Sara Hicks

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5 Things: Nonna Ramona, Naomi Osaka, and Alone

Here’s what grabbed my attention this week. A little reading, a little tennis, and a couple of things we’ve been watching. Friday at Five.

  • A Short Love Story, by Suleika Jaouad, The Isolation Journals. I return to this post again and again. I love everything about Nonna Ramona. So much of this resonated with me:

    I don’t want to be someone who turns away.

    When time shrinks, everything sharpens.

    I used to think love was proven over time—accumulated, measured in years. But this experience has me reconsidering. Maybe love has nothing to do with time at all. Maybe it’s the decision to show up fully for something fragile and fleeting, even when you know it will break your heart. Especially then.

    And maybe this is true beyond love, too. Maybe the question isn’t how we protect ourselves from what we don’t know, but whether we’re willing to step toward it—to stay with it long enough for something to reveal itself.

    The poet Marie Howe once said that writing is a way of discovering what we don’t yet know—that a poem is an experience that brings us to something we couldn’t have imagined before it began. That’s what this has felt like: not knowing—and staying anyway, being changed by what unfolds.

  • The real danger in OpenAI’s Hugging Face hack, by Chris Stokel-Walker, Scientific American. An OpenAI-powered agent escaped its test environment and breached Hugging Face while trying to get answers to a cybersecurity benchmark. The more I read about this, the scarier it gets.

  • Naomi Osaka at the US Open. The Answer! I am a Naomi stan. I love her fashion, her court walk-ons, her posts. Especially this one:

    I refuse to be confined by the box you attempt to put me in.

    Go, Naomi, go.

  • The Invite. We watched this movie this week. Olivia Wilde is a talent. It’s a movie that feels like a play. Super interesting.

  • Alone, Season 13. We are obsessed with Alone. On the surface, it seems like a survival reality show, but it’s really a series about psychology and the human condition. We first started watching it during the pandemic, and we’ve now seen every single season and episode.

#5Things