Nearly seven years after Lin Yi-Han first published her novel Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise in Mandarin, the English translation is finally on its way to publication in the United States—by HarperVia in May. The novel, which was released posthumously, greatly influenced the #MeToo movement in Taiwan; it was widely read and discussed for its depictions of sexual violence and mental health, and it has also raised significant awareness about sexual grooming.

This piece is one of the last nonfiction pieces Lin published before her death by suicide in 2017. It appeared originally in Mandarin, on BuzzFeed Taiwan, and reflects on the language we use to describe mental illness—words like psychopath, or telling someone to “go check themselves in” as though they were ill. Her descriptions of her time in a psychiatric hospital, layered with the scenes in the university library where she studied, are movingly drawn, and overlap thematically with much of her novel.

 The piece was translated by Jenna Tang, who also translated Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise into English. Tang first encountered Lin’s work in 2017 and immediately knew she wanted to translate it; she was drawn in by Lin’s lyricism and the echoes of Classical Chinese literature in her work, especially poetry. “I could feel her love for writers like Eileen Chang, Hu-Lan Cheng, and more,” Tang told the Review. Tang said, “The way she builds a sense of place through her writing makes me feel like she has always been alive and present with her languages.” The posthumous translation was especially challenging, she said, because she wasn’t able to consult the author on particular choices; still, what Tang describes as the tenderness of Lin’s style made it easier to feel close to the author, even at a distance. “Translating her work was like embodying that language full of warmth and love, which will never go away,” Tang said.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A change to the federal EV incentive that took effect Monday could widen access for low and middle-income buyers who want to go electric but have been excluded by high prices. 

The clean vehicle tax credit, which offers up to $7,500 toward a new electric, hydrogen, or plug-in hybrid vehicle, and up to $4,000 for a used one, is now available as an instant rebate at approved dealers. Until now, buyers could not take advantage of the credit until they filed their taxes. 

EV-equity advocates said the change will put buying an electric vehicle within reach of more buyers. “It’s a huge help,” Irvin Rivero, e-mobility associate at the Bay Area nonprofit Acterra, told Grist. Rivero consults prospective buyers on how to apply for financial incentives, and said some clients either can’t afford the upfront cost or do not earn enough to owe taxes.

“A lot of people were getting the tax credit, but the people who didn’t have tax liability weren’t benefiting from this program,” Rivero said.

From Marvel show Echo to Naomi Watts and Demi Moore in Feud: Capote vs the Swans

More Americans are stockpiling abortion pills in case they need them in the future, according to new research published Tuesday.

The relatively new practice of requesting a prescription for abortion pills before potentially needing them—known as advance provision—has spiked during two periods of recent uncertainty about the future of abortion access, the study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found. Those periods included two critical moments: the weeks following the May 2, 2022 leak of the Supreme Court’s draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and amid conflicting rulings last April about the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, the first pill in the two-pill regimen that comprises medication abortion.

Studying data from the nonprofit organization Aid Access, whose doctors prescribe and mail abortion pills to people in all 50 states, researchers found that the average number of daily requests for advance provision increased nearly tenfold—to about 247 a day—in the seven weeks between the leak of the Dobbs draft and when the Supreme Court issued its final decision. Once the Supreme Court issued its final ruling in June 2022, requests decreased to about 89 per day—but then they spiked again last April when conflicting rulings about the FDA approval of mifepristone thrust abortion pills back into the headlines, leading to an average of about 172 daily requests for advance provision of the pills. (While a lawsuit challenging the FDA approval brought by anti-abortion activists is currently pending before the Supreme Court, abortion pills remain available by mail.)

“I think it shows people are paying attention” to threats to access, Abigail Aiken, the study’s lead author and associate professor of public affairs at the University of Texas-Austin, said, emphasizing that nearly three-quarters of participants cited wanting “to ensure personal health and choice” and “to prepare for possible abortion restrictions” as their reasons for requesting advance provision.

