Author: My World of Interiors
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Chapter 48: Loving You
Back at Bryn Mawr, I’m racing to finish my senior thesis, determined to do it quickly and well. Tilly is supposed to be working too, but she’s distracted. Buddy comes down to visit us so often that their constant antics are beginning to get on my nerves. More than once, I slip a noise complaint…
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Tove Ditlevsen
Essay · Literature & Lives The Copenhagen Trilogy and the Cost of Seeing Clearly Tove Ditlevsen wrote about the interior lives of women — their desires, their loneliness, their addiction, their marriages, their children, their slow suffocation inside the arrangements that society had made for them — with a directness and a formal precision that…
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Affordable Style: Inns and Guesthouses of Essaouira & the Atlas Foothills
Morocco’s Atlantic coast and mountain landscapes offer a different kind of escape: atmospheric, artisanal, and surprisingly affordable. While Marrakech draws luxury seekers, the port town of Essaouira and the villages of the Atlas foothills remain places where riads, kasbahs, and guesthouses welcome travellers with warmth and character. Here, affordable style is woven into hand-carved wooden…
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Chapter 47: Wild in the Country
We are wasting away the day, lying on the sofas in the TV room at Tilly’s family’s country place. “What a party,” Tilly mutters, placing a bag of ice on her forehead. I laugh. “Good though.” “Happy New Year,” I say. “Happy New Year, Birds.” She groans. “Can you get up and change the channel,…
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Chapter 46: The Idle & The Wild
“Am I glad to see you!” Tilly picks me up at Idlewild Airport. She’s back from Europe, and she looks so English now it makes me chortle. She notices. “I’m transmorphing into that little English rose you arrived as,” she smiles, then adds, with bite: “A bit more sophisticated, though.” She adjusts her hair in…
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Nel Mezzo del Cammin: Dante and the Journey That Is the Argument
He was thirty-five years old, exiled from his city, stripped of everything that had defined him, when he began the most ambitious poem in the Western tradition. He set it in the middle of his own life because the middle of a life is where the crisis comes — when the path forward is no…
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I’m Not a Fan of the New World Order
A political deep dive into Trump’s reckless behaviour on the world stage — and why the consequences will outlast him Introduction Foreign policy is usually a slow-moving business. Alliances take decades to build, trade relationships are negotiated over years, and a nation’s credibility is a resource accumulated patiently across generations of diplomats, treaties, and crises…
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Chapter 45: I’ll Have a Blue Christmas Without You
The boy is vexed that I haven’t seen Love Me Tender, so he takes me to Loew’s that evening. He whispers all the way through, pointing out what he wishes he’d done differently. “We could’ve watched this at home, and you could’ve talked as much as you liked,” I tell him. He looks surprised. “What?…
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The Human Condition According to Ovid
By Bergotte If Homer is the poet of what we lose, Ovid is the poet of what we become. Writing at the height of Roman civilisation and dying at its edge — exiled, cold, forgotten on the shore of the Black Sea — Publius Ovidius Naso produced a body of work that is dazzling, troubling,…
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Chapter 44: God Only Knows
Turns out I’m a little more sensitive than I thought.Thank God for Johnny and his guys taking me out last night. Johnny sees things clearly; he’s thoughtful. We talked about Jerry Lee, “Killer,” as they call him, how wild he is, yet how much of a genius. “He’s like a rock ’n’ roll Mozart,” someone…