Latest news with #1983
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Memories of my magical mix tape summer
Re your article ('I threw it in the bin with everything else he gave me': the mix tapes that defined our lives, 16 July), a boy called Richard (very handsome and funny, although endearingly modest and shy) pushed a cassette through my door during the summer of 1983 when we were both about 17 or 18 and 'just friends'. It featured the song You To Me Are Everything by The Real Thing. He made me laugh so much and I was definitely in love with him, but I think neither of us knew quite how to act on our feelings. The line 'To you I guess I'm just a clown who picks you up each time you're down' struck me at the time as being a reference to how much he made me laugh, but now I realise that it was probably a plea to take him seriously. I've just turned 60 and heard the song played recently. It stopped me in my tracks, transporting me right back to that gorgeous, magical summer of laughter and flirting that somehow never became anything more. And all the more magical for that I and address supplied To make a mix tape was an art form. There were only between 30 and 45 minutes each side, which required a good knowledge of the tracks to be put on to each one. Following that, how do you get the attention of the audience? Starting with a banger and trying to hold that for a couple more songs before easing off a bit. Towards the end of each side it was vital not to cut off any song but, if possible, to fade out. Even better if the tracks were finished just at the right moment before the tape ran out. A mix tape was a work of art, a work of love. You had to know your audience, your music and had to time it perfectly. I'm an avid lover of this lost art WagnerBoulogne-Billancourt, France Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
Atlantic
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Writer Who Embraces Forgetting
When it comes to memoirs, an author's task is clear: Remember how it happened; then, tell the truth. Writers who draw on personal stories are often dogged by nonfiction's prevailing imperative of factual precision. They should want, above all, to get it right. But what if one has forgotten it, even if that thing feels important enough to write about? Whatever the reason for a memory's erasure—the blitheness of youth, the defense mechanism of blocking out pain, the natural erosion of particulars over time—it often throbs like a phantom limb, no less potent for the absence of details. Faces and words may fade, but their emotional residue frequently lingers. A diligent storyteller might curse these gaps as hopeless obstructions, but the Norwegian author Linn Ullmann has reconceived them as central to her work. 'How do experiences live on, not as memories, but as absences?' asks the narrator of Girl, 1983, Ullmann's latest novel, now translated into English by Martin Aitken. The book seeks to answer this query by recasting personal writing as a conversation between recollection and amnesia. For the protagonist of Girl, 1983, this relationship is intensified by competing desires: to recover the lost shards of a painful adolescent memory, or to let them fade into oblivion. Ullmann's protagonist seeks to record a past experience that she struggles to fully remember, but the autobiographical elements she does provide tend to align with Ullmann's own history. These varied tensions between fiction and fact ripple throughout the book in vivid recollections drawn from Ullmann's life, broad smears of vanished history, and interludes depicting the uneasy work of remembering. A reader might get the sense that Ullmann has removed the top of her head in order to reveal the choreography of her mind. And yet, Ullmann calls this introspective book a novel, imposing some distance between herself and the story she's told. She challenges the idea that memoir is more intimate than fiction, and manipulates genre to express a vulnerable relationship to her own cerebral archive: what she can claim to know, what she can't bear to face, what she has lost. It is fitting, for these reasons, that Girl, 1983 —the title of which reads like an aptly cryptic caption—begins with a missing object. Ullmann opens the book by describing a lost photograph, one taken of the unnamed narrator when she was 16, 'which no longer exists and which no one apart from me remembers.' Forty years later, when the narrator has a 16-year-old daughter of her own, and finds herself unmoored by depression during a COVID-19 lockdown, she decides to write about the picture and the circumstances surrounding it. Her choice is fraught because, by the narrator's own admission, 'the story about the photograph makes me sick, it's a shitty story.' She has 'abandoned it a thousand and one different times for a thousand and one different reasons.' The narrator thinks back to October 1982, when, while riding the elevator in her mother's New York City apartment, she catches the eye of a 44-year-old photographer, 'K,' who invites her to come to Paris for a modeling gig. She readily accepts, despite her mother's protests. Soon after she arrives, she begins a sexual relationship with K. She is thrilled to model for this older man, and ultimately poses for him once, before telling him she wants to go home. He derides her as a 'crybaby' and a 'neurotic little bitch' whom he regrets meeting. Here the paragraph breaks, and once more, the protagonist claims forgetfulness. 'I don't remember one day from another,' she narrates. 'I don't remember how many days I was there, in Paris, in January 1983, perhaps five or seven.' Her complicated desire for K—erotic in nature, and yet based in a childlike longing for approval—produces an irrecuperable psychic fissure. She is repelled by his aging, 'decrepit' body and embarrassed by her own 'greedy body saying yes' to his sexual maneuvers. Nonetheless, their affair continues in New York City, though it is short-lived and ends abruptly; the photograph he takes of her runs in a 1983 issue of a now-defunct French fashion magazine. For safekeeping, the narrator slips a copy of the picture inside a white notebook, but when she searches for it decades later, both the photo and the notebook are gone. To tell the photograph's story, she must summon the details from memory as best she can. Those familiar with Ullmann's biography might immediately suspect that she is the girl in the photo; after all, her own upbringing echoes the one depicted here. Ullmann is the daughter of the late Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and the Norwegian actor Liv Ullmann, and specifics of her childhood are not difficult to locate. Moreover, it is her own teenaged face that peers from behind the typescript on the book's cover, looming above the words 'A Novel.' You might find this interplay between word and image destabilizing. Perhaps Ullmann sought in fiction the creative and emotional freedom to portray both her atypical childhood and her parents in more impressionistic terms, or perhaps she hoped that classifying the book as a novel would offer some measure of privacy to her family and herself. Then again, Ullmann is in well-traveled territory. Autobiographical novels and works that otherwise test the boundaries between novel and memoir—Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? —are familiar to contemporary readers. Literature has a distinct ability to illuminate truth's multiplicities; writers like Ullmann remind readers that fact and fiction are fragile categories, and that collapsing them can yield enthralling results. Girl, 1983 is still more deft in its experiments, subverting conventional ideas about fiction's use of the truth. A reader might expect autobiographical fiction to flesh out the skeleton of a memory with invented details. Ullmann instead draws on the category of the novel to embrace the gaps, to insist on their primacy in any remembered history. Ullmann has not just written an autobiographical novel; she has suggested that every autobiography might be a novel in the first place. If Ullmann had labeled Girl, 1983 a memoir, few readers would have raised an eyebrow, because she barely disguises her story's basis in autobiography. The protagonist is undoubtedly her proxy: Like Ullmann, she is a writer in her 50s, half Norwegian and half Swedish, with an actress mother who was 'one of the most beautiful women in the world' and an illustrious father who was largely absent from her upbringing. And like Ullmann, the protagonist has already written a novel that was 'based on real events.' Unquiet, translated into English by Thilo Reinhard in 2019, chronicles Ullmann's parental relationships—particularly with Bergman—with seeming fidelity. For Ullmann, designating her latest work a novel seems to communicate something both distinctly personal and universally true. By foregrounding incomplete memories—she writes about trying to ascertain 'the order of events, the ones I remembered and the ones I'd forgotten and which I had to imagine'—Ullmann lays bare the reality that minds are not so much storage devices as sieves. As her protagonist puts it, 'Forgetfulness is greater than memory.' To call Girl, 1983 a novel, rather than a memoir, is no mere exercise in literary classification, nor is it only a challenge to the limits of genre. It is surrender, inscribed: an acknowledgement that ownership of one's memories is provisional, an unstable cache susceptible to time and circumstance. Ullmann's protagonist wrestles with this difficulty. Over the course of the novel, she struggles to recount the Parisian photo shoot and her affair with K. The history is 'made up mostly of forgetting, just as the body is composed mostly of water,' she explains. The story, separated into three sections—Blue, Red, and White—travels a spiraled, associative, and fragmented path, making persistent returns to the events connected to the photograph. Most notably, it frequently revisits the protagonist's past and present relationship with her often-distracted mother. Indeed, the narrator's desire for proximity to her mother forms the connective tissue stitching together the chronology of her childhood. 'I've never been much good at distinguishing between what happened and what may have happened,' she reflects. 'The contours are blurred, and Mamma's face is a big white cloud over it all.' Perhaps recollection always requires a degree of fiction-making, not simply because people are inherently forgetful but because memories are shaped as much by impression and sensibility—a mother's face, the hazy sketch of a dark Parisian street—as they are by actual events. And yet, as Ullmann makes clear, remembering and forgetting are not so much actions as forces that everyone must negotiate. One might try to foster conditions for remembrance—take photographs, keep a journal, stash relics—but forgetfulness sets its own obscure terms. This need not be distressing. In fact, there is something pleasurable in setting down the burdens of the past. 'I don't want to lose the ability to lose things,' the narrator protests, in response to a promotional email for an app that makes it easier to retrieve misplaced items. Too much past accumulates; it gnaws like a parasite, thriving on the vitality of one's most punishing memories. What a relief, to let some things fade away.
