In this essay—a written version of a speech given on January 27—Nicki Kattoura reflects on the attacks on Gaza over 113 days; the futile process of writing about war and destruction; and the way that our sentences fail to convey the scale of Palestinian suffering.
I’ll give you another example. Typically, when reciting the devastation of genocide we tend to rapid-fire statistics. To date, 26,000 Palestinians have been martyred (comma) over 60,000 have been injured (comma) over ten thousand are trapped underneath the rubble of buildings and presumed dead (comma) 2 million people have been internally displaced (comma) millions are starving (comma) dehydrated (comma) dying of disease… The comma neatly separates a list of things that are completely entangled, and in the process obscures the degree of violence happening to each individual person.
A thousand eulogies are exported to the comma, a tiny line or symbol, that just cannot bear the weight of the lives and aspirations of this many people. People whose lives are as intricate and multi-faceted and contradicting as our own.
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For most of my adult life, I have been, in the words of Beyoncé, a single lady. I met my current partner in 2021. My previous relationship ended in 2009. For the intervening 12 years, I was single.
I loved those years. I devoted a lot of time to building my career as a communications specialist for international NGOs: working internationally, immersing myself in local communities, and seizing every opportunity that came my way. Outside of work, I traveled widely and prioritized my own development. I practiced yoga and learned to cook. I wrote a novel. I bought and made a home. I found and lost friendships. So much of life exists outside of romantic relationships, and I immersed myself in this realm. I embraced solitude, relying on myself for sustenance and happiness. It was an enormous gift to intentionally build a happy, fulfilling life, just for me. And I’m not the only one to think this way. The number of single people in the U.S. has increased significantly in recent decades: In 2004, 33 percent of people aged 18-34 were unpartnered. By 2018, that number had risen to 51%.
During my single years, I had one friend who would always ask if I was dating anyone. No matter what else was happening in my life, my relationship status was the only thing that mattered to her. The rest of my life was only window dressing around that central, critical question: had I been chosen by another person? I tried to be generous with her. I knew she came from a generation of women defined entirely by their relationship status. If I’m honest with myself, her questioning only bothered me because it struck a nerve.
There were times when I longed for a partner. I knew it was better to be alone than in a bad relationship, but I still craved some kind of romantic connection. I dated: immersing myself in dating apps, swiping and liking, and going on first dates, before scampering back to my solitude. Sometimes my dates liked me and wanted more. Sometimes I liked them and wanted more. But those desires rarely overlapped. In 12 years, I had only a few flings, all of which were more trouble than they were worth. I was sometimes lonely, though less than people assumed. I missed having a steady person by my side, someone to drive me home from the hospital after a medical procedure or collect medication from the pharmacy when I was sick. But I certainly didn’t feel lonely on weekend nights, curled up with a novel and a bubbling lasagna.
Interestingly, I struggled to surface articles about heterosexual men choosing to remain single. There are plenty of alarmist pieces about how dating opportunities for heterosexual men are diminishing as relationship standards rise, but few include the voices of men who’ve found value in remaining single.
But despite rising numbers of single people, the cultural expectation that we will fall in love and get married remains strong. For some, it’s only when we’re happily partnered that our lives are considered complete. Being single is usually positioned as something to overcome, not something to celebrate. Someone like me—who remained single for more than a decade in a world devised for couples—is a puzzle to be solved, not a reality to be accepted.
What follows is a collection of articles offering different perspectives on single life. I hope they will challenge your perceptions of what a single life can look like and push you to make space for the richness that exists independent of romantic partnership.
On Spinsters (Briallen Hopper, Los Angeles Review of Books, July 2015)
I first considered my singlehood as an identity while reading Kate Bolick’s book Spinster, which grew from this 2011 article in The Atlantic. I enjoyed the book, but it was Hopper’s blistering review that really resonated with me. Hopper doesn’t criticize the book, as much as she imagines what could have existed in its place. Bolick’s book features five white female writers living in the American Northeast. The review challenges this framing and imagines the diverse group of radical women who built lives full of “friendship, faith, family, community, political purposefulness, significant caregiving responsibilities, dazzling professional success, and, occasionally or eventually, real romance.” This review adds queerness and radicalism to a book I loved, while expanding our understanding of what a satisfying life can look like outside of the same old heteronormative, patriarchal pattern.
