Issue forty four of The Attention Span Newsletter was published on 17 December 2025.
ps: the online version is numbered 43 but that is a mistake I cannot correct anymore :)
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.
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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…
I have always loved the ocean; wide, wild, an endless dreamscape of possible escape. Filled with beauty, violence and mystery, the ocean has been carrying humanity’s fears and hopes for millennia. Yet, we know so little about it. Scientists still make discoveries about its habitat. Our Western societies have yet to truly face their own history of crossings in the name of God and Gold. There is always the greater narrative and the personal stories. Both are entwined. …
I had been working for more than a year on this collage.
I made it meticulously with beautiful materials: Pink and gold Japanese paper. A pressed flower I had gathered years ago from a poet’s garden. Fragile materials. I used special glue to bring them together. Archival, naturally, promising to last a lifetime.
I had also applied gold leaf, forming little islands across the layers of paper. A process that demands care and patience. Care, I do have a lot of. Patience, not so much.
My piece was spectacular. Ready to be framed. Perfection.
I destroyed it. That one morning, I felt the need to undo it.
