"My father worked in a rock quarry. My mother was a kindergarten teacher. And I, anticipating a life of motherhood and Christianity..."

"... was engaged at 16. I had planned to marry after I turned 18, but my engagement ended shortly before our wedding day when my fiancé was arrested and charged with possessing child pornography. When that dream evaporated, I needed a new dream, so I decided to go to college, something my fiancé had discouraged. Partly out of spite for his low opinion of me, I applied to Harvard and was somehow accepted. Off I went, but the culture shock was extreme. I struggled but graduated, unsure of what was next."

Writes Emilee Hackney, in "I Hadn’t Planned on a Love Triangle/Bring on the ticks, bears and ice storms, but don’t make me choose between two men" (NYT gift link).

She was hiking the Appalachian Trail with the idea of being alone — a good trick for finding romance.

"Across the seven sheds, each with their own atmosphere and theme, are life size, lifelike figures and animals, as well as miniatures, tableaux of found objects, ladders, old papers..."

"... boxes, buckets, complex assemblages of forms and materials, some indecipherable and unfinished. The workshop shed shows the scale and breadth of Exworth’s technical acuity and thinking – everything from drills, jigsaws, sanders and glass cutters to grinders, putty and tiny paintbrushes.... 'For me, he was a really genuine artist – solving problems about how to make things. He was engaged in the activity of making, and found that far more rewarding than presenting it. Ray was just engrossed every day in how to move forward and make something.'"

From "'The door slid open and my jaw dropped': the astonishing sculptures only ever seen by 20 people/Ray Exworth spent his life filling Cornish sheds with breathtaking sculptures – but wouldn’t let anyone in to view them. Now, after his death, his secret body of work has been revealed" (The Guardian).

"He wanted revenge — revenge against society because he blamed society for all his troubles."

"You’ll hear that in 2024, the defendant was lonely, with no real friends.... He lived by himself and was withdrawn."

Said the prosecutor, quoted in "Man accused of starting LA wildfire ‘wanted revenge on the rich’/Jonathan Rinderknecht is on trial for arson, facing allegations that he was behind the devastating fires that consumed thousands of homes" (London Times).

"Gabi Drunyte, 21, from the Glasgow area, posted her first video, which opens 'I have no friends,' on TikTok in November."

"It received more than 211,000 views and 20,000 likes. 'A really large flood of people said they were in the same position … and that it was refreshing to see someone be so open because they thought they were alone,' she said. 'The biggest comment that I got was that I gave them a new lease of life, like they were really contemplating things, they felt really, really, really poorly about themselves.' Drunyte explained that after school she gave into being 'a wee bit of a recluse,' feeling that her efforts to socialise were futile. After university, she moved home and worked hybrid jobs. She posts 'day in the life' videos of her doing errands, hikes or solo trips to lochside lodges...."

From "The latest TikTok trend for Gen Z? Admitting you have no friends/Behind the perfect skin routine, delicious meal for one and spotless flat, popular 'living alone diaries' highlight a loneliness epidemic" (London Times).

A City Without Loneliness.

An ad I'm seeing:

That's appearing at the NYT, with the article "Trump on His Presidential Library: He’ll Write His Own History/In his determination to own and control every document in his future library, the president is working to shield his administration’s inner workings from public view."

Trump's library — which might include a hotel — is in a city I'm sure has some loneliness, Miami. But let's think about Seoul, South Korea, and what it has decided to talk to us about — loneliness.

Does it just want us, over here in America, to know that it's taking care of its lonely people, with counseling and hugs from an imaginary animal? I clicked "learn more" and got "In An Age Of Loneliness, Seoul Reimagines The City As Care" which is a sponsored New York Times article. 

Seoul has a loneliness hotline, we're told. Also, "The Seoul 365 Challenge Program" — inviting residents to go outside once each day. And, my favorite, the "Mind Convenience Store," where "Anyone can step in, sit down, eat, and rest, and" — with the help of a facilitator called "Everyone's Friend"— "begin to connect."

"And it is a vicious cycle: the more women and non-binary people do the overwhelming majority of resistance work..."

"... the more men take in the wrong-headed message that this work is not for them...."

Writes Saul Austerlitz, author of "How to Assemble an Activist," in "How do we get more men to join the anti-Trump resistance? My activist group is about 80% women. Where did all the men go – and how can we get them back?" (Guardian).

My first thought was: Don't push the "and non-binary people" talk. But anyway isn't it funny that you're so vitally interested in the male/female split and simultaneously hot to insert "and non-binary people"? 