Spinsterhood, for Bolick, is not simply being an unmarried woman. Nor is it cat-collecting, celibacy, or the social indignity of life as a human Old Maid card. Instead it is something luxurious, coveted, and glamorous, associated with long days of reading, plenty of room to sprawl in bed, ecstatic self-communion, and, as befits the former executive editor of the decorating magazine Domino, a well-appointed apartment of one’s own.
I also loved another piece from The Cut—Anna Holmes’ thoughtful take on her decision to stay single. “For a certain type of creative, highly sensitive soul,” she writes, “singledom was a feature, not a bug.”
Building from her own experience as a longtime single woman, Traister writes about how a cultural reassessment of female life could spark a significant political shift. I enjoyed how Traister takes what is ostensibly a cultural issue and traces its influence on our collective political priorities, pointing to how issues like pay equity and caregiving are rooted in the changing role of women in society.
Today’s women are, for the most part, not abstaining from or delaying marriage to prove a point about equality. They are doing it because they have internalized assumptions that just a half-century ago would have seemed radical: that it’s okay for them not to be married; that they are whole people able to live full professional, economic, social, sexual, and parental lives on their own if they don’t happen to meet a person to whom they want to legally bind themselves. The most radical of feminist ideas—the disestablishment of marriage — has been so widely embraced as to have become habit, drained of its political intent but ever-more potent insofar as it has refashioned the course of average female life.
This heart-wrenching essay about being single in a world that expects us to want romantic partnerships was published on Them, one of my favorite sites for queer news. With beauty and simplicity, Brandon Taylor writes about his history of childhood sexual abuse and how it impacted his life. Like Taylor, I experienced sexual trauma during childhood and found snippets of my own experience between his sentences. Taylor writes movingly about how sexual attention makes him squirm, and how he craves the intimacy of close friendship rather than romantic connection. Ultimately, he strives to make peace with himself knowing that, at least for the moment, singlehood is the best fit for him. I related to it deeply.
Perhaps that’s the source of my uneasiness. That every time a person interacts with my body, I’ve got to live with the record of it; that suddenly I have another voice to contend with as I try to make peace with myself. It’s another thing I have to move aside or reconcile as I move slowly, so slowly, with the speed of geology, toward a deeper accordance with myself and what I want or don’t want.
I didn’t expect to relate to a 15th-century Catholic nun, but I was very happy to be proved wrong. Jessa Crispin travels to Ávila, Spain, where the locals are celebrating a philosopher who pioneered women’s independence more than 500 years ago. In the Catholicism of my youth, a woman’s only role was to birth and raise more Catholics. But St. Teresa chose another path, joining the church because it was the only way for a woman to be a philosopher and an author. In doing so, she became an unlikely role model for women choosing to create a life alone. This piece also highlights how unmarried women are often the most socially and politically engaged members of society, which reflects my own experience volunteering during my single years. Without a romantic partnership, I had more energy to devote to my community. For a season, I spent my Friday nights volunteering at a children’s hospital—more meaningful than a night of socializing.
Teresa did not want to be reduced to merely a body, bred and sacrificed for the sake of her husband and children. If she had to choose between being a body and a brain, she would choose to be a brain. So she entered the church — the only way a woman could become a philosopher.
DePaulo has published several books on singlehood and has also given a popular TEDx talk on the topic.
We’ve all heard the studies: married people are, on the whole, happier and less lonely than their single counterparts. But when social scientist and long-term single person Bella DePaulo decided to examine the research, she uncovered serious methodological flaws in how these studies were conducted. This piece examines the research that currently exists on single people and highlights how further studies could benefit society as a whole. Single people have a lot to teach us about the pleasures of solitude, the importance of building a life based on your own values, and why we shouldn’t prioritize one central romantic relationship to the exclusion of everything else.
