The very last thing I read was a US magazine piece online about 9-11, because I was chasing a curious and allegedly true fact circulating the internet that ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ by the Bee Gees was playing in a Twin Towers foyer when the planes hit. It turned out to be half-true—it was a muzak version. But still. ‘…and you come to me on a summer breeze, keep me warm in your love then you softly leave…’ The song is now rendered differently, as if it’s gone through some sort of machine that has made it more haunting than it ever was.

I prefer books to strange online rabbit holes, but I like to do both every day. Right now, like everyone else in the world, I have just finished Rick Morton’s One Hundred Years of Dirt. It is wonderful and also brutal in terms of its thinking around the politics of poverty, the proximity of the writer to that poverty as well as acute mental health conditions and suicide in a family.