Category: 5. Entertainment

I have approximately the time it takes for I’m With Her to pile into a sprinter van backstage at Colorado’s Telluride Bluegrass Festival and drive to their late-night show at the nearby Sheridan Opera House to conduct a fast-paced interview.

But, in truth, three and a half minutes of listening to songs like “Ancient Light,” “Year After Year,” or “Mother Eagle (Sing Me Alive)” is all you need to grasp the appeal of the supergroup trio. Their innate gifts for harmony, melody, and songwriting make their songs, especially those on the new album Wild and Clear and Blue, all but irresistible.

“We’ve just lived so much life together, much more life together than we had on our first record,” the band’s Sarah Jarosz tells Rolling Stone. “This [album], we know what our sound is, and now what do we want to say?”

At 11:30 p.m., the group emerged behind a lone microphone at the intimate 1913 opera house on North Oak Street. The gorgeous “Year After Year” hushed the audience, focusing them squarely on members Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan, and Sara Watkins.

“Things will never be the same/as they were when we were young,” Watkins sang. “Let’s welcome the change/no song unsung.”

“I love singing with them so much,” Watkins says of her bandmates. “One of the main things I remember from that first meetup was just how easy it was to communicate.”

The initial meetup occurred right around the corner from the opera house in nearby Elks Park. It was during the 2014 Telluride Bluegrass Festival. The three musicians were each performing at the gathering with various projects and were asked to host a workshop in the park.

“It just happened that the three of us were the ones who could work something up beforehand,” Jarosz recalls. “We met up behind the main stage earlier that day and that was the first time we sang together. That harmony was so magical.”

“The thing I like most about our band is that it’s not always the same blend. Who’s singing high? Who’s singing low? Who’s singing harmony?” O’Donovan says. “So, you end up having all these color combinations. It’s like we have this whole box of paints and we’re constantly thinking of new colors to make.”

Editor’s picks

The seamless blend of ancient tones and soaring voices is what elevates I’m With Her, and Wild and Clear and Blue, in the roots-music world. The members are well-aware of their chemistry.

“There’s this ease of working together,” Watkins says. “It’s just a very natural working environment.”

While I’m With Her may have some elements in common with other harmony-based bands, like Crosby, Stills & Nash, there’s none of the rock & roll baggage and expectations that plagued some of the greats.

“Once we decided to become a band, it’s kind of what we always hoped it could be,” Jarosz says. “This band we could return to when we wanted to, and not something we had to do. I think that’s why it’s so enjoyable, because it’s this bonus musical experience.”

The day before the opera house gig, O’Donovan is sitting in the lobby of the Camel’s Garden Hotel in downtown Telluride. Later that afternoon, the trio will hop onto the festival’s large main stage, their melodies radiating out into the towering box canyon surrounding the town. But, for now, O’Donovan is reflecting on the origins of the group.

Related Content

“We’d all been friends for many years,” O’Donovan says. “We sang through a couple of songs and it was so cool. And right after the workshop, Chris Thile texted.”

Thile, frontman for the Punch Brothers, asked the group if they wanted to open for him at the opera house that night. It was the Sunday evening sendoff for the festival, a tradition Thile and his bandmates have held for several years. (To note, Watkins is part of Nickel Creek with Thile, and O’Donovan and Jarosz were regular performers on Thile’s radio variety show Live From Here.)

“We didn’t have any repertoire,” O’Donovan chuckles. “We got to the gig early. We went into the bathroom and worked up a bunch of songs.” Among them, Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and Watkin’s “Long Hot Summer Days.”

“It was electric,” O’Donovan says. “The next day, Sara Watkins texted, ‘I feel like this should be a thing.’”

The group released their debut album, See You Around, in 2018. They won the Grammy Award for Best American Roots Song for “Call My Name” in 2020. All the while, they played strings of rapturous gigs.

“I’m constantly surprised by how it still feels so creative,” O’Donovan says. “And we’re still thinking of new ways to change up older songs, play with dynamics, add little sections, little fills here and there.”

Trending Stories

Back in the lobby, O’Donovan’s cell phone vibrates. Jarosz and Watkins are in front of the hotel, ready to go for a quick hike together before their set. Exiting the hotel, the group disappears down San Juan Avenue toward the mountains cradling the community.