Ever since social science has been interested in the concept of marriage, it has endorsed the idea that everyone’s goal and likely trajectory is to get married at some point. “The idea has been that everybody wants to get married, and eventually everybody will, so why bother studying single people?” she said. Single people are either people who have failed to get married, in other words, or married-people-in-waiting. They’re not worth studying as a category unto themselves.
Throughout most of my single years, I was fortunate to be able to live alone. I couldn’t always afford it, but would sacrifice other luxuries to ensure my own space. One of the biggest challenges to remaining single in a world structured for two is the financial strain it can cause. In this thoughtful and deeply researched piece, Anne Helen Petersen dives into the ways our society is organized to support the needs of partnered people. The tax code, social security benefits, pensions, health insurance, IRAs, and countless other aspects of our societal infrastructure are set up to support married family units—and disadvantage those who choose to stay single. This particularly impacts women, who can expect to live longer than men, but earn less over their lifetimes. Women of color, especially Black women, are particularly penalized. It’s a sobering article about the need for policy—as well as cultural—change when it comes to the rights of single people.
American society is structurally antagonistic toward single and solo-living people. Some of this isn’t deliberate, as households cost a baseline amount of money to maintain, and that amount is lessened when the burden is shared by more than one person. There are other forms of antagonism, too, deeply embedded in the infrastructure of everyday life.
Clare Eganis a queer freelance writer based in Dublin. She writes a regularnewsletter about life after trauma and is working on her first book.
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In this essay at The Dial, Jessica Traynor writes about the proliferation of data centers across Irish cities and towns, which store much of Europe’s digital information while increasing Ireland’s energy footprint and straining its power grid. Today, people generally think the cloud is an effective and secure way to preserve knowledge, but here, Traynor argues that the digital preservation of a nation’s records and memories is not as stable as we think. “The benefits of the data center economy are diffuse, intangible,” Traynor writes. “Unless Ireland figures out a way to surge forward with its slow development of renewables, these data centers seem impossible to sustain.” This is an interesting read on data, memory, and sustainability.
We drive back from Clonshaugh through Priorswood and Darndale, estates built during the 1980s, a time when Ireland suffered successive recessions, mass emigration and a heroin plague. The estates seem to have changed little since those days, even though the country as a whole has seen massive economic and social shifts, and I start thinking about the fragility of social and national memory. I wonder if data centers such as the one in Clonshaugh will contribute to the kind of record keeping Ireland has not always excelled at as a nation. Ireland is a country with a long memory, but a patchy one. . . .
“We have a black hole opening in history. When Irish government departments started using computers in the 1970s, there was no network, and many of those files can’t be read any longer. There’s no real policy for digital preservation of state records. A nightmare is facing us. Emails, Excel, Word, PowerPoint — they’ll all vanish — unless there’s a decision made by the government.”
I was surprised by the projected speed of deterioration of the images we were creating for our database; even TIFF files, the largest and most detailed of commonly used image file types, were prone to quick degradation. And so all that material floating around in the cloud — which is in reality being bounced from server to server, degrading each time this happens — is not really being preserved in the way we might imagine. Its continued existence is dependent on a steady flow of electricity, the continued provision of which is contingent upon governments reaching renewables targets they can’t agree upon.
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For the 17 families who lost loved ones in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14, 2018, Valentine’s Day is not a day of chocolates and candy hearts. And for Linda Zhang and Kong Feng Wang—the parents of Peter Wang, one of the children murdered that day—the process of grief and healing has been complicated by language and culture barriers. Amy Qin’s story is a heartbreaking look at how isolating life has been for their Chinese American family in the years after the Parkland tragedy.
“I am Peter Wang’s mom. It is so difficult to write this letter because I don’t know how to use language to express the pain of losing my oldest son, Peter.”
A few months before, prosecutors notified the victims’ families that they had the option of reading an impact statement at the sentencing trial of Nikolas Cruz, the gunman. Ms. Zhang had initially been unsure whether she would accept. Even in Chinese, talking openly about grief felt so unnatural. And what could such a statement really accomplish?
Peter developed a sense of responsibility from a young age, Mr. Wang and Ms. Zhang said. Like many children of immigrants, he was his parents’ bridge to the English-speaking world, translating correspondence from school and interpreting at doctor’s appointments.
