In the final episode of The Pursuit of Love, Linda Radlett (played by Lily James), the dazzlingly romantic and impractical heroine of Nancy Mitford’s 1945 novel, is taken shopping by a formidable French aristocrat. Linda parades a series of outfits, blowing kisses and laughing, then feigns abashed surprise when Fabrice (Assaad Bouab), her new lover, declares that they’ll take it all.

For years, Sandra Emry, a researcher at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, has been studying the potential impact of future heat waves on rockweed, a species of brown alga that provides a habitat for marine life on both coasts of North America.

Does my name belong to me? Does my face? What about my life? My story? Why is my name used to refer to events I had no hand in? I return to these questions again and again because others continue to profit off my identity, and my trauma, without my consent. Most recently, there is the film Stillwater, directed by Tom McCarthy and starring Matt Damon and Abigail Breslin, which was, in McCarthy’s words, “directly inspired by the Amanda Knox saga.

The author standing with a tank by Havana’s Malecon in 1988 (Courtesy of Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez)
Every Thursday at 5 p.m., my grandmother would go into her bedroom in Havana, lock the door, and tune her Soviet-made radio to Radio Martí, a Miami-based station run by Cuban exiles who had fled Fidel Castro’s revolution. She always set the volume barely above a whisper. “Walls have ears,” she would say.