“I think one of the perhaps unintended consequences of abortion bans, or of the Dobbs decision, is that it really does shine a light on medication abortion, and probably made it more visible to a lot of people out there,” she added.

Florida authorities are trying to determine whether Christian Ziegler, the embattled head of the Florida Republican Party, engaged in “video voyeurism” by filming a sexual encounter with a woman without her consent.

The new investigation, which was undertaken based on a police affidavit unsealed earlier this week and obtained by the Florida Trident, is the latest chapter in the ongoing sex scandal roiling the Florida Republican Party. At its center are Christian Ziegler; his wife, Moms for Liberty co-founder and crusading Sarasota School Board member Bridget Ziegler; and an unnamed woman who has accused Christian Ziegler of raping her in October, and with whom the couple had engaged in a previous sexual encounter. So far, no criminal charges have been filed against Christian Ziegler, and he has denied the claims made by the accuser.

According to the Florida Trident:

In a police interview on Nov. 2, Ziegler claimed the encounter was consensual and showed detectives a two-and-a-half minute video of the sex act he’d taken on his iPhone, according to the new affidavit. 

Ziegler’s attorney, Derek Byrd, told police during the same interview the woman sent an Instagram message to Ziegler shortly after the sexual encounter asking him if he’d shown the video to Bridget Ziegler. Byrd said the message was sent in “vanish mode.” 

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Farid Matuk’s “Crease” appears in our new Winter issue, no. 246.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

The images and ideas in the poem started long ago, in college, when I met a brilliant artist named Jeannie Simms. Around that time, they were doing a series of photograms, images made by laying an object on photographic paper and exposing it to light, called Interiors: Little Death. Jeannie had said their process was “to make love” to photographic paper. The results are gorgeous ruins, pieces of photographic paper bearing no image but deeply creased and distressed by Jeannie’s touch. I’ve never stopped thinking about the poetics of that process—the intersection of abstraction and embodied desire it involves, the way it confounds the photograph’s habit of delivering bodies as spectacle. Now, almost twenty years later, I’m mostly interested in Jeannie’s desire to create a space where sex, ritual, and art are one and to make a trace there. “Crease” is part of a longer manuscript, and a lot of that book tries to attend to moments where we can sense that entanglement as ethical, sensuous, and joyful.

The part of the poem about the falling flowers comes from time I spent as a visiting professor at University of California, Berkeley. The school puts you up in a little house donated by the poet Josephine Miles in an area just north of the campus that houses many seminaries and churches. In March of 2020, the neighborhood fell into a routine of evening walks. It was good to be outside and to have a reason to walk slowly, to know most folks around you were caring for their own health and for yours too. But there was also an air of privileged piety about the whole scene—very different than the lives of the “essential workers.” Hence the surliness in the poem about everyone wanting their “stupid church high on a hill.”

On my walks, I kept noticing floppy flowers dropped on the sidewalk. I liked the idea that they were so heavy with their own sex that they had to fall off their stems. The flowers still looked utterly vital sitting on the sidewalk. I am in desperate need of anything heavy enough to crease the infinite regress of what’s given to us as Cartesian space, anything that will make the void fold back so that there’s no void. That’s where my drafts started to test variations on the somewhat familiar phrase “not with but of.”

Wayne Rooney lasted longer than the cabbage. And at least he didn’t have one thrown at him like Steve Bruce.

Marcus, Luke, Andy and Vish discuss the exit of Luke Littler’s younger brother from Birmingham City and just why useful-FIFA-Committee-idiot-in-waiting Garry Cook appointed him in the first place.

We also ponder West Ham fans’ split on Davide Moyes and – in totally normal news – Gianluigi Buffon wants goals to be made bigger and the Argentina FA retire the men’s national team number 10 shirt. Is that… Diego Maradona with an air rifle?

