A famous author was saved by a fictional family and then wrote a novel about it
Meg Mason on Nancy Mitford, a lonely teenager, and the strangest thing to happen to this entire field this year.
The GuardianRead →
A 31-year-old's death became a generation's first real loss
SBS on Liam Payne, and the specific weight of losing someone you grew up with at sixteen.
I taught high schoolers for years and this is the thing nobody prepares them for. You do not lose your childhood at eighteen. You lose it the year the person you measured yourself against actually dies, and there is no assembly for it and no one hands you a form. He was thirty-one. He was old to them and young to everyone, and that gap is where the whole story is.
Notice, name, choose. That's the whole method.
The clerk's shelf - how this got here first
Sources
Where this sits in the encyclopedia
Kurt CobainA death broadcast in real time to a generation that had grown up with a songwriter's complaints as a soundtrack.Grieving a person you never metCollective mourning of a public figure, and the persistent argument about whether it counts. Measured in studies of soap opera finales finding grief…
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A widely-shared explainer on why every single person has a parasocial relationship and why most of them are fine.
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When a famous person dies it can feel like losing someone you loved
The Guardian ran this on the exact week Dolly Parton, Gloria Steinem and Liam Payne died. The timing is not the story. The timing proves the story.
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A woman died in Seoul and by the next day the argument was about whether the fandom was toxic
The pivot from a death to a discourse about ourselves, in about a day, in front of a diaspora that had to watch it happen.
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