R. West | Della Bateau blogging|writing|thinking

So ok look. The point is not the flared leg by itself. These cannot be yoga pants. These are, and you have to understand this if you are too young to have worn them, BLUE JEANS. And this was the last years before all jeans were 70% spandex.

They were denim, and they weren't bell bottoms. They hung loose from the knee in a way that would make a wizard envious. We all walked around like we were wearing hakama. And they dragged on the ground. That was important. Ragged cuffs. If your jeans weren't so long that they had ratty cuffs, they were embarrassingly short.

And the thing about denim is that it's a twill weave and it's cotton. So not only does it hold a lot of water, it wicks. Walking around in these suckers on a wet day could get you wet to the knees even if you never stepped in a puddle.

Then you'd go inside and take off your shoes and try to avoid letting your freezing, wet, filthy pant legs touch your skin.

Yutaka Murakami's "Foreign Books and a Kitten"

Hope you’re having a gentle day 🐾🤍

„None of my texts, including the novel that will appear in Polish this fall, has been written with the help of artificial intelligence – except for using it as a tool for faster preliminary research.“ *

And the kind of research is: „Often I just ask the machine, ‘darling, how could we develop this beautifully?’“ **

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* [in response to the public reaction] Olga Tokarczuk, May 19, 2026, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

** original interview, also on LitHub