Lord, what a relief it is, to be obsessed with the Olympics. Most years, I catch glimpses, but this summer has been hot and hard, and I needed to obsess about something other than illness, home repairs, and work. Why not savor my favorite city and immerse myself in other people’s hard work, […]
The dilemmas have filled advice columns forever. “My friend asked me to—” give her an alibi, smuggle cocaine, lie to her husband, risk prison by helping her die…. Though most of my friends are the law-abiding sort, I dread some future ask that leaves me stymied, torn between ethics and love. Cicero would […]
Breaking stops you. Whether you are headed to meet your new boss or rendezvous with your lover, if you see somebody on a side street brave enough and crazy enough to spin on his head, strong enough to rotate his entire body on one hand, graceful enough to kick and step in a […]
First, an admission: in the immediate wake of the shooting at the Trump rally, I watched the video of Donald Trump raising his fist and blurted, “Fuck.” A grudging admission that the man, even shoeless, is a consummate showman. That he knows, instinctively, how to galvanize a crowd. That his chutzpah is undeniable, […]
In the movie Hit Man (funny, smart, well done, morally questionable but you end up not caring—and is that a good thing or worrisome?), the central question is whether we can change. Can someone escape what looks like their fate and reinvent themselves? Which ties to the question I have long wrestled with: […]
Bored at a wedding reception, I started chatting with an old friend of my husband’s. Somehow one of us mentioned loving, back in grade school, diagramming sentences. Soon we were scribbling complicated challenges on cocktail napkins, oblivious to the tipsy fun that swirled around us. How nerdy can you get? Still, we were […]
“It is so hard to make someone else feel anything other than pain,” Nilay Patel remarked. “Christ,” Ezra Klein exclaimed. “That’s the darkest thing I’ve ever heard you say.” Patel, co-founder and editor in chief of the tech news site The Verge, had been chatting breezily with him about AI and the internet. […]
The nightly news used to be a ritual, and my grandmother used to shush us—not for the Vietnam body count or the latest on Watergate, but for the weather. She drew her excuses from it. Housework could not possibly be done in July or August; nor could the oven be lit. Running errands […]
Scathing criticism never works for me. I listen to other people thrust and parry, demolishing arguments with rapier wit. Then I try—and fail to draw a single drop of blood. My dismissal of someone’s argument as “akin to Thomas Aquinas telling us how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” […]
There is an article in The New Yorker about Miranda July, whom I have never read. She sounds interesting, so I zip along, half-skimming—then skid to a stop. She is reading the notes she wrote for her new novel, All Fours, to the reporter. Here is one from 2018: “Thinking about what aging […]
