#identity

#identity

I hovered over the dropdown menu before clicking "widowed." I realized that next year I would be clicking "married." Though I will consider myself both "married" and "widowed" after my coming wedding, the binaries that govern paperwork will not honor this joint identity, erasing a title that I have come to embrace in the past four years since my husband's death.

There are some items that symbolise the gap between the person you want to be and the person you actually are. For me, that item is the leather trouser. Long the reserve of motorcyclists or try-hards (the Guardian in 2020: to buy a pair was to show the world that you were coping very badly with the ageing process), the trousers started to appear everywhere a few years ago.

Fashion image makers on our MA often treat the word 'fashion' rather loosely. We encourage that,

For while Erpenbeck adopted some of the features of the form apparently throwaway observations on daily life, such as minor irritation at the difficulty of sourcing proper splitterbrotchen, an unpretentious pastry now pimped for a more elaborate and wealthy clientele she consistently enlarged and complicated it. Into that recognisable tone of ennui and mild querulousness with which journalists hope to woo a time-pressed but disenchanted or nostalgic readership, Erpenbeck smuggled metaphysics, politics and history.

Let's start with a confession: I've never been fully authentic for a single day in my life. Neither have you. I don't mean this as an accusation. I see it as fact. The relentless cultural message telling us to "be ourselves" might be the cruelest advice we've ever collectively accepted. It promises liberation but brings anxiety. Because here's what nobody mentions when they sell you authenticity as the path to enlightenment: being your full, unfiltered self would make you unemployable, unfriendable

What's in a name? As people such as Peach, Riot and Aquaman have found, it can change your life for the better, or worse. With this in mind, we would like to hear from people with unusual names about how it affects others' perceptions of you. How has your name shaped your life? Share your experience You can tell us about how your name has shaped your life using this form.

Back to selectionEvery Contact Leaves a Trace, its title alluding to a basic principle of forensic science, is the latest cinematic exploration from experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs. Pairing this concept with seven (of the 600) business cards she's collected over the years, Sachs embarks on an investigation into "how an encounter with someone seeps into your way of thinking" (as she explains in a VO that runs throughout the film).

Kushal certainly has pretensions toward neutrality, even if he isn't strictly neutral. This makes him an effective narrator, as you point out. But it's the pride that Kushal takes in his neutrality that really interests me. I think he savors the idea that he exists at a remove from his family; it makes him feel unusual, even exceptional. The irony being, of course, that everyone around Kushal is equally convinced of his or her own exceptionalism.

Between Chaos and Control: A visual exploration that collides punk rebellion with futuristic surrealism. This editorial combines raw human vulnerability, including bruises and scars, with primal expressions, metallic distortions and digital 3D forms. Through this fusion, the series explores the tension between chaos and control, the body and the machine, authenticity and performance. It captures identity not as something fixed, but as a fluid, ever-evolving form shaped by technology and rebellion.

I remember the moment it happened - the single spark that set my body aflame. Cecelia stood behind me on the Pilates reformer and pressed her legs into my back, her hands into my shoulders. The strength of her long, lean limbs drove me into submission. Her perfectly-highlighted blonde hair tickled the back of my neck. "Connect your pubic bone to your sternum. Hold it." Her voice was deep, throaty.

the changeable, renewable second skin, that outside the merely practical act as a facade for far more than we know. As Dr Valerie Steele, the curator known as the Freud of fashion, puts it, fashion communicates our unconscious desires and anxieties, with none of us fully aware of the messages we send. From her perspective, far from being superficial, fashion exposes people's desires and anxieties like a psychosomatic rash.

Hayley and Helaman Perry-Sanchez put off their move to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as long as they could. Helaman was accepted to Harvard Business School in 2020, and though he was excited to pursue his MBA, the Perry-Sanchezes weren't as eager to relocate to the East Coast. After meeting and marrying while they were in college in Utah - and subsequently leaving the Mormon church together - Hayley, 27, and Helaman, 29, had found jobs and built a life in Seattle.

I was volunteering in raptor rescue, monitoring eagle nests as the busy season ramped up, juggling consulting work, supporting adoption placements, writing, creating. I was showing up fully in every space except the one I lived in: my body. And yet I refused to let go. I told myself it was just a busy season. That if I could push through, things would calm down. That my exhaustion was noble, temporary, necessary.

"The wound is the place where the Light enters you." ~Rumi I didn't know what it meant to grieve a body that was still alive until mine turned on me. It began like a whisper-fatigue that lingered, strange symptoms that didn't match, a quiet fear I tried to ignore. Then one night, I collapsed. I woke up in a hospital room I didn't recognize, attached to IVs I hadn't agreed to, surrounded by medical voices that spoke in certainty while I sat in confusion.

Bodies, for Lanthimos, are ill-fitting shells. Uncomfortable carapaces. We wear them, often awkwardly, because we have to, but we're typically struggling with the urge to take them off, trade them out, or-having failed to control our own-control those of others. Bodies betray us, fall apart, stop working, or inadequately represent our true selves. Maybe, if we're determined enough, we can inhabit a different body by taking someone else's.

It starts with a tingle, a tremor, a sense that something is off. Dr. Sue Goldie doesn't recognize the symptoms at first. Maybe she ignores them, wishes them away. It is 2021. She is 59, in the prime of a long teaching career at Harvard. She has just immersed herself in the sport of triathlon. One coach notes something off with her running cadence. Another wonders why her left arm isn't fully lifting out of the water.

Part of the answer comes from optics. Violet light has the shortest wavelength on the spectrum of visible light, right next to the unseen ultraviolet, which only our skin detects. With its short wavelength and high frequency, the color purple contains the highest energy of all visible light. Figuratively, we can think of purple as the border between the visible and the invisible.

This is a novel of ideas, as well as, at its most elemental, a tangled love story. Desai's characters inhabit a complex post-modern, post-colonial world and, yet, her own sensibility as a novelist is playfully old-fashioned. Consider the contrivance Desai brazenly concocts to enable a central moment of this story: a chance meeting on an overnight train between the two title characters after they've each rejected their own families' formal attempts to arrange a marriage between them. Dickens, himself, might have blushed.

In "Consuming Place: Women, Wine and Imagination," Janine Aujard examined how women in England and Australia experience wine drinking not just as a gustatory pleasure, but as a medium for engaging with place, memory, identity, and imagination. She frames wine consumption as a cultural practice that allows women to "consume" spatial and temporal dimensions. In effect, they are drinking more than wine: They imbibe ideas of place, belonging, and time.

As a Japanese man born and raised in the United States, Kitamura said he struggled with imposter syndrome. Though he was part of a Japanese tattoo family, apprenticed to a Japanese tattoo master, and works with primarily Japanese-American clients, he worried that his own style was Americanized compared to the traditions he was studying. Now, nearly 29 years into his own practice as a tattoo artist (Kitamura opened his own studio, State of Grace Tattoo, in 2002 in San Jose) he feels "This is me accepting who I am and being proud of that," he said.

I packed my bag, kissed the kids goodbye, and skipped out the door, not out of neglect, but necessity. I was off for a weekend of no kids, no bedtime stories, and no reapplying sunscreen on wriggly bodies. We sat in lounge chairs, read books, drank bottomless cocktails, and didn't check the time or see if anyone needed to eat to avoid a meltdown.

I know I mentioned my profession to him, but I am pretty sure he was the one who engaged me that way. I also know how diabolically good a chatbot can be at saying what is on the tip of your tongue, and doing it before you can, and better than you might have. That makes me feel less troubled by my uncertainty.

Bear's Nap by Emily Gravett, Two Hoots, 12.99 Someone is cheeping and keeping Bear from sleeping in this increasingly uproarious picture book filled with forest-dwelling creatures and their noises. A joy to read aloud. This Is Who I Am by Rashmi Sirdeshpande, illustrated by Ruchi Mhasane, Andersen, 12.99 A moving celebration of heritage and identity, this softly coloured picture book follows a little girl with a foot in two worlds, who is both the richness of all the worlds she belongs to and uniquely, proudly

Characters in the "Alien" franchise have always wrestled with identity crises. Whether it's human beings trying to transcend the limits of their finitude through interstellar travel, or synthetic machines passing themselves off as humans, there's always a disconnect with one's baseline identity that drives protagonists and antagonists alike. "Alien: Earth," the first television series set in the franchise and set two years before Ridley Scott's original film, continues this existential tradition but through the experiences of two new entities.