Tag: first thing
Marilynne Robinson Makes the Book of Genesis New
Marilynne Robinson’s novels always leave me with a visceral impression of celestial light. Heavenly bulbs seem to switch on at climactic moments, showing a world as undimmed as it was at Creation. “I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once,” writes John Ames, the narrator of Gilead, an elderly preacher approaching death as if returning to the birth of being. “And God
Etgar Keret Is Searching for Signs of Life
The war between Israel and Hamas has progressed at such speed, with body counts mounting by the hour, that it can feel like the chasm of human grief it is leaving behind has gotten relatively little attention. In Israel, the society I know better, every individual seems to be connected to someone who was murdered or has been kidnapped. In Gaza, death surely feels inescapable. I have been worried about this reverberation of pain almost from the moment I learned
Trans in Texas – The Atlantic
This week Texas will join the 20 or so other states that have passed laws restricting access to medical therapies and procedures for transgender children. The new law is a triumph for Governor Greg Abbott, who has tried a couple of different strategies to restrict gender transitions, first threatening to investigate parents and caregivers for child abuse and now, in the latest bill, threatening doctors with prosecution. Civil-rights groups challenged the bills, and some medical providers who oversee the treatments
My Father’s House – The Atlantic
In the early 1930s, a few years before I was born, my father bought a summer house. This was an astonishment to all our relatives and friends. For one thing, we were not the sort of people who “summered.” My father was a working stiff; even in the best of times we made do with city parks, the public pool, the fire escape, the air-cooled movie house. For another thing, these happened to be the worst of times,
Why So Many Californians Are Living in Cars
The month I moved to Los Angeles felt apocalyptic, even by the standards of a city forever being destroyed in film. It was the end of the summer of 2020; stores were closed, streets empty, and wildfires had enveloped the region in smoke, turning the sky orange. Yet after I parked the U-Haul, things got even bleaker.
Walking to my new apartment, I passed a car where a 20-something had passed out with the engine running. Folks, I noticed,
The Problem With Comparing Social Media to Big Tobacco
Last month, the surgeon general released a lengthy advisory calling attention to social media and its effects on the mental health of teenagers. Historically, a warning from the surgeon general pointed a big neon sign at an issue that we might not be sure how much to worry about: cigarettes, AIDS, drunk driving. But people are already worried about social media—and they’re acting on those concerns. School districts are suing social-media companies for “knowingly” harming children. Legislators are grilling tech-company
I’m a Philosopher. Don’t Ask Me to Always Be Deep.
Here is a story I have heard from more than one professional philosopher, though it has never, at least not yet, happened to me: You are sitting on a plane, the person next to you asks what you do, you tell them you are a philosopher, and they ask, “So, what are your sayings?” When a philosopher opens their mouth, people expect deep things to come out of it. Philosophers don’t always enjoy this; to avoid it they might
A Night on a Jeopardy-themed Bar Crawl
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Lizzie: Do they call it a bar crawl because by the end of it you’ll be crawling? Or is it because if you attend one in February, you’ll be crawling out of your apartment wondering why the host, generally understood to be a party genius, decided to throw a bar crawl in the East Village on the coldest weekend of the year?
Our friend Andrew (the brain behind last year’s Watergate party)
No One Knows What a Slushie Is
Recently, after a particularly invigorating car wash, I had a yen for a slushie. Maybe the warming weather inspired me. Perhaps the proud signage of the QuikTrip convenience store nearby activated an unconscious desire. No matter, a slushie I did get. At QuikTrip, it’s called a Freezoni, a curious, quasi-Italian aspiration that bears no relation to the dispensed product. To my palate, the slushie wasn’t good: too wet, not frozen enough, like it was already half-melted from being left too
What Was RT America? – The Atlantic
You can still watch Russian-propaganda television if you really want to. RT, the English-language news network funded by the Kremlin and based in Moscow, was dropped from YouTube and American cable in early March, but still appears on an assortment of alternative video-hosting platforms, where reporting on the war is described as a “special operation chronicle.” What you won’t find, though, on any television or social-media site, are the thousands of hours of programming that RT filmed and broadcast over