"My unscientific conclusion is that the men who have already drifted away, whatever their reasons, are unlikely to come back. Instead, now is an ideal time to extend an invitation to the men in our circles who hover on the edges, shouting fruitlessly at their TV screen or social-media feed, not knowing yet how much good they can do – or how much better they will feel

"I can’t think of one person in a relationship that I would want for myself. I’ve done it before and prefer focusing on me and my own needs."

Says a 33-year-old Toronto woman, quoted at the beginning of a NYT article called "Why Marriage, for So Many, Is Less Appealing Than Ever/From Gen Z to Gen X, a pause in the march to the altar, or a decision to skip it altogether, is becoming more common."

There's also this from Shani Silver, 43, host of "A Single Serving Podcast": "[A]s millennials, we got to the age where we were promised all these things would happen, and they never did.... [We] worked on ourselves throughout our lives to become the desirable partners we were told to become... But the men didn’t rise along with us. They’ve stagnated. There are imbalances in domestic labor responsibilities, emotional labor responsibilities, in running a household... If you marry a man you’re settling for, I don’t see a lot of relationship longevity."

"5 things society makes a big deal about that don't have to be that important" and "21 more things I love about being single and living alone."

It might be dangerous — especially for the young — to consume these 2 lists in sequence. It might be what "they" don't want you to know.... 

ADDED: These are Tiktok videos and I'm having trouble embedding them. So: the first one is here and the second one is here.

"It’s a little under four minutes long, all told, but you’ll watch it at least four times over, then wonder if it’s a joke, if Melania is a wind-up merchant playing a complex, hilarious long game..."

"... with an unknowable outcome, if AI has its grubby little robot mitts on it... or if it’s symptomatic of the damage social media has wrought more generally on words, on rhetoric, if a billion drivel-addled Instagram posts have rendered language so empty, so narcissistic, directionless, and light on pith, what more can you expect? Then you think: yeah, but she really did help get 19 kids back home to parents...."

Writes Polly Vernon, in "Is Melania Trump really a 'visionary'? She certainly thinks so!/Everything we learnt about the first lady from her recent White House speech" (London Times).

Vernon calls the speech "just mental." It's: "An elevated puking up of fundamentally unconnected words that do achieve a startling clarity a few times, just not in a good way — ie, when she declared herself 'a visionary,' which I’m not sure anyone should ever do (even if they are one)."

“Often alone, at the top, I follow my passion, listen to my instincts and always maintain a laser focus,” Melania continues.... “In solitude, my creative mind dances, feeding my imagination with originality. Attention to detail, demanding schedules and multi-tasking are everyday realities.”...

Listen for yourself:

"She was doing just fine on her own. That’s what she told her relatives whenever they gently suggested that maybe it was time to move into a care center..."

"... or closer to family, or at least closer to something. She had climbed mountains with a pickax in her 40s, trained for marathons in her 50s, and walked five miles each day to the end of the peninsula in her 70s, fighting against the howling wind and sea mist just to prove she could. Now she was bent and twisted by scoliosis, down to 4-foot-6 and 85 pounds. She propped herself up on three pillows so she could see over the steering wheel on her trip to yoga class and the store each Wednesday. She hauled the grocery bags up 12 stairs by herself. But despite her strength and stubborn independence, her doctors had warned that living alone sometimes came at a cost. The U.S. surgeon general had declared loneliness and social isolation 'profound threats to our health and well-being.' For older adults, they increased the risks of anxiety, depression, dementia, heart disease and premature death by up to 30 percent. 'Do you want to talk?' ElliQ asked. 'With you?' Jan said...."

I'm reading "To Stay in Her Home, She Let In an A.I. Robot/At 85, Jan Worrell lived alone on a remote corner of the Washington coast. Could ElliQ become her companion?" (gift link... because it's a long story).

"The swan, who had recently lost his mate, would not move away from a vending machine at Tri-Township Park in Troy, Ill."

"The swan stared at his reflection below the Dr Pepper dispensers, thinking it showed his mate, park officials said. The swan needed a new partner, but the parks department would not be able to budget for new swans until April, said Sandy Pensoneau, the office manager at the Tri-Township Park District.... Park regulars had been clamoring for a response, Ms. Pensoneau said. 'The people that walk the park every day, they’re like, "Hey, you guys need to do something. This is sad,"' she said...."

From "Swan Seeks Mate: Must Like Cold Lake and Small Flock/An Illinois parks department sought help from the community to find mates for two swans after they lost their companions. Residents responded" (NYT).

