Issue forty two of The Attention Span Newsletter was published on 27 August 2025.
Every month, I take the time to reflect and offer a glimpse of how I see and feel the world through the lens of culture, art, translation, poetry and literature.
Access all issues and subscribe on theattentionspan.com/subscribe.
What a world have we been building, since I sent the last issue of this newsletter last summer. It was issue 30, on Humility and Imagination. I feel none of these two words are part of our mainstream discourses, and it worries me. So here I am. Trying to do my part, attempting to contribute to a narrative of connection and most importantly, trying not to get distracted by voices carrying nothing else but void —from news headlines, algorithms to incompetent politicians.
I promised I would return with new thoughts, reflections, spaces for imagination…
On Sunday night, as the two slow weeks between Christmas and the New Year drew to a close, I felt sad and frustrated. It was time to leave my bubble and return to reality, I thought. This bubble had been a space of freedom—an empty calendar where each day unfolded in the moment. It was filled with culture: ….
I have always dreamed of seeing the world. From an early age, I yearned for movement —physically, emotionally and intellectually. Travel was never simply a holiday; it was where I found myself. It was also always an invitation for humility: a reminder that there is more to this world than the environment we find ourselves in. Seeing new landscapes, feeling unknown languages, dancing through the unfamiliar rhythms of new cities and streets always mirrors something within me. The simple act of moving from one place to another, even for short distances, would awaken my imagination. Movement has shaped me and my work, and has deeply influenced the way I practice translation.
Our obsession with impact exhausts me.
Everything must be measured, analysed, optimized—our choices now data-driven. As if it weren’t enough that arts and culture got caught in this trap, imprisoning imagination inside charts and PowerPoint presentations, we’ve also adopted the vocabulary of capitalism to define our friendships and love stories: we invest emotions, calculate risks before opening our hearts, swipe, like, and treat one another like commodities. The space for genuine discourse has been swallowed by the clickability of headlines and reels.
I wanted to write a lengthy essay about the recent SAIL event in Amsterdam—[…] about the wounds woven into all our histories, and about how we search for beauty in a broken world—how violence and beauty coexist in that fragile space.
But then summertime sadness arrived, carried by shifting winds: warmth fading into chill. We’ve reached that moment when you wrap a scarf around your neck yet still insist on one last ice cream of the season, holding onto the hope of one more outdoor swim before it all disappears. For me, it always brings a deep melancholy. The essay on decolonising SAIL will have to wait…
