Katie

“Hardly anyone took any notice of the political decisions at the time, but now the storm has arrived and the first thing to collapse over in Hed is the roof of the ice rink. At the same time a man is running through Beartown to save twelve flagpoles. A storm strikes a forest, one ice rink collapses and another remains standing, this will soon drive the inhabitants of two towns into a new battle for resources, and it will finish the way everything seems to finish around here: with violence. So much will have happened by then that we’ll have forgotten how it all started, but it starts here. Now.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“We are so accustomed to seeing this image that we barely notice the cruelty which underpins the story: it’s just a hero and his trophy.”
― Natalie Haynes, Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

“Sawbridge used to say that a good historian tells us what’s in the records, and a great historian tells us what isn’t.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“The Second Medusa meme appeared two years later, and its origins are somewhat more complicated. Ostensibly, it is a photograph of a statue made in 2008 by the Argentine-Italian artist Luciano Garbati. But it is extremely difficult to find any trace of the statue prior to the existence of the meme, which appeared at around the same time as Professor Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony of sexual assault to the US Senate Judiciary Committee. The image is striking and extremely shareable: a statue of Medusa stands alone in front of a completely black background. She is naked, just like Perseus in the Canova and Cellini images, and is lithe, young, strong. Her hair is a mass of snakes, but they are beautiful, not grotesque: they look more like curling dreadlocks. Her expression is calm, her eyes gaze out at us unapologetically. Her arms are by her side and she holds a sword in her left hand. In her right hand is the decapitated head of Perseus, which she holds by the hair. It is an exact reversal of the Canova image. Some versions of the meme came with an accompanying text. ‘Be thankful we only want equality’, it reads, next to Medusa’s head. Below Perseus’ decapitated neck, it continues, ‘and not payback.”
― Natalie Haynes, Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths