What Are Apples And Toffee

James Baldwin talking about love

A young student's selfie

Early summer, just before our last summer holidays, we got into a discussion with a teacher at recess.

He had a topic for us. Evidence. An opinion.

One more year and we'd be done with school. We felt so mature.

His discussion? Why, young girls and body images of course.

Oh, we were so in. He started on the young girls in his class, how they dressed. How they walked. How social media was trapping them. We nodded along, thinking we were talking about the same thing.

We thought we were talking about Instagram's clutch on our young sisters. The twelve year olds with eating disorders. The sleekly styled hair of middle schoolers with baby fat and round eyes.

He pulled out a photo.

A girl. We'd seen her. It was a good pic, her at eye level with a statue in a museum they'd gone to. A class trip. She'd asked this teacher to make the picture of her, all golden curls and brown lashes.

Look at what I had to photograph, he said. Showing us the lace bra peeking through her shirt, the pose she stroke like she was twenty-five.

We said all the right things. How horrifying it was. That society shouldn't do this to girls. Satisfied, he left, pocketing his phone.

That was two months ago.

Someone realised it yesterday. That class trip to the museum was four months ago.

He had kept the picture of her on his camera roll.

Lace bra and baby round eyes.

ordered pizza from a small local place and they didnt actually cut it so i've chosen to revert to a wild animal and begin ripping it apart instead of just using a knife to portion slices

Hen and Chicks by Yamaguchi Okatomo, mid- to late 18th century

Masterpieces of Japan on Twitter: Source

The Rotted Man

When I was a child of only three The Rotted man came for me late one night from my open door he slowly crept across the floor he took me by the hand and said I’ll save you from this life of dread we left the house in the early morn and took his carriage of blackened thorn we rode for hours through thick dense fog to a darkened unlit swamp filled bog where top-less trees with hanging moss were shields from the unseen winter frost the thick wet heat from the dense cool air crept up your back and through your hair he took me to his house of bones on a path laid with cobble stones upon his door hung a head of a child with hair of fiery red his hall was bathed in blood red tile the walls were stacks of flesh in piles He told me of his protective view and begged that I should join him too He smiled and through his rotted lips I saw a thousand children’s fingertips He promised me the world would pay and told me that I could stay Then we entered a smaller room and the rotted man gave me a red balloon Then I saw my mom through tinted glass The man with her was talking fast The tears were pouring from her eyes The man then held her while she cried Then the Rotted man did the strangest thing, He sat down with me and began to sing. A soft nice tune that filled my head With puppy dogs and fresh baked bread It was then I notice that the rotted man Was simply old and had a tan, And then my mom burst in the room The feel of warmth, her sweet perfume She hugged me tight and swore to me From here on out, Dad would let us be. No more bruises no more fights, No more screaming in the night, The rotted man had saved our lives, By taking those who beat their wives, And children that cry when they’re dropped, And are beaten senseless until they stop, I thank the Rotted man a lot, And never have I forgot, That the thing I feared, saved my life, They had found my father with a knife, There are real horrors on this earth, Some are subjected to them at birth, We were saved by a man made of rot, I was lucky, but many are not.

by thelirivalley

I'm an intern and my job is to enter addresses from hand-written letters into the database and did you know that Joshua Neumann from Hermannstreet 4, Cologne, has a life too

Oh

He's a principal in a small town. I googled it.

A mid-50s couple donated 100 dollars to our cause and I said that's very generous of you and he shrugged and said is it really

Oh

I guess it isn't really. Not for us.

When I came back after New Year the woman I've been working a lot with saw me in the office kitchen and hugged me.

I googled a scrawled address to decipher it and the town was so pretty I'm going to go there on a day trip with some friends. By train. Like we did 2 years ago.

You know what I'm saying, you know it.

I’m sorely I just. This is the most inspirational thing I’ve seen this week.

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

Annie Choi, Studio Ghibli

“tell me a story. i don’t have any to tell. (you wouldn’t believe me if i did.) you always have stories. you already know all the good ones. (the only good ones i have are the ones with you.) then tell me an old one. but you already know how it ends. (i wish i could forget how this one ends. i think i was happier not knowing.) i don’t care. it’s no fun if you know the ending. (you should care. this tragedy is a fairytale without it.) can’t you make one up? i just want to hear a story. fine. i’ll tell you a story. (i’ll tell you a lie. that’s all i have left to give you.) okay. i’m listening. once upon a time, there was a boy with fool’s gold for hair. (and i couldn’t save him.)”

— but I swear I tried. I did. ( j.p. ) || insp. by @noxalnoesis

thinking about the people who vanished without a trace. The mutual who reblogged something as usual and never came back online. The friend on discord who just disappeared, and when you go to check on them their account is deleted and theres no other way to contact them

I look out of my window and hope you are okay, I wish you well and Im sorry I didn't get to say goodbye.

I hope we meet again someday but until then. Stay safe. Stay alive. Be well.