"China today is a country where many young people have no siblings. Because the one-child policy lasted so long, their parents also have no siblings..."

"... so they have no aunts, uncles, or cousins, either. That is complicating China’s war-planning efforts because the massive casualties required to invade Taiwan would mean many families lose their only child, who they’re counting on to take care of them in old age. Decades of sex-selective abortions have resulted in severe gender imbalances. Because there are tens of millions more men than women, dating or marriage — let alone procreation — is impossible for many. Intense pressure on the children who are born, plus child-raising costs that are among the highest in the world when adjusted for income, make the prospect of family life unattractive, even as loneliness eternally grates on the soul...."

From "China embraced population control. The damage may be irreversible. Despite the communist government’s efforts, women won’t have more children" by the Editorial Board of The Washington Post.

1. Taiwan has an even lower birth rate than China.

2. "loneliness eternally grates on the soul" — That was not a phrase I expected from the Editorial Board of The Washington Post.

3. I've seen so much social media touting the joy of a single life for women. There's a viral TikTok audio that begins with an ominous sounding warning of women about what will happen if they don't marry and continuing with a list of good things like having a clean, well-decorated house, peace and quiet, and the company of music, books, friends, and pets. And here are the WaPo editors anguishing over the solitude of the Chinese. Hmm.

4. I'm also surprised WaPo editors didn't try harder to align their language with the belief in the right to have abortions. These 2 sentences (not quoted above) jumped out at me: "Forced abortions and sterilizations, combined with fines and propaganda, snuffed out many millions of lives. Unborn girls were particularly victimized because of sex-selective abortions." 

Goodbye to Brigitte Bardot.

"Brigitte Bardot, the pouty, tousle-haired French actress who redefined mid-20th-century movie sex symbolism in films beginning with 'And God Created Woman,' then gave up acting at 39 to devote her life to the welfare of animals, has died. She was 91."

The NYT reports.

President Macron writes: "Her films, her voice, her dazzling glory, her initials, her sorrows, her generous passion for animals, her face that became Marianne, Brigitte Bardot embodied a life of freedom. French existence, universal brilliance. She touched us. We mourn a legend of the century."

Much as I've admired Brigitte Bardot for her great beauty, I have never seen a Brigitte Bardot movie, not even "Contempt."

"We must rebel when we're trapped by circumstances, conventions."

Here's her filmography, full of titles I'm sad not to recognize.

"At best, Ms. Bardot was considered eccentric in her later years, prompting observations that this former sex kitten, as she was often called, had turned into a “crazy cat lady,'" it says in the NYT obituary. 

At best? That's because of this:

"Schopenhauer was a lifelong bachelor who had few friends and many enemies, who preferred the company of dogs..."

"... to that of his fellow men and women, and whose own mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, broke off ties with him, telling him in a letter, 'I am acquainted with your heart and know that few are better, but you are nevertheless irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you.'... [H]e became even more so as he grew older, driven by the belief that solitude was the price of telling the rest of humankind two unbearable truths. First, that it is better never to have been born; second, for those of us unfortunate enough to exist, to expect nothing but suffering and sorrow.... It is curious to think that his beloved standard poodle, Atma, knew what men and women did not know: that his master believed in the care and concern for all living beings...."

Writes Robert Zaretsky, in "Compassionate Curmudgeon/Why we must root ourselves in the real world" (The American Scholar).

"I was working on a poem yesterday that had an epigraph from the poet Christopher Morley: 'No man is lonely while eating spaghetti.'"

"Sometimes you discover a sentence like that and say, 'I’m gonna put that on the top of a poem and see what happens.' Sometimes the epigraph is not just some cute afterthought but the reason why the poem started."

From a 2018 "Conversation with Billy Collins" (Booth), found because I was making spaghetti and remembering the epigraph, which I'd just encountered at the top of the poem "Vivace!"

I don't want to reprint an entire poem on my blog, but I will link to this other blog that did see fit to do what I won't do. You'll find the full text of "Vivace!" in a blog post titled "I Figured Out the Perfect Evening Activity."

"Six hundred and forty-two people are watching when Emily tugs off her sleep mask to begin day No. 1,137 of broadcasting every hour of her life."