Peter often played the roles of caretaker and translator for his extended family, too. During a family trip to Disney World, Peter insisted on holding the toddler daughter of a family friend in his arms for 20 minutes so she could see the fireworks. When his cousin Aaron moved to Florida from China, Peter took him under his wing at school and helped him communicate with the other students.
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A suspicious death in London, England. How AI could unlock the secrets on ancient scrolls. The struggle to convey a massive glacier’s beauty. How plants experience time. And the hot mess behind the sriracha shortage.
Patrick Radden Keefe | The New Yorker | February 5, 2024 | 14,311 words
I didn’t read Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing when it first came out. Not because I wasn’t interested—rather, I knew that I was going to like it so much, that it was going to be so annoyingly good, that I needed to crack it open when I had time to get lost in its pages. It was one of those leave-me-alone-I’m-reading books. In the case of PRK’s latest feature for The New Yorker, I waited two days to dig in: I finished a long, complicated edit, a bunch of admin work, and household chores, then found myself with a solid stretch of an hour to just read. The story is about Zac Brettler, a young man in London who posed as the son of a Russian oligarch and wound up dead in the Thames after jumping from the balcony of an apartment owned by a gangster; his death appeared to be suicide, but it might have been something else, and we’ll never know for sure because the gangster, who was the last person to see Brettler alive, is now dead too. As I suspected, I had to read the piece in one gulp. Every inch of it is fascinating: the twists and turns of Brettler’s story, the portrait of London as a playground for conmen and fabulists, the revelations that stunned Brettler’s family after he was gone. Needless to say, when you can, clear your own plate and get to reading. —SD
Ashlee Vance and Ellen Huet | Bloomberg Businessweek | February 5, 2024 | 3,688 words
The Herculaneum papyri, a collection of ancient scrolls, were buried by the 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius. To date, about 800 scrolls have been found from excavations at the site, but historians think there may be thousands more, which could shine more light on the world of classical texts and thought. Attempts to unroll them over the centuries, however, have been unsuccessful—in some cases, these fragile scrolls have literally crumbled into pieces. This entertaining story by Ashlee Vance and Ellen Huet has all the elements of a modern-day Indiana Jones adventure, minus the villains: Precious artifacts buried beneath layers of volcanic ash in a villa thought to be owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. A Silicon Valley executive-turned-Roman history buff who holds a competition in which promising young programmers around the world race to uncover the secrets on pieces of papyrus that were last unrolled 1,900 years ago. A team’s breakthrough discovery of hidden ink, which opened the door to deciphering Greek letters on the scrolls using AI. It’s a delightful read that blends history, the classics, technology, and machine learning. —CLR
Elizabeth Rush | Emergence Magazine | February 1, 2024 | 4,468 words
In this excerpt adapted from her book The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, Elizabeth Rush recounts an expedition to the Thwaites Glacier, a massive sheet of ice in Antarctica, one whose “calving edge stretches over a hundred miles.” What I love about this piece is that you get a deep sense of the thinking and struggle that went into writing about familiar geography so many have never experienced in person. I revelled in Rush’s attempts to get it right. And at first, the glacier defies her. “The words I conjure—cirque, serac, cleft, torque, ski slope, rampart—all slide off the surface of the ice, plopping one after the other into the bay right in front of Thwaites,” she writes. “I try out different words for white—plaster of Paris, opalescent, pearl—and blue—cobalt, cadmium, torqued turquoise—but none get at the way these colors come together to form a symphony of sorts, a polyphony of light and play, impossible to translate.” This piece is far more than a litany of discarded descriptors. It’s a fascinating account of coming face-to-face with a glacier and trying to comprehend its vast majesty; about grappling with how to convey that singular experience with precision. And in the end, reader? Rush ices it. —KS