“People have passed on. New lives have come into this world. Families have grown,” Jarosz says. “And we’ve all kind of experienced that together. That richness of life and grief and all of the above — all of that fed these songs.”

What steps did the Indian government take?

After the Pahalgam terror attack, the Indian government has taken action to ban Pakistani actors from appearing in Indian cinema. Not only their appearance, but the government have also decided to put a ban on their social media accounts on several Pakistani actors.

Why is there a ban on Pakistani channels?

Despite this, there was a ban on popular Pakistani channels in India. Despite the ban, some popular Pakistani shows are still accessible through subsidiary channels. This move is part of India’s efforts to strengthen its stance against terrorism.

Which shows are available in India?

Now, popular Pakistani shows including Mere Humsafar, Kabhi Main Kabhi Tum, and Suno Chanda, are still available in India on YouTube. However, the primary channel remains banned to the audience, and the shows are accessible through the subsidiary channels.

Whose Instagram account was accessible in India?

Recently, the primary channels, along with the Instagram accounts of several Pakistani celebrities, including Mawra Hocane, Yumna Zaidi, Ahad Raza Mir, and Danish Taimoor, are accessible in India.

What was the reason for the access?

Later, it was revealed that the access was due to a technical glitch, and the access was again revoked. However, the tension between India and Pakistan is not going to end anytime soon.

What happened to Dilijit Dosanjh’s film Sardaar Ji 3?

Recently, Punjabi singer Diljit Dosanjh was in the middle of a controversy with his film Sardaar Ji 3, which stars Pakistani actress Hania Aamir. Despite the ban in India, the film skipped India’s release and was released worldwide on June 27.

Who is the director of Sardaar Ji 3?

The film is directed by Amar Hundal and produced by Gunbir Singh Sidhu, Manmord Sidhu, and Diljit Dosanjh. It stars Diljit Dosanjh, Neeru Bajwa and Jasmin Bajwa, with Pakistani actress Hania Aamir initially cast in a lead role.

What did Diljit say in the interview?

In an interview with BBC Asian Network, Diljit revealed that the film was shot in February, and everything was fine during that time. As per the producer’s decision, the film is set for overseas release, skipping the India release.

Julian McMahon, the actor best known for starring in the medical drama Nip/Tuck and portraying Doctor Doom in the Fantastic Four films, has died at the age of 56.

The Australian-born actor’s wife Kelly confirmed McMahon’s death in a statement to Deadline, adding that he died July 2 in Clearwater, Florida following a private battle with cancer. McMahon’s rep also confirmed the death to the Hollywood Reporter.

“With an open heart, I wish to share with the world that my beloved husband, Julian McMahon, died peacefully this week after a valiant effort to overcome cancer,” Kelly said in the statement.

“Julian loved life. He loved his family. He loved his friends. He loved his work, and he loved his fans. His deepest wish was to bring joy into as many lives as possible,” she continued. “We ask for support during this time to allow our family to grieve in privacy. And we wish for all of those to whom Julian brought joy, to continue to find joy in life. We are grateful for the memories.”

McMahon, the son of former Australian prime minister William McMahon, was first a television star in his native country, appearing in the popular soap operas The Power, the Passion and Home and Away before making the jump to Hollywood in the mid-Nineties.

In 1996, McMahon was the lead role in the NBC crime drama Profiler and part of the main cast of the supernatural series Charmed before landing a co-starring role on Nip/Tuck in 2003. McMahon played plastic surgeon Christian Troy on that hit Ryan Murphy-created FX show, which ran for six seasons and 100 episodes.

During his Nip/Tuck run, McMahon was cast as the Marvel villain Victor Von Doom, a.k.a. Doctor Doom, in 2005’s Fantastic Four and its 2007 sequel Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

Trending Stories

Ioan Gruffudd, who played Reed “Mr. Fantastic” Richards in those Fantastic Four films, paid tribute to McMahon on social media, “Even though we played each other’s nemeses, there was always so much lightness and laughter working together,” he wrote. “Every encounter with him was a joy. It was an honor to be Dr. Richards to his Dr. Doom. My heart goes out to his wife and family. God speed Julian.”

