil and shrapnel lodged in the earth. When she turns her attention to people — rarely — it’s to show their bodies as a similarly torn geography: scars and rough-hewn stitches, fresh out of surgery, as in the series Every One, taken as she stalked the wards of a Parisian hospital in 1994.
Ristelhueber is a cartographer of destruction; she displays her work as grids of epic, unlabelled photographs, sometimes inflected with sound or video. The French artist, born in Paris in 1949, went to the Sorbonne; she studied literature, and her approach to photography is also novelistic. Her first photo book, Beirut (1984) was designed to the dimensions of a Gallimard paperback. It was light and unassuming, easy to roll up and place into a pocket.
I meet Ristelhueber a few days before she is to be announced as this year’s winner of the Hasselblad Award — touted as the “Nobel Prize of Photography” (past laureates include Sophie Calle and Henri Cartier-Bresson). The award comes with £150,000, and an exhibition of her work will open at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg, Sweden, on October 11.
Ristelhueber’s demeanour is tidy — and sometimes a little reticent. We are in her Paris studio, in Pigalle, at the foot of Montmartre. Pinned to the walls are floor plans of galleries covered in notes; the last remaining copies of her sold-out photo books are on the shelves.
Ristelhueber hands me Beirut and explains that in 1982, while poring over newspaper images of the city, she realised she was drawn to the background more than the foreground. She set off to make a new kind of war photo. As she held up her camera, she emptied the frame of its people, shooting hollowed-out buildings with shattered windows. “I think I really broke something in the tradition of reportage,” Ristelhueber tells me, “but I didn’t feel I was a reporter.” In one picture, a cinema is flooded with daylight, and the building’s metal frame hangs low over the wooden seats. In another, we’re in a stadium, but the bleachers have turned to rubble, and the awnings have caved in.
Traditional war photography, at its simplest, uses the vulnerability of the human body to evoke empathy and outrage. But Ristelhueber isn’t interested in the sensationalist flash of the news cycle. Where war is loud, as are its images, Ristelhueber places us in a brutal quiet. “The context is violence, but I’m not showing the violence,” she says. Time slows down, and absence is unnerving; instead of single moments of brutality, we are shown the stark permanence of war’s consequence.
Ristelhueber arrived in Beirut in the long wake of the Sabra and Shatila massacres (in which more than 1,000 Palestinians were killed by Israeli-backed Lebanese Christian militiamen), the Israeli invasion, and the civil war. She travelled to Kuwait in 1991, after US forces had begun their withdrawal, and then to Iraq in 2001, as the US-led coalition entered Afghanistan. She took photos in the West Bank in 2003 of Palestinian roads overwhelmed by debris, rock and felled concrete, of which she made a book entitled WB. On the cover is a photo of a four-wheel drive car; on its roof is a figure in repose: Ristelhueber, taking a nap on a special platform she had installed atop the vehicle.
When I ask why she photographs what she does, she replies: “Ask my shrink.” She pulls out a photo to show me. It’s her, hair flung in the wind, leaning against a single-engine aircraft. She appears poised and assured, camera slung on one arm. It was taken in Kuwait in 1991, and next to her is a Swiss surveillance pilot. “I had never done aerial views before,” she says. He would swerve, she says, angling the aircraft doors against the desert, encouraging her to fling them open and take her shot. Each time, she only had a few seconds. “Now when I look at my contact sheet, it’s incredible that I’m so confident in what I’m doing.”
Ristelhueber also travelled the desert by foot, tilting her body downwards to mimic an aerial view. But it’s not always apparent in her work what has been taken from the sky; she expertly manipulates scale. The aerial views deliver a sheer expanse of damage. When she zooms in, isolating a single detail — a crater or shard of weapon — the vastness is turned intimate, precise. Ristelhueber’s abstractions, devoid of context, toe a fine line. Photographs, even those of the most horrific events, can never truly represent the reality of war. There is always a gap between image and experience. But abstracting horror, as Ristelhueber does, has consequence too. Not all stories of violence are interchangeable, and aestheticisation can create detachment.
A war photographer — but not like you’ve ever seen
Last week, I was walking down the street when I spotted a woman reading in the window of a coffee shop. I knew immediately what the book was — its luminous pink and green was unmistakable. She looked up as I approached and we smiled at each other through the glass. An impulse ran through me to pull my own copy from my bag and wave Philippa Perry’s The Book You Want Everyone You Love to Read at her while giving her a thumbs-up. But I played out in my head how the extended fumble to fetch the book while walking might go, dismissed it as an action I was unlikely to pull off in time, and carried on.
Afterwards, I regretted not having tried. But I would only need to take my copy on a second excursion to get another chance — the bestselling title is ubiquitous. Perry, a psychotherapist whose books unpack the tools to live better lives, is testament to a world that has a growing appetite for self-analysis.
Our modern age is criticised for self-obsession. It can be hard to make an argument for thinking about the self without getting lost in the quagmire of 21st-century vapidity. But the popularity of psychology books is a celebration of something different: therapists are distilling their practice to make readers better equipped to understand themselves. This is not because the reader believes they are the centre of the universe, but because we all have negative patterns of thought and action — and we all too have the ability to disrupt those.
I’ve been thinking about this now that I am regularly in situations that require public speaking. Whether it’s an event in a bookshop or a talk in a lecture hall, I have come to approach the experience calmly. This might not be surprising — many people have to speak in front of others for work and grow comfortable with the idea. Yet the prospect for me would have once seemed impossible. From primary school into my teens and university years, when I was expected to speak or perform in a public setting my vocal cords would often seize up to the point of barely being able to emit a sound. (Not an ideal reaction for a kid who, incredibly, had aspirations to become an actor.)
Having the right words then to describe what was happening — I had anxiety — would have saved me a fair amount of distress and confusion. At the time, I could not understand why my body would stop working. The lucidity with which younger generations encounter mental health is a remarkable and encouraging contrast. But sometimes their expanded vocabulary can be applied too definitively — acting like a shield or a full stop.
