Embarrassing Lonely

Is Mary Oliver Embarrassing?

Maggie Millner | Yale Review | 2nd September 2025

Mary Oliver is of a “small class of commercially successful poets whose audience consists primarily of people who do not write poems themselves”. Yet the literary consensus seems to be that she was “middlebrow, accessible, placatory”. Her poems are read aloud at weddings and funerals to smirks and lowered eyes from the poets in the room. “This embarrassment soon began to interest me” (3,700 words)

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All The Lonely People

Nick Haslam | Inside Story | 8th September 2025

Loneliness is often defined as “not getting the social contact we desire”, yet this “could work equally as a definition of boredom or dissatisfaction”. It can be paradoxical: social trust reduces loneliness, but the “highly cohesive” Japanese suffer high rates of it. Loneliness entails a lasting sense of disconnection from others, yet brief, shallow interactions with baristas have been shown to alleviate it (1,300 words)