McMahon’s recent roles include playing Special Agent Jess LaCroix across three series in CBS’ FBI franchise, co-starring alongside Nicolas Cage in 2024’s The Surfer, and — in a role that recalled his father’s position — playing an Australian prime minister in the Netflix White House murder-mystery The Residence.

Though we’re used to Rolex’s chief Testimonee rocking the brand’s newest, shiniest wares, occasionally even Roger Federer will opt for something with some more mileage on it. To wit: Here is the GOAT looking dapper at the Dior show during Paris Fashion Week, a gold Rollie clearly visible on his wrist. But this is no modern Rolex—this, dear friends, is the ref. 5100 “Texano,” the Crown’s first quartz watch, first watch with an integrated bracelet, and the precursor to the still-fresh Land-Dweller from Watches and Wonders 2025.

Key to the Texano’s design was the looming Quartz Crisis of the 1970s: In response to the Japanese development of the quartz movement, the Swiss banded together to try to develop their own version via a consortium dubbed Centre Electronique Horloger. The resulting movement, dubbed Beta-21, was stuffed into all manner of early quartz watches, including the Crown’s own ref. 5100, which debuted in 1970. Made in just 1,000 examples—supposedly 900 were in yellow gold (some with diamonds indices), 100 in white gold—the Texano was also the first Rolex watch to boast a quickset date and a sapphire crystal.

All in all, this was one sophisticated timepiece, and it featured complex case architecture to match—plus a lot of gold. Each piece was individually numbered in series on the caseback of its 39mm housing, while the business end’s aesthetics called to mind classic models such as the Datejust and Day-Date: There’s the fluted precious metal bezel, and the dial has a large outer minute track, applied indices, the Rolex coronet at 12 o’clock, a magnified date window at 3 o’clock, and the word “QUARTZ” conspicuously (and proudly) displayed above 6 o’clock. The origins of the “Texano” name are tough to pin down, but the wealth required to purchase one—it was then the most expensive watch in Rolex’s catalog—jives well with the characterization of the Day-Date as the “Texas Timex.”

The integrated bracelet, meanwhile, looks like a cross between an old Omega Speedmaster flat-link bracelet and, well, something else. But we all know where the ref. 5100 would eventually lead: First, it birthed the Oysterquartz in 1977, which saw Rolex ditch the Beta 21 in favor of its own quartz movement. Like the ref. 5100, this model also featured an integrated bracelet in either an Oyster or Jubilee style. After discontinuing this model around 2001, the Crown’s catalog was devoid of an integrated bracelet sports watch…until 2025, that is. The new Land-Dweller continues the lineage of the Oysterquartz—and before it, the ref. 5100 “Texano.”

So while Federer may have his pick of the litter when it comes to new models, he clearly has an appreciation for horological history. Quirky as it is—and battery-powered, to boot—the “Texano” is a genuinely important piece of Rolex company history.

---

Russell Crowe’s Rolex Cosmograph Daytona

Russell Crowe was spotted at Wimbledon this week in a turquoise-dial Rolex Cosmograph Daytona on an Oysterflex rubber strap. Unveiled earlier this year at Watches and Wonders, it features a 40mm yellow gold case with a black Cerachrom bezel, screw-down pushers, and a bright blue dial with black chrono totalizers, 18K gold applied indices, and plenty of Chromalight lume. Powered by the brand’s in-house, automatic cal. 4131 movement, it’s a summery take on a classic tool watch that’s increasingly seen in more fun-loving colorways. (Turquoise still ranks somewhere below Rainbow and Leopard in the “fun-loving” department, however.) Crowe is definitely a Rolex guy, though he does collect other brands: He auctioned off a solid-gold Daytona ref. 16528 a few years ago.

---

Dwayne Johnson’s Rolex Cosmograph Daytona

It’s a Daytona kind of week, it would seem. On Dwayne Johnson’s wrist as he presented at the UFC Hall of Fame Class of 2025 ceremony was a reference 126595TBR in Everose gold with a special “Sundust” dial and factory-set diamonds throughout the indices, bezel, and lugs.

After a montage of headlines about the sparring siblings was capped with the words “the guns have fallen silent,” Oasis appeared on stage to a deafening roar, opening with the apt “Hello” and its refrain of “it’s good to be back.”

The brothers had a brief hand-in-hand moment but largely kept their distance onstage. Noel, 58, focused on his guitar while a parka-clad Liam, 52, snarled into the microphone with a swagger that has not dimmed in the three decades since the band released its first album, “Definitely Maybe.”

A crowd of more than 60,000 in the Principality Stadium was treated to a well-paced two-hour set that drew heavily on the first album and its 1995 followup, “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory,” alongside a smattering of later tracks and fan-favorite B-sides.

Song like “Supersonic,” “Roll With It” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” sounded as thunderous as ever and sparked mass sing-alongs.

“Turn around,” a tambourine-clutching Liam exhorted the crowd before launching into “Cigarettes and Alcohol,” another classic. “Put your arms over each other like you love each other.”

There was poignancy on “Live Forever” when an image of Liverpool Football Club player Diogo Jota, who was killed in a car crash on Thursday, was projected above the band.

Noel took his turn on lead vocals for several songs, including the touching “Half the World Away,” and the show ended with encores featuring some of Oasis’ most enduring tracks: “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” “Wonderwall” and “Champagne Supernova.”

Multicolored, sometimes faintly psychedelic projections formed the main technological accoutrement to a show where the focus was squarely on the songs. There was little banter, though Liam paused between songs to check the audience was having a good time.

“Was it worth the 40,000 pounds you paid for the ticket?” he asked at one point, referring to the scramble for seats that saw some fans pay hundreds to see a show.

‘Very, very special’

The show in Cardiff kicked off a 19-date Live ’25 tour in the U.K. and Ireland. Then come stops in North America, South America, Asia and Australia, ending in Sao Paulo on Nov. 23.

Before the show, the streets around the stadium filled with fans who gathered in groups to sing along to the band’s hits and snapped up Oasis-branded bucket hats at 35 pounds ($48) each.

“It’s very, very special — emotional,” said 44-year old Rob Maule from Edinburgh, Scotland. “I’m here with three of my friends, childhood friends, and we used to see Oasis across the country.

“For us, it’s a generational thing. It’s a chapter of our lives,” he said. “And then the second generation, as people are taking their kids. It’s really special.”

Vicki Moynehan came from Dorchester, in southwest England. She said her life has changed since she bought her ticket almost a year ago.

“Seven months pregnant — ain’t gonna stop me,” she said.

Sing-along rock choruses

Founded in the working-class streets of Manchester, England, in 1991, Oasis was one of the dominant British acts of the 1990s, releasing eight U.K. No. 1 albums.

The band’s sound was fueled by sing-along rock choruses and the combustible chemistry between guitarist-songwriter Noel Gallagher — a Beatles and glam rock-loving musician with a knack for memorable tunes — and younger brother Liam.

Then and since, the brothers have often traded barbs — onstage, in the studio and in interviews. Liam once called Noel “tofu boy,” while Noel branded his brother “the angriest man you’ll ever meet. He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup.”

‘An absolute unbelievable blast’

The announcement of the U.K. tour in August sparked a ticket-buying frenzy, complete with error messages, hourslong online queues, dashed hopes and anger at prices that surged at the last minute.

Some fans who waited online for hours at the Ticketmaster site complained that they ended up paying 355 pounds ($485) for regular standing tickets instead of the expected 148 pounds ($202).

The ticketing troubles sparked questions in U.K. Parliament, where Arts Minister Chris Bryant criticized “practices that see fans of live events blindsided by price hikes.” Britain’s competition regulator has since threatened Ticketmaster — which sold around 900,000 Oasis tickets — with legal action.

No plans have been announced for Oasis to record any new music, and the tour is being presented as a one-off.

Music writer John Aizlewood said that it’s an opportunity for Oasis to “tend the legacy” of the band, and remind people of the power of the Oasis brand.

“There should be a sense of huge joy and life affirmation about these shows. And I think if they can just play it right, then that can be a massive burnishing of their legacy,” he said. “(There is) this enduring love for Oasis — and love means money.”

Fans were determined to enjoy the moment.

“I’m the oldest sibling of four brothers, so I know they’ll fall out,” said Stephen Truscott, from Middlesbrough in northeast England. “(But) the first night, they’re going to have an absolute unbelievable blast. It’s going to be the best.”

ONCE YOU ARE a mother, you are a mother forever. You are a mother before your child is born, you are a mother once your child becomes too large to fit in your arms, you are a mother when your child no longer needs you. You are a mother when your child leaves this earth before you do.

Yiyun Li is a mother who has lost both of her children—her two sons: Vincent, who died at age 16 in 2017, and James, who died at age 19 in 2024. Each chose to end their lives by suicide. I use the language of “suicide” intentionally here; Li makes her disdain for euphemisms clear, given that their primary function is to make other people feel more comfortable. That is not her responsibility. Her responsibility is to her children. Should it be your desire to be made to feel more comfortable, should “a mother using the word ‘died’ or ‘death’ offen[d] your sensibilities,” then, “dear readers,” as Li writes near the beginning of her new book, Things in Nature Merely Grow, “this is a good time for you to stop reading.”

Losing both of your children, no longer having their living physical forms as proof of their existence, does not mean that the relationship between mother and child ends. Instead, it must take a different form. Li, whose medium is writing, uses words to conjure up her children again in the pages of two books, each constructed with respect to both of her sons’ ways of existing within and experiencing the world.

The first, Where Reasons End, written in the wake of Vincent’s suicide and published in 2019, is structured as an imagined conversation between a mother and her dead son. The volume was published as fiction “because it could only be called that: no dead child has ever come back to have an argument with his mother.” The second, Things in Nature Merely Grow, is the book Li wrote after James’s suicide and published this spring, a work of nonfiction in which she uses language to reconstruct thought, attempting to reconfigure the particular, astonishing complexity of her son’s mind—all the while knowing that it will be merely that: a reconstruction.

Li’s project evokes the title of Elizabeth McCracken’s masterful 2008 memoir of the stillbirth of her first child: An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination. I’ve always taken that title to mean that the living child McCracken later births is a replica of the dead child who lived only in her imagination. For Li, perhaps, the books she has written for her two sons are precisely that: replicas of them as they continue to live in her imagination. The “book for Vincent,” as Li often refers to it, is a book that captures his curiosity, his tenacious spark, their passionate mother-son sparring; it “was as much written for Vincent as it was written by Vincent.” James, on the other hand, “resisted metaphor and evaded attention,” making the task of summoning his essence in literature effectively impossible. Li understands this from the outset but chooses to write the book anyway. It is this understanding of the inherent impossibility of bringing James back that makes the resulting piece of writing so remarkable: “Anything I write for James,” she acknowledges,

is bound to be a partial failure. Sooner or later there will come the moment when my understanding parts ways with his essence. I can ask questions—answerable or unanswerable—but it is likely that by the end of the book I will have failed to find the right questions, just as I will have failed to pinpoint the exact moment when James’s contemplation of suicide shifted from Vincent’s to his own.

Within those sentences, which appear near the beginning of Things in Nature Merely Grow, Li arrives at what I believe is the essential project of the book: the conflation of her inability to recreate James in writing and her inability to have predicted his suicide. And yet, with painstaking care, Li resists reflecting on James’s death as if it had been preventable. Her work, and perhaps also her life, is dedicated to honoring her children and respecting the choices they made, which means not only writing in the vein of the distinct lives each lived but also repeatedly referring to their deaths as deaths, using the word suicide, again and again, so that we must acknowledge what it is that happened to them, what they chose, that they existed. That they exist still.

¤

Things in Nature Merely Grow has an organically cyclical nature. There are refrains and repetitions, like mathematical equations, like philosophical conceits, like musical compositions—like James. Two of the most hauntingly affecting are products of one another, a play on a line in Camus’s Caligula (1944), which James had been rereading before his death: “Men die; and they are not happy.” As Li observes,

Half of the line is a fact; the other half, a conjecture. There is no cause and effect emphasized: do men die because they are not happy, or are they not happy because they have to die someday? The two statements, existing together, are like two hands kept close, either barely touching or with their fingers intertwined.

