On Hunting

in
People get hunters all mixed up, and think they are looking for what is rare or elusive – the thing that might give them the slip, and scurry away down some furtive alley if it were not for the hunter’s state of constant awareness. On the contrary, for the hunter, there is too much world, and all of it is clamouring for attention. Nothing rare or elusive here.
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Droning On

in
I used to work in a call center in which we were instructed to make 50 calls an hour. Our pay depended on us fulfilling this quota. Most hours, this didn't prove to be a problem. At 7pm, there was a list of thousands of old grannies eager to be divested of their retirement fund. Things got trickier, however, on the night shift. At 3am, who do you call to fulfill your quota?
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Stasis-Noise-Heaviness

in
Simply put, one needs to leave in order to arrive anywhere. And leave where? Where one is comfortable: the shock of the new is always the other thing that is invariably compared to home (when I think of something, I always think of something else), which is why tourism is so apparently seductive, because what one experiences is home, again and again. Leaving simply brings into relief the contours of home: the expensive holiday that reveals the rich businessman at his house (one is never more at work than when one is spending); the photographs, already taken in order to recycle the world just above the fireplace, used to stand testimony to a world outside of home...
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Guardian op-ed: Breaking the cycle of violence in Sudan

in

On 18 August, at least 600 died in Uror county, Jonglei state, as Murle raiders attacked Lou Nuer villagers, in the latest in a series of raids and tit-for-tat attacks between the two groups that have left more than 1,000 dead since February. In grisly but illuminating symmetry, the UN said that around 26,000 cattle were stolen and 26,800 people displaced in the latest series of clashes.

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