By July, our tent had become almost impossible to live in. As soon as the sun rose, the fabric trapped the heat, turning the small space into an oven. We decided to get a new tent. I wanted to make it by hand, hoping it would be larger and better at keeping out the heat, but my father thought we should buy a ready-made one. My mother didn’t care either way. Whenever we started arguing, she’d say: ‘Just get any tent. I don’t care what it looks like. Just get us some relief from the heat. It’s all just fabric anyway.’
Last month, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez published a series of Instagram posts documenting the process of freezing her eggs. In the last video, on the economics and politics of women’s healthcare in the United States, she asked why fertility preservation is so prohibitively expensive, costing thousands of dollars and not covered by insurance.
Dolly Parton performing in the 1970s (MediaPunch / Alamy)
It’s an understatement to say that Dolly Parton, who died on Tuesday, was many things to many people. She was multifaceted in a way that few are: she was a popular, well-respected, beloved iconoclast, a true original, and she also radiated the self-referential camp of a celebrity impersonator. She operated both as a person and as an idea.
The Wittockiana museum has a slight air of mystery. Deep in suburban Brussels, crouching discreetly behind ramparts of greenery, it’s an elegant but inscrutable concrete and glass bunker. By the entrance, a monumental carved book the size of a tombstone provides a clue to what’s inside. It’s a research library as well as a museum of book arts and bookbinding, founded by the bibliophile Michel Wittock. There are displays of fine bindings, rare fonts and a room full of antique rattles. The main space is currently given over to an exhibition of blank pages, empty books and ‘publications made of silence’ . This minimal theme is given a maximalist treatment, with nearly two hundred books on show that – in one way or another – are all about absence.
‘Casablanca’
When Casablanca went into production in the spring of 1942, most of Morocco was a French protectorate, administered by the Vichy regime. The film was a hasty project, with excellent anti-Nazi credentials, shot on the cheap – largely at Warner Brothers’ studios in Hollywood.
The Jerusalem municipality has worked to ethnically cleanse the city of its Palestinian population since the illegal occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967. Discriminatory taxes and planning laws, house demolitions, closure of Palestinian schools, hospitals and cultural centres, revocation of residency rights, harassment of businesses and restrictions on the right to entry are some of the ‘legalised’ ways in which Palestinians have been pressured to leave the city.
On 10 August, three days after the inauguration of President Abelardo de la Espriella, Colombia experienced a magnitude 7.4 earthquake, the country’s worst since 1979. With the epicentre in San José del Palmar, the western cities of Cali, Pereira and Manizales were directly affected, along with the entire Chocó department, where the lack of a census, the collapse of communications and the absence of transport infrastructure have stymied relief efforts.