Li reinvents the line as “Children die, and parents go on living,” and she often returns to the image of two hands “barely touching or with fingers intertwined.” Each time these lines appear, they mean something slightly different. Each time, that meaning is clearer.

Another unexpectedly compelling facet of Things in Nature Merely Grow’s composition is the frequent inclusion of voices outside of Li’s, in the form of emails, conversations, and telephone calls from close friends—which feel like her conduit for communication much in the same way her son James, who had a predilection for silence, turns toward logic, philosophy, and existentialist literature in order to speak. The book is given weight from the people who kept Li and her husband alive after the death of their children. That is never explicitly stated, but one feels the intensity of what these interlocutors mean to Li: people willing to look with her to see her dead children, to name them, to wonder into Vincent’s and James’s lives and their respective decisions to end them.

There are two such inclusions—one near the beginning of the book and the other near the end—that serve as pillars holding the project together. The first arrives in the form of an email to Li “precisely an hour and a half after [James’s] death” from a friend who was one of James’s professors. “You did everything you could to help James find his place in life, but he wanted to leave and one must let go.” Li repeats the line in italics, ruminating on how deeply the friend understands James and understands the unforgiving nature of life itself. Like Li, I found myself repeating the line and rereading it countless times, feeling the words somewhere underneath my skin, knowing what it means to love someone fiercely whose experience of the world brings them astonishing pain. Recognizing that your desire for them to live is a desire that does not account for their suffering.

Li’s decision to braid the narrative of James’s life and his death with fragments of speech and writing she received in the wake of his suicide is one of the many stylistic choices that ensures the book transcends genre conventions. Things in Nature Merely Grow is a textured, living record of Li’s unfathomable loss. Beyond that, it is an invitation to the reader to carry the unimaginable with her. It is an insistence: rather than turning away from the horror or gawking from a distance, it is necessary to sit inside the room where she and her husband are greeted by police officers for a second time to learn that their last living child has died.

¤

At one point in the book, Li invokes the concept of assisted suicide, choosing to refer to it with that precise term rather than the elegant, somewhat poetically veiled death with dignity. I pondered this as I read. What does it mean for society to embrace one’s decision to wield power or to assert control over the end of their life when faced with a terminal physical illness in late adulthood, and why are we comparatively unable to understand that some younger people live every day of their lives with a pain that is unspeakable, a pain that makes living no less of a torment? “Those who have learned swimming in their childhood tend to swim unthinkingly,” Li reflects, after beginning swimming lessons following her sons’ deaths. “For some people, the same must be true in life; for them living is a natural process. This has never been the case for me or for my children.”

Just as the mother character in Where Reasons End never asks her dead son, a portrait of the late Vincent, why he has killed himself, Li rarely wonders in Things in Nature Merely Grow why James has ended his life. The answer to that question will not change his death, and the answer, for her, is not unfamiliar. Toward the book’s close, Li describes a visit from a friend who asks “how much [Li] thought James’s suicide was connected to Vincent’s.” “Do you think,” the friend ventures, “that Vincent’s suicide might have given James a sense of possibility?” Another mother might fall apart at this question or become enraged, but Li feels gratitude. Her friend is willing to stare directly into the abyss of child loss with her, to ask a potentially off-limits question, which then allows Li—who is moving through the book as James might, leading with logic and reason—to ask herself: “How did my suicide attempts affect Vincent? Did I, by trying to end my life, also make him see that as a possibility to end his own suffering? Was I the person to have pointed at what separates life from death and said, Look, that partition is not as solid as people make it out to be?”

Exercising (as ever) extraordinary control and restraint, Li refrains from opening this line of inquiry until the very end of Things in Nature Merely Grow. Before this inclusion, knowing that Li has been open, in the past, about her own suicide attempts, I felt shadows of the shield Joan Didion put up in Blue Nights (2011), the memoir she wrote after the death of her only child, her daughter Quintana. While Didion’s posture of distance is a signature of her style, I’ve always found Blue Nights less narratively satisfying than Didion’s earlier memoir The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), which follows her husband John’s unexpected death. In the latter, Didion exhibits traces of vulnerability that undercut her persona, but Blue Lights seems less interested in contending with the thorny complexities of a parent outliving their child. Li is a very different writer from Didion, though they share an aversion to sentimentality and are each masters in their own right. Li, for her part, chooses to see and see and see and see, reflecting and refracting the image of her hospitalizations for suicidal ideation and her sons’ successful attempts.

