For my first apartment, I signed up for the cheapest possible phone service: ten calls per month. Gymnastics ensued, with exasperated friends forced to call back if I rang once and hung up. In our first home, my husband and I shared, with elaborate politeness, a computer—“Did you need the…
Mina, the main character in Emanuela Anechoum’s new novel Tangerinn, leaves her Sicilian village to find herself a well-lit life in London, one with “predictable architecture,” she hopes, and clues to the self she has yet to discover. She is relieved to be away from the mother who has…
Last week, I read a delightful story on a friend’s Facebook page, full of specific details about a farmer who realized that someone was taking eggs and potatoes from his farm stand without plunking any money into the honor jar. She was hungry and broke—times were increasingly hard—and too proud…
The masochism of it never sat well with me. Watch, on a screen, your nightmares acted out? Fix your eyes on that screen while your heart pounds faster and faster, your breathing shallows, your guts clench, and the worst possible things happen? It sounded like a mad scientist’s torture experiment.
It was all so amusing when it happened to other people. To old people. Such fun to say dryly, when one’s parent scrambled, frantic, to find their glasses, “They’re on your nose.” But the other day, I was the one hunting for the glasses on my nose. Granted, I have…
I was railing again about Eve. For Eve. Why should she take the rap for humanity’s fall, just because she had a healthy curiosity? Then I remembered Pandora, whom we blame just as angrily for the unleashing of our woes. But think of living with that box, gazing at it…
The unbearable whiteness of being....
“But, it would seem, there is no getting around explanations, we are constantly explaining and excusing ourselves; life itself, that inexplicable complex of being and feeling, demands explanations of us, those around us demand explanations, and in the end we ourselves demand explanations of ourselves, until in the end we…
The tech bros must have stumbled onto Abraham Heschel’s book about the Sabbath.
ADHD, sleep deprivation, amphetamines and the truth of why they work.