Name of the new song from Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend, Discovery). Fell in love with it instantly and playing on loop.
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From this article on suicides at the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, a prevention strategy that is simultaneously terrible and clever, made all the more terrible that you could find it clever: “In the southern city of Guangzhou, workers had been ordered to smear butter over a steel bridge popular with jumpers, in order to make it too slippery to climb. “We tried employing guards at both ends,” said a government official, “and we put up special fences and notices asking people not to commit suicide here. None of it worked—and so now we have put butter over the bridge, and it has worked very well.”“
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At some point while reading Norwegian Wood, I began predicting the fate of each character we met to be suicide and found myself correct disturbingly often. It is easy to plumb for nostalgia in the suicides of beautiful and charismatic youth. The novel opens on an airplane plunging through the clouds, and it spends the next 300 pages plunging through the clouds of nostalgia. Supposedly, fans of Norwegian Wood, which is Murakami’s most popular novel in Japan, are often disappointed by the elliptical turns and surrealism of his other novels. I came at his work in the opposite direction, only to be disappointed by the straightforward sentimentalism of Norwegian Wood. The novel is a nostalgia trip. Drunk on nostalgia. These metaphors are deliberate: as the users of a drug are carried to the extremes of human experience, those of us sober on the sidelines can only wonder what is so mindblowing, what it is that we are missing out.
