Tag: best friends
Would You Buy a Home With Friends?
What motivated two families to engage in the organized chaos of shared living, and how did they learn to talk through, and shape, new expectations for their family life at home?
In this episode of How to Talk to People, we hear from Deborah Tepley and Luke Jackson, who remember when they first asked their best friends to buy a house with them. The Flemings—soon to be expecting their first child—didn’t hesitate to say yes. Their real-estate agent and extended
We Still Need Judy Blume
Like tens of thousands of young women before me, I wrote to Judy Blume because something strange was happening to my body.
I had just returned from visiting the author in Key West when I noticed a line of small, bright-red bites running up my right leg. I was certain it was bedbugs—and terrified that I’d given them to Blume, whose couch I had been sitting on a few days earlier.
Of God and Machines – The Atlantic
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
Miracles can be perplexing at first, and artificial intelligence is a very new miracle. “We’re creating God,” the former Google Chief Business Officer Mo Gawdat recently told an interviewer. “We’re summoning the demon,” Elon Musk said a few years ago, in a talk at MIT. In
The White Liberals’ Burden – The Atlantic
When I first arrived in South Africa, in 2009, it still felt as if a storm had just swept through. For most of the 20th century, the country was the world’s most fastidiously organized white-supremacist state. And then, in one election, in 1994, it became the first modern nation where people of color who’d been dispossessed for centuries would make the laws, run the economy, write the news, decide what history to teach—and wield political dominance over a substantial
The Fall of Roe and the Curse of Forced Motherhood
The uterus has long doubled as a political tool. Summoned as a metaphor—for emptiness, for deficiency, for obligation—it has conflated a body part with womanhood, and used the logic of maternal sacrifice to limit women’s lives. Mental stimulation, some 19th-century doctors argued, could harm their reproductive systems. Exercise could, too. We might laugh, today, at the transparency of such tactical ignorance, but our smugness would be premature. The uterus, idealized into a means of degradation, is precisely what the Supreme
How to Make and Keep Friends as an Adult
In the post-social-distancing era, some of us can’t remember how to make a new friend. But for many, making friends has always been a challenge—left as an unfulfilled desire without any clear course of action.
In this episode of How to Start Over, we explore the barriers to friendship formation in adulthood, how to navigate conflict, and why starting over as a better friend begins with getting out of our own heads.
This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and
She Wouldn’t Exist if Not for Her Friend’s Family
Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship. This is the 100th and final installment of the series.
This week she talks with two women who were brought together by an extraordinary act of courage: During World War II, Clémentine Lestang’s great-grandfather, a member of the French resistance, rescued Meredith Moseley’s grandfather, a U.S. Army pilot, after he
Geraldine Brooks’s Sympathy for Her Black Protagonists Isn’t Enough
It’s 2019 in Washington, D.C., and Theo is changing his art-history dissertation after finding a painting of a horse in his neighbor’s giveaway pile. He is 26 years old, a Black Londoner (his mother is Yoruba, his father Californian) and a former star polo player. He left the sport for academia because of relentless racist harassment, and now studies stereotypes of Africans in British painting. The working title for his dissertation is Sambo, Othello, and Uncle Tom: Caricature,
The Keys to Lifelong Friendship
“The Friendship Files,” my series of interviews with friends about their friendships, began with an idle thought. Having written a lot about both friendship and dating apps, I was curious about Bumble BFF. Did it work? Did it feel like dating? What do you do on a friend date anyway? So I interviewed two young women who became best friends after using the app. It was intended as a onetime article, but the conversation was so fun, genuine, and sometimes
‘Yellowjackets’ Is So Much More Than a Female ‘Lord of the Flies’
Attempts to summarize the Showtime series Yellowjackets have mostly had to rely on creaky comparisons: a female Lord of the Flies … a ’90s Stranger Things … a teen Lost, but in Canada. The coming-of-age horror story is indeed tough to categorize, but nonetheless thrillingly addictive. The show follows a championship-bound girls’ soccer team that crashes in the wilderness in 1996, threading their story with that of the surviving members as adults in 2021.
Like Stranger Things, the