A reader, naturally, might ask, following the logic Li herself embeds in the narrative: What might have happened had Li been able to write these books for her children before? To capture their essence while they were living, trace the shadows of their deaths earlier? Which, invoking Li’s preference for bluntness, is another way of asking: Could she have prevented their suicides? But it’s a false question, or, to use a term from the book, it is a pebble of a question: “Better kick the pebble out of your way instead of letting it stop you.” It is a pebble of a question because it presupposes that the deaths of Li’s children are her fault, it places the blame—the responsibility—on the mother. It puts the onus on her children living on her; it disregards the very likely possibility that they were deeply loved and that even that was not enough to make the pain of their lives livable. It disrespects James and Vincent’s choices as much as it does Li’s own.

¤

Li does not discuss her suicide attempt fully until the second half of the book. She similarly waits until we’ve become familiar with James in the pages of Things in Nature Merely Grow before, indirectly, mentioning certain aspects of his identity that might provide fodder for investigation or assumptions about his decision to die. Initially, when these details appeared, my mind returned to Didion as I contemplated whether Li was protecting herself by withholding; then, I was reminded that, just as Li’s every word is painstakingly chosen, her every decision is measured, calculated, and weighed. Here, she ensures that the reader does not assume the role of detective to try to find clues or answers about James’s death, because doing so is a reductive act. His life is not a puzzle to be solved. Any attempt to do so is dismissive and pathologizing. The answer to his death is not what this book is about.

This book is about James. At the same time, it is, in some ways, about Vincent and in others, about Li herself. Li has long alluded to the unhappiness of her childhood in communist China and her mother’s inhumane cruelty, but it is in Things in Nature Merely Grow that she lays bare her mother’s astonishing abuse. I suppose it is naive to consider a mother inflicting pain on her child as astonishing, but what is certainly astonishing is that in all of Li’s work, it is here, in this book for James, that she most bluntly presents her mother’s staggering violence.

In a late section titled “Things I Never Told My Children,” Li writes about the beatings she endured at the whims of her mother. While the physical violence is devastating, what is arguably more devasting is the psychological violence Li’s mother inflicted, including inventing a game of isolation in which an imagined twin of Li is a child finally worthy of love. Throughout her childhood, Li’s mother asked her: “[D]o you want a dead mother or a mad mother?” In response, Li now writes: “Nobody knew that I had always thought a dead mother would be better than a mad mother,” adding, “That thought too was on my mind when I felt too bleak to live: it’s not my children’s job to keep me alive; in fact, it’s my job to protect them from myself, if I cannot save my sanity.” After Li’s suicide attempt, her mother’s response was “Why did you do that to me?” The question positions Li’s mother herself at the center of her daughter’s pain, rather than attempting to understand or acknowledge it.

Intergenerational trauma defies language. We hold the wounds of our parents inside us: whether or not we’re aware of it, the violence is there, and our children may well feel it. Li’s decision to write about her mother now, then, in the wake of her children’s suicides, reads like an act of defiance, an act of freedom. It is a direct rejection of her mother’s question; just as Li is not responsible for the deaths of her sons, her sons are not responsible for the pain she experiences as she goes on living.

¤

Toward the book’s close, Li includes a section titled “Minor Comedies—for James,” whose tone takes on an almost childlike glee—if one can ethically use the word “glee” in the space of child loss. Still, glee is the word that occurs to me each time I recall the section of text in which Li seems to inhabit the joy James might’ve felt had he been able to witness her dedicating a substantial portion of the book to publicly exposing the people who have behaved horrifically toward their family in the wake of the children’s deaths—so horrifically that their actions verge on comedy. There is a freeness to the prose in this section that feels shocking for a writer who is an artist of precision.