Count me among the people who didn’t know that plants experience time in variable ways. We may age trees by their rings, but their growth—and thus those ever-accreting concentric circles—ebbs and flows in response to the world around them. Trees have helped researchers mark climate change over centuries, even tying it to history-changing droughts. That’s why, as Jonathon Keats explains in this enlightening essay, a 12-foot-tall “arboreal clock” will be among the timekeeping devices included in a project he has been shepherding. There will be others, like a fluvial clock marking time the way a river system might. Taken together, they will underscore a crucial point: time is larger than humans, and by experiencing it as other beings do can help us reconnect to the larger natural world. “Humankind appears to be the only species to have contrived clocks that count without reference to something outside of themselves,” he writes. “We also appear to be the only species to have use for these contraptions, to use time in this peculiar way.” I’ve recommended stories about time and measure before. None of them gave me pause the way this one does—a pause that, I now know, ripples well beyond any one organism. —PR
Indrani Sen | Fortune | January 30, 2024 | 3,994 words
I started reading this essay in a cafe, with a bottle of sriracha sitting on the table across from me. Staring at the iconic bottle—the bold rooster motif, the cheerful bright green cap—I tried to remember when I first heard the rumors of the “Great Sriracha Shortage.” I believe the mutterings started at a dinner party, whispered tales of bottles selling for $80. Getting home, I opened my cupboard to check my stash—relieved to see two full bottles snugly in place. I would make it. Secure in my immediate supply, the sriracha dilemma fell from my mind, until I came upon this essay and realized I had no idea what actually caused the shortage. I was ready for Indrani Sen to dish the dirt. She begins by artfully filling us in on the history of the sauce, its unexpected rise to fame (it’s never even run a marketing campaign), and the deal between two companies that secured its future with a quality supply of chilies. But this deal—between Underwood Ranches (the chili farmer) and Huy Fong Foods (the sauce maker)—ultimately led to the problem. An argument about money caused a fiery end to the 28-year relationship, costing both companies millions. As Sen writes, the two “soft-spoken patriarchs” remain at odds, even though it leaves: “One man with thousands of acres of pepper fields, but nobody to buy his peppers. Another with a massive pepper factory, and not enough peppers to keep it running.” A Shakespearean-level feud. This hot mess makes for a fascinating read, and hold onto your bottles: it’s still a rocky road. —CW
Kyra Dempsey | Asterisk | January 22, 2024 | 3,422 words
The United States leads the world in airline safety. That’s because of the way we assign blame when accidents do happen. Kyra Dempsey, aka Admiral Cloudberg, explains the governing norms of post-accident investigations. —SD
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Yes, the headline is undeniable. Yes, the story delivers on its promise. Yes, Peter Holley’s story about Austin Riley’s harrowing ordeal will stay with you. A chilling reminder that animals gonna animal, no matter how tight the bond.
Always eager for his owner’s company, Waylon enjoyed following Austin around the family ranch and falling asleep on his chest after feedings. He loved red apples, rough belly scratches, and tender massages on his hardened, bony snout. Before long, the pig and the brawny farm boy were inseparable. “I just kinda became his parent, his dad, really,” Austin said. “Early on, I’d take him with me through the drive-thru at Whataburger and he’d sit in the front seat, happy as can be.”
Waylon soon grew to be “two hundred fifty pounds of pure protein,” as Austin likes to say—more than an average-sized NFL linebacker. By then, Austin had moved him to a large pen a few hundred yards away from the family home. On particularly beautiful days, he liked to lie on the ground in the enclosure, listening to sports radio and watching the clouds pass by. Inevitably, Waylon would lie down beside him, gingerly resting his enormous, wart-covered head on Austin’s thigh. They could remain that way for five or six hours at a time.
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In Noēma, Jonathon Keats unspools a thought-provoking essay about time—specifically, about how every organism other than humans experiences time, and how one key to undoing humans’ ecological impact might just be appreciating those other experiences. To wit: an “arboreal clock” that measures and displays time from the perspective of a massive tree.
Fluctuations in the bristlecones’ growth rate, affected by environmental conditions ranging from local rainfall to planetary climate change, will be measured by analyzing the thickness of tree rings in microcores retrieved from the mountain each year. These data will be used to determine the center of gravity for the pendulum, which will swing slower or faster depending on the tree ring thickness. Though the clock face will display time in the usual way, it won’t serve as a mechanism for human planning — a technology to impose order on the environment for our convenience — but rather to pace our lives to match the lived reality of other organisms.
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