We’d been experimenting for weeks. My Food Bag. My Lunch Box. My Dinner Box. My Great, Big Bag of Tucker. My Seed Box. My Box of Goodies. Whatever. I lost count. I lost track. They were all okay. Some hits, some misses. Our biggest complaint: it all tastes like cafe food. We missed our family recipes. Spaghetti bolognese. Butter chicken. Family roast. You know, the normal stuff. Then last week, something new. Something completely different. Something surreptitious. Something … subversive. Without discussion, with no forewarning, The Kai Box. Yet another home-delivered food box to last the week. But with one major difference. It was Vegan Food. Gluten free pasta. Laboratory processed cheese. Lentil tacos. My heart fell. My soul ached. Was it betrayal I was feeling? Or simply hunger? It matters not. I have taken back the pantry. I have barricaded the kitchen. I have stocked the fridge with meat. And I have declared … No stranger will ever bring us dinner again.

There's an entire journalistic enterprise these days trying to tell people who don't sit in trailers all day watching reality television whilst shoveling down corn syrup-and-soy-based salty-sweet Walmart-brand bacon-cheese snax into their maws about how the Other America is the Only Real America. —Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies

All the time I feel the tension between composing poetry and writing incidental prose, but I feel it as a creative interchange, not as a conflict. When I took care to describe, in my Wimbledon reports, how Jimmy Connors deployed his Early Grunt along with a two-handed line drive and Bjorn Borg returned it along with a grunt in Swedish, I was being as poetically concentrated as I could ever get. The secret of writing that kind of journalism was to give it everything. The River in the Sky is full of momentary scenes that I might have written as journalism, but the opportunity never arose. Now they have. And only just this morning I saw, out there in the garden, a butterfly getting into a flower. He would have been in the poem if he’d arrived earlier.

— Clive James, New Statesman, August ’18