Time of India
11-07-2025
- Time of India
Punjab DCs told to ask travel agents to declare they've nothing to do with jobs abroad
1 2 Chandigarh: Deputy commissioners across Punjab have been asked to obtain a monthly self-declaration form from travel agents registered under Punjab Travel Professionals' Regulation (PTPR) Act in their respective districts, announcing that they do no engage in any services offering overseas employment. In the form, agencies are mandated to declare that they do not engage in any recruitment-related services such as work visas, work permits, employment visas and others, for overseas employment without the necessary registration or permit as required under the Emigration Act, 1983. The Punjab home department, in the June 20 advisory to all DCs and senior superintendents of police/commissioners of police, asked the officials to "monitor activities of travel agents, especially on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and WhatsApp". The advisory was issued over the violation of the Emigration Act, 1983, by PTPR licence holders. The advisory was necessitated after Punjab received communications from the protector general of emigrants, New Delhi, and the protector of emigrants, Chandigarh, ministry of external affairs. These communications highlighted that "numerous travel agents registered under the PTPR Act, 2012, are reportedly engaged in activities that contravene provisions of the Emigration Act, 1983". DCs are the competent authority under PTPR Act for maintaining monthly self-declaration forms from all PTPR-licensed travel agents in their respective districts regarding their advertising and publicity practices. Section 7 of the PTPR Act mandates that all registered travel agents will furnish the complete details of their ads to the competent authority with regard to their profession or to hold seminars in respect thereof. Pointing out that the PTPR Act "explicitly excludes activities related to recruitment for overseas employment, as governed by the Emigration Act", the advisory noted: "However, it has been observed that certain PTPR-licensed travel agents are advertising employment and work visa opportunities for foreign countries; assisting individuals with 'work permits', 'employment visas', and other job-related travel services; and are operating without the requisite Recruiting Agent Certificate of Foreign Employer Permits, as mandated under the Emigration Act, 1983. " It instructed DCs and SSPs/CPs to take suitable legal action under the Emigration Act against such offenders. There are 166 recruitment agents (RA) registered in Punjab under the Emigration Act, 1983, as per the official emigrate portal. Protector of emigrants, Chandigarh, Yashu Deep Singh said there are 8,000-9,000 travel agents registered under PTPR Act in Punjab. "In about a year-long exercise, we detected 120 travel agents who are illegally offering services for overseas employment and duping people without having the mandatory recruitment agent (RA) licence under the Emigration Act, 1983," he said. Singh added the protector of emigrants has been sharing the details of such travel agents with Punjab Police regularly. "In about six months, 49 FIRs were registered against such travel agents in Punjab," he said. He added 52 such unregistered travel agents indulging in offering overseas employment were detected in Chandigarh, and 13 FIRs were registered so far. The law also requires an agent to declare: "I am fully aware of the provisions of the Emigration Act, 1983, and I hereby affirm that no advertisement or activity carried out by my agency violates Sections 10 or 16 of the said Act. My agency does not engage in any recruitment-related services (such as Work Visa, Work Permit, Employment Visa, etc.) for overseas employment without the necessary registration or permit as required under the Emigration Act, 1983. " The advisory also asked the DCs to actively promote awareness regarding safe and legal overseas migration practices among youth and prospective emigrants in their respective districts. "Individuals should be advised to use only legal channels and registered Recruiting Agents for overseas employment," it says. "All Deputy Commissioners and SSPs/CPs are directed to continue district-level enforcement drives against illegal and unregistered travel agents. Regular inspections, public reporting mechanisms, and coordinated law enforcement actions are essential," says the advisory, noting that "These preventive and enforcement measures are crucial to protect the interests of Punjab's youth from fraud and exploitation; ensure compliance with national laws; and strengthen public trust in legal emigration systems. "
Wall Street Journal
29-06-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
The Case for Space Defense
When President Ronald Reagan created the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983, he challenged the nation to build effective missile defenses. Critics labeled the initiative 'Star Wars,' to which Reagan responded that 'it isn't about war; it's about peace. It isn't about retaliation; it's about prevention. It isn't about fear; it's about hope.' Central to that vision was a space-based layer of interceptors capable of destroying ballistic missiles in early flight. The concept became real in the form of Brilliant Pebbles—small, autonomous interceptors orbiting relatively close to Earth and designed to collide with missiles at incredible speeds.
Bloomberg
11-06-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Oil's Lost Decade Is About to Be Repeated
For as long as most of us can remember, a rule of thumb has held true: Every year, the world's production of oil goes up by one million barrels a day. In 1983, the figure stood at 56.6 million barrels. In 2023, 40 years later, it was 40 million barrels more: 96.3 million. Annual figures may jump around thanks to wars, recessions, and the rise and fall of economies, but averaged over the longer term, every decade we've added an extra 10 million daily barrels to the headline total.
