Irina Lutsenko

Pilates does seem to triple the price of any class it touches—true that. But we don't have to do pilates. We can join a club... Yulia did—and lived to tell the tale. The article was written by the wonderful Yulia Levina in my " Writing with The Guardian " course, but I can totally see it in the actual The Guardian . ✼✼✼ You do not talk about Fight Club (enough) Every Tuesday and Thursday, at 6 pm a 30-year-old woman drops whatever it is that she is doing and heads for a run-down five-floor building. There, she makes a beeline for a cramped and cluttered room that smells like dirty socks, changes into cheap-looking shorts made of polyester (the kind that makes this annoying swishing sound when you rub it) and goes straight to the boxing ring. Record scratch. Freeze frame. Yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I got here? Just like all the other women I’ve ever met, I was traumatized by PE lessons at school. Subjecting myself to this torture again? No, thank you. A...

This article struck a chord. Instantly. It was written by the wonderful Marina Khudolei in my " Writing with The Guardian " course, but I can totally see it in the actual The Guardian . ✼✼✼ Who’s Talking? Finding a Human Voice in the Age of ChatGPT A couple of weeks ago, I needed to write a polite email to a colleague. As a non-native speaker writing in English, I often second-guess the tone of my messages—am I being too formal? Too direct? Too vague? Wanting to get it just right, I turned to my loyal friend—ChatGPT—for help. The resulting email draft was immaculate in both tone and style, and, pleased with myself, I sent it off without a second thought. When she replied a day later, I burst out laughing—her email was so eerily similar in tone and phrasing that it was instantly obvious we shared the same virtual ghostwriter. It was clear: she, too, had asked ChatGPT for help. There we were—two humans outsourcing the simple task of polite correspondence to a machine. That wa...