"They watch as she draws on eyeliner and opens an energy drink for breakfast. They watch as she slumps behind a desk littered with rainbow confetti, balancing her phone on the jumbo bottle of Advil she uses for persistent migraines. They watch as she shuffles into the bathroom, the only corner of her apartment not on camera.... When Emily started streaming in 2016, her world felt impossibly small. She worked night shifts as a cashier on Long Island and spent her off hours at her boyfriend’s place, watching him play video games. At 19, she chose to save money by staying close to home and enrolling at the local community college, watching as all her friends moved away. One afternoon, her boyfriend told her to try Twitch, saying, as she recalled: 'Your life sucks, you work at CVS, you have no friends. … This could be helpful.'..."

From "Inside the life of a 24/7 streamer: ‘What more do you want?’ A lonely young woman in Texas has streamed every second of her life for three years and counting. Is this life, or a performance of one?" (WaPo)(free-access link, because there's a lot of material here, and I couldn't begin to quote everything interesting/horrible).

If it all feels very deja-vu, perhaps you are remembering JenniCam, which went on for 7 years and went off 22 years ago. Jenni — Jennifer Ringley — got on the David Letterman show: "He predicted that Ringley’s style of entertainment would 'replace television, because this is really all people want.... They’re lonely, desperate, miserable human beings... they want to see life somewhere else taking place.'"

Zuckerberg invites you into a room with 15 A.I. friends.

I remember when Zuckerberg wanted real people to interact in a virtual space called Metaverse. But people didn't want to go there. The rooms were empty. But 4 years later, what Z is talking about sounds like the solution to the core problem with Metaverse. The rooms are full of interesting people — all there ready to talk to you and full of interesting stories and knowledge all framed around your preferences and tuned to your mood.

Makes me think of the old Dylan lyric: "Oh my God, am I here all alone?"

"But if each of us moves about to a separate soundtrack, then is that even living in the city?"

"Or to put the question another way: If all space is private space, then what is public space even for?"

Asks the architecture and classical-music critic Justin Davidson, in "Public Space Has Become Earbud Space" (NY Magazine).

"Urban planners fit out plazas with a variety of seating, for instance... to accommodate a maximal range of groups and conversations. But most of those users just want to be left alone.... And yet I often suspect that... many people don’t actually like the isolation they permit. Lorde’s video ends in Washington Square Park, where the singer convened fans by TikTok for an impromptu concert that the police shut down for lack of a permit. When she did finally show up, that was the climax of an ultimate un-earbud moment...."

"On American TV shows, the London native starred as an android brought to an asteroid to keep a prisoner (Jack Warden) company on 1959’s 'The Lonely'..."

"... the seventh episode of CBS’ 'The Twilight Zone,' and she was the self-described 'office bitch' Roz in 1982-83 on ABC’s adaptation of '9 to 5.'"

From "Jean Marsh, ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ Actress and Co-Creator, Dies at 90/The British actress won an Emmy for her performance as the prim and proper parlormaid Rose Buck on the acclaimed ITV drama ['Upstairs, Downstairs']" (Hollywood Reporter).

I saw that yesterday and immediately watched the "Twilight Zone" episode, "The Lonely." Marsh plays a robot, given, mercifully, to a man condemned to 50 years alone on a desolate asteroid:

It's a great robot story! Watch the full episode here, on Vimeo. Great ending (with a great teaser for next week's show). I don't remember having seen "The Lonely" before, and I devotedly watched the show at the time, but perhaps not until after the first season, which aired in 1959, when I was 8. 

The actor who plays the condemned man in "The Lonely" is Jack Warden. That blew my mind! I had just finished watching "Shampoo" (on The Criterion Channel) the previous night.

In "Shampoo," Warden plays the male character who is not played by Warren Beatty. I never go around thinking about Jack Warden! And yet yesterday, before I got the prompt to watch "The Lonely," I was thinking about Jack Warden. Here's the trailer, which has everything you need to know about Warren Beatty and just a bit of Jack Warden:

"Young people in the city are very boring now. I am only in my early 30s but the difference between 10 years ago is stark."

"When I was in my early 20s, you would go out and meet new people every bar you went to. Every night had a funny or interesting story. Contrast that with the Gen Zs you see out: they sit glued to their phones, are scared of speaking to new people, vape constantly, and are only interested in the latest viral tiktok they saw. If you are in New York and spend all your time hanging with other transplants from your same home city, scrolling your phone, and order delivery from a franchise for all your meals, why even live here? You can eat chick fil a and watch TikToks in any city in the US. Guess I'm getting old!"

Says Bud Weiser — if that really is your name — in the comments section of "Why Are These Clubs Closing? The Rent Is High, and the Alcohol Isn’t Flowing/The financial decline of some of the city’s most popular clubs has put a spotlight on the realities of nightlife" (NYT).

Agreeing with Bud is Clark: