What I’ve Taken — No. 3
The one about the grandmother gets harder the longer you sit with it.
Seven things here. The Blackbird Spyplane piece is one of the best, and exactly why this roundup exists.
Searching for Meaning in My Grandmother’s Wild Life—and Finding Something Else Entirely
Vogue
A writer interviews family and friends to preserve her grandmother before dementia takes too much. What she finds is a woman who drank, left marriages, kept a kiln in her flat, and lived on communes — a life that doesn’t match the gentle figure she grew up knowing. The piece is about what happens when the archive you build reveals someone you weren’t prepared to hold.
A$AP Rocky Is Living His American Dream
Esquire
A celebrity profile that is about return: what success looks like when the neighborhood that made you is still part of the story. The most interesting thing here is not fame, but the question underneath it: what you owe the people who knew you before any of this made sense.
Thinking of a ‘No Buy’ 2026?
The Independent
Under the language of budgeting is an older American belief: that discipline is a form of virtue, and that hardship can be redeemed if it improves your character.
Introducing The SIL, a Vintage Site Where Provenance Comes First
Vogue, Per Lilah
A vintage platform built around provenance sounds niche until you remember how much modern consumption depends on pretending objects come from nowhere. This is about why things feel different when their former lives are allowed to stay attached.
Memory of Winter
Emergence Magazine
Zoë Schlanger writes about plant emergence, climate volatility, and the gamble of coming back to life too early. Underneath it is a larger question: what happens when the old cues stop working, and survival starts depending on whether you can tell the difference?
Open-Source AI Hardware Could Weaken Big Tech’s Grip on AI
Rest of World
A handheld AI device out of India runs offline, supports 22 languages, and is being released as open-source hardware. The older question underneath is who gets to own the infrastructure of intelligence — and whether “open” can survive the same consolidation that swallowed the early internet.
This Life Gives You Nothing
A writer picks up Proust to make an Instagram reel and accidentally remembers what reading is for. The essay underneath the bravado is about what constant mediation does to attention — how screens don’t just distract you, but restructure the way you see, until looking at a real hillside feels indistinguishable from looking at a photo of one. The question it lands on is whether your attention still belongs to you, or whether you surrendered it so gradually you didn’t notice.
