I used to read about regimes in other countries where anything unfavorable to those in power was erased, burned, rewritten. The Chinese Communist Party, which pronounced any negative events or criticism “historical nihilism.” Joseph Stalin, who rewrote Russian history before he began his purges. Afghanistan, which plucked forty years of the country’s life […]
Kamala Harris’s concession speech was, pundits on both sides agreed, “graceful.” The compliment is a tad gendered; men are seldom described as graceful, though they certainly can be. But brush that aside, because this country stands in desperate need of grace. And that holds true across all of the word’s possible definitions: forgiveness, […]
The tension in our usually placid household has been ratcheting up for days now. My stomach is tight; my husband’s blood sugar keeps spiking. We read each other the latest political outrage and talk nervously about the unrest we fully expect. What will happen in our sweet little town, a place where the majority […]
Thoughts are pricy these days; a penny will only buy ambivalence. Should our nation’s tiniest coin be preserved or officially abandoned? It has shaped our figurative language, our notions of thrift, our attitudes toward money. Yet we are a practical people, and it costs well over one cent to mint a […]
The other day I interviewed a woman who had been evicted—after being laid off from work in the aftermath of the 2008 recession and receiving a cancer diagnosis two days later, newly uninsured. She lost all her savings because not even McDonalds would hire her (too skilled, might leave soon). She said many […]
Remember when we fantasized about where we would go to college or who we would marry? Now my sixtysomething cohort fantasizes about where they will retire. And Lord, but my friends are practical. A ranch house, they say, all one floor. Or a “villa”—if ever a word was inflated, it is this one; […]
“Demure” once meant full-skirted dresses, chaste necklines, low-heeled pumps, and pearls. Sweetness, modesty, a 1950s femininity that did not assert itself. In my all-girls Catholic high school, it was still held up as an ideal in the late 1970s—but by the time we graduated from college, we snorted at the thought. For four […]
Steve Vender is a tough, daring private investigator. It feels strangely right that the book most important to him is Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. Vender read Becker in college, long before he found himself hunting witnesses in crack dens. “The people in this place were already dead,” he would realize […]
As a law student in New York, Jim Clemente had no money for Broadway shows or clubs. “I’d take a milk crate and sit in Times Square and watch people,” he tells me, “trying to figure out who they were, where they were from, and what their stories were.” He had no idea […]
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 […]
