Tag: exchange student
A New Year’s Eve Friend Reunion
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 week she talks with three men whose international group of friends has been having an annual New Year’s Eve reunion party for the past 10 years (except for 2020, when the pandemic prevented it). They discuss the “special sort of alchemy” that took their group from spending just one
hurmat kazmi: The Armpits of White Boys
During the predeparture orientation at the crumbling three-star hotel by the sea—with its white portico and its lobbies smelling like a Native Jetty swamp—the exchange student is warned about a number of things. Ex-exchange students—by now so Americanized, you would think they had spent their entire lives in the U.S.—regale him with anecdotes both funny and scary: host fathers casually dropping the bass during dinner-table conversations, and host mothers quietly letting one or two rather pungent ones slip during