FROM THE EDITOR

I know someone who knows someone who apparently is able to make amazing things materialise in her life purely by thinking positively. Positivity is her ruling planet. I’m a pretty positive person as a rule, but I find this maddening, to put it mildly. It makes me wild. Which is probably just me being negative and the universe will probably punish me for it.

But it suggests such a radical disconnection with reality. Imagine if all the momentously horrific social, economic, natural disasters and catastrophes could just have been fixed if those suffering had just been positive. By the same logic, the poor and struggling really just have themselves to blame for not being positive enough. They too could have a nice house in a leafy suburb if only they banished those negative thoughts about their challenges and hardships and put their minds to it. OML. In a new book, Toxic Positivity: Keeping It Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy (page 22), the author Whitney Goodman warns that subscribers to the “good vibes only” mindset are setting themselves up for a fall. Life, spoiler alert, is not that simple. It’s not linear, but complex and rich and there’s a very thin line between joy and pain.

When I read Penelope Cruz (page 8) describing her long-held conviction that she would one day work with film director Pedro Almodovar, it’s less #manifestation and something more akin with intuition. Doggedly following your dreams. Not the glib, facile proposition that anyone can just manifest themselves up the wazoo by thinking positively. Almodovar says Cruz had “blind faith” and witchy qualities. Her collaborations with Almodovar certainly cast a spell on screen.

Ma te wa