A personal tragedy followed by a pandemic "Me, sightless, wandering the wild, head thrown back, mouth wide open, singing to a star-drenched sky. Like all the speaking, singing women of old, a maligned figure in the wilderness. Few listened in the night."

This is the raw grief of US writer Jesmyn Ward after losing her husband (my Beloved, she calls him) at the beginning of 2020. She describes his last heartbeats while hooked on a ventilator – a scene that we became sadly accustomed to – before the world came to a halt with coronavirus. Her grief develops with the lockdown, as she holds on to her writing to keep going.

Then come the Black Lives Matter protests: Ward, who is Black, feels her grief amplified among her community’s fight. This beautiful, heart-wrenching personal essay had me in tears.

Irene, First 1,000 Days correspondent Vanity Fair: ‘A personal tragedy followed by pandemic’ (reading time: 10 minutes)
This short story might as well be a Lamborghini. Buckle up Eloghosa Osunde’s ‘Good Boy’ is a stunningly original story; so original that it defies description. With breathtaking momentum and spectacular prose, Osunde peels back the unspoken layers of relational intimacy, dissecting power, survival, shame, chosen family, defiance and love through the interior life of an unnamed protagonist. ‘Good Boy’ packs an immense punch, mapping a reality that is too rarely explored from a perspective that the world definitely needs more of.

OluTimehin, Othering correspondent The Paris Review: ‘Good Boy’ (reading time: 25 minutes)
The ‘Trumpification’ of Germany’s extreme-right Polling this summer shows Europe-wide trust in Trump has plummeted since the onset of the pandemic. However, Katrin Behnhold’s latest report for the New York Times captures a fringe group of people where the sentiment has surged in the opposite direction. Among the 50,000 people protesting coronavirus restrictions recently in Berlin, Trump was an icon. The US president’s face featured on banners, T-shirts and even on Germany’s imperial flag (popular with neo-Nazis).

Behnhold writes how this protest signals the “Trumpification” of the German far-right, which has been boosted thanks to the QAnon online conspiracy – the unfounded theory that Trump is waging a secret war against Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media. Pre-pandemic, the QAnon community in Germany barely existed, but now, the number of followers of QAnon-related accounts has risen to more than 200,000. As the US election campaign heats up, Behnhold’s piece demonstrates how Trump’s sly nods to these online groups – in the past, he’s called QAnon supporters “people who love our country" – can have real-life consequences, posing dangers not only to democracy in the US but also to European democracies.

Morgan, digital rights journalist New York Times: ‘Trump emerges as inspiration for Germany’s far right’ (reading time: 10 minutes)

The best of The Correspondent

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