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In 1974, Harry Stein and Thomas Moore, young editors who’d worked together at New Times, a glossy biweekly in New York, had an idea: Let’s start a magazine—in Paris. Moore had recently come into a windfall when one of his articles, about a bank robbery in Brooklyn, became the basis for the film Dog Day Afternoon. He moved to Paris, following his then girlfriend; the relationship ended, but he stayed. Stein had previously lived in Paris, writing features for the International Herald Tribune, and also had a European girlfriend at the time. At first, the idea seemed impossible: Maybe we should sell baseball caps instead of starting a magazine, Stein thought. But Moore had a vision. He stole the name from the café outside his living room window, stole the masthead logo from the subway sign, and their publication was born: The Paris Metro.

Stein and Moore called Joel Stratte-McClure, a fellow journalist then in Paris on assignment, to tell him that they had a “scoop” on a nuclear meltdown and ask him to meet them in the Bar Hemingway at the Ritz. (There was no meltdown.) Several martinis in, Stratte-McClure joined the Metro team. He quickly became one of the core reporters, writing everything from regular features—an On the Money column, which advised readers about how to invest in wine or bet on horses—to cover stories like “Our Man in the Seine: Gets to the Bottom of the Dirty River—And Comes Back Alive!” A few months later, Moore approached Stratte-McClure about a new role. “Do you balance your checkbook?” Moore asked. “Of course. I’m a fanatic about it,” said Stratte-McClure. Moore’s follow-up: “Would you like to be publisher?”

Nothing else remotely like Metro existed at the time. Other English-language competitors like the Herald Tribune provided local news coverage, but the Metro offered a full high-low smorgasbord, from in-depth interviews with city employees to poetry by writers such as Gregory Corso and capsule reviews of Paris’s worst restaurants to coverage of pickup softball leagues. Stratte-McClure told me in a recent interview that the Metro routinely “tackled taboo subjects. Money, salary, who’s voting for whom, personal details about people.” The Metro also had a robust list of what was going on in Paris, such as job opportunities (“URGENT: Seek Modern Dance Teacher”), personal ads (“WIFE JUST DIED—looking for attractive woman dress size 36, between 20 & 31”; “I should like to offer my husband a totally original birthday present: a good meal out with an attractive girl/woman”), requests for information (“Have you had an abortion in Paris? Share your experience with your sisters”), events (such as, on Bastille Day, the Communist Party’s “traditional swinging affair on the Île Saint-Louis”), and shoestring-budget recipes (“In addition to being extremely good for your health, chicken livers are the biggest bargain at Monoprix”). The magazine allowed its writers the freedom to write what they wanted: to explore longer-form stories that leaned quirky, the result of enmeshment in a subculture or riffing on one’s pet topic.

Festive football has almost drawn to a close and the highlight is most definitely Noni Madueke calling friend of the Ramble Jules Breach “bro”. Marcus, Andy, Jim and Vish react to that and share their displeasure that Liverpool vs Newcastle didn’t end 4-3. Just for old times’ sake.

Elsewhere, Marcus makes his case for why Arsenal need a Tom Cairney in midfield and Vish explains why he isn’t surprised a goalkeeper scored a worldie for Arbroath. Plus, we hear the new Roy Hodgson “let’s not take the piss here” extended cut!

**Please note that only UK listeners are eligible to enter our Toshiba competition!**

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Football’s great - but it’s not perfect. As a new year rolls around, we thought it was a perfect time to decide on some resolutions that football should definitely adopt. All of them. Even the ridiculous ones.

Marcus, Jim, Luke and Vish bring some idea of their own, from shot clocks and sartorial guidance to fundamentally destroying the fabric of the game. Plus, we sift through a boatload of suggestions from you lovely lot, which mainly focus on spanking and Gary Neville’s goalgasm.

**Please note that only UK listeners are eligible to enter our Toshiba competition!**

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Sign up to the Football Ramble Patreon for ad-free shows and a visit from Pete Donaldson to put some fluid up your wall for just $5 per month: patreon.com/footballramble.