The way Li playfully embraces vengeance feels both refreshing and somewhat dangerous. Suddenly, no one and nothing is safe: in a scathing paragraph of uncharacteristic catharsis, Li directly addresses the Chinese media and tabloids who ran salacious and crude headlines about the deaths of her children in conjunction with her perceived role in their suicides as well as the many visitors she and her husband were forced to host who inflicted their own harm. Most notable is the mother of one of Vincent’s friends, who came to “file a complaint about [Li’s] dead son.” To them, she now writes: “I am sorry for whatever losses you have suffered or whatever deficiencies you were born with that make you, unavoidably, who you are and what you are.” The descriptions of utter inhumanity serve as a reminder of the difficulty inherent in being human, a feeling Li and her children know intimately.

There is no redemption arc in Things in Nature Merely Grow, no hero’s journey, no arrival at a deeper meaning of life after the compounding tragedies of Vincent and James’s suicides. Instead, there is an astonishing act of what Li refers to as “radical acceptance,” the only form of control she can assert on the tragedies of her life, which is to acknowledge them, which is not to try to play a god that she does not believe in, which is not to try to imagine (at least not for long and with very little indulgence) what might have happened if she had mothered her sons differently, what might have happened if her sons had discovered a world in which they could live—though, of course, they have one now. It is the world she has made in the books she wrote for them.

LARB Staff Recommendations

• Ultimately, “Where Reasons End” is a tremendous act of empathy.

  Rachel VeroffFeb 21, 2019

• Jenessa Abrams reviews “Liars” by Sarah Manguso in the wake of Andrea Skinner’s essay about her sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather, and her mother Alice Munro’s silence.

  Jenessa AbramsJul 23, 2024

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has questioned why nobody has been fired at the BBC over its decision to air a Gaza documentary that featured the son of a Hamas official.

It comes ahead of a review expected to be published next week into Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, which was pulled from iPlayer in February.

In an interview with The Times, Nandy said “people must be accountable for the decisions that were taken” and she was “exasperated” by the time taken to carry out the review.

A BBC spokesperson said on Saturday that findings of the review would be published “as soon as possible” but must be “thorough and follow a proper process”.

In February the BBC apologised over “serious flaws” in the making of the programme about children’s lives in Gaza, after it was revealed its 13-year-old narrator was the son of a Hamas minister.

The review is being headed by Peter Johnston, the BBC’s director of editorial complaints and reviews, which is independent of BBC News and reports directly to director general Tim Davie.

It is expected to determine whether any editorial guidelines were broken and if any disciplinary action is needed.

The BBC will also undertake a full audit of expenditure on the programme.

Nandy said she needed an “adequate explanation” about what had happened, which she had not yet had from Davie or BBC chairman Samir Shah.

If nobody was fired over the incident, Nandy said she wanted “an explanation as to why not”.

A BBC spokesperson said: “The findings of the review will be published as soon as possible.

“As we have said previously, it is vital that this work is done as quickly as possible, but it must also be thorough and follow a proper process.”

Last month, the BBC decided not to broadcast a separate documentary from another independent production company about doctors working in Gaza due to impartiality concerns it had surrounding the production. It was later aired on Channel 4 instead.

Nandy added that BBC leadership had to “get a grip on it” following the live Glastonbury broadcast of punk-duo band Bob Vylan.

Scarlett Johansson had a joyful get-together with the Jurassic World Rebirth cast and crew while filming in Malta.

Scarlett’s co-star Jonathan Bailey recalled a dinner she organized for the cast and crew members and their families.

“Everyone’s family was there at the same time. We were in a square in Valletta, and it was just really special,” he told People.

The latest installment of the Jurassic World franchise also stars Mahershala Ali, Rupert Friend, and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo in key roles.

The Lucy star, who shares daughter Rose, 10, with ex-husband Romain Dauriac and son Cosmo, 3, with husband Colin Jost, also gushed about the dinner.

She told the publication, “It was beautiful, and it was so nice to see everybody’s children playing in the square. All the partners were there, and it was a wonderful celebration of what we were accomplishing, how much work we’d done. It was kind of the halfway point. It was so nice.”

Wicked star Bailey went on to praise Scarlett for the way she led the film.

He hailed her for leading the “film with such incredible energy, and that’s on and off camera.”

“It was so apparent very quickly that it was going to be a knockout summer,” he added.

Jurassic World Rebirth is in cinemas and has already made $100 million globally.