Tag: free time
Christine Blasey Ford Testifies Again
“I am here today not because I want to be. I am terrified,” Christine Blasey Ford said in the fall of 2018, introducing herself to the Senate Judiciary Committee and a television audience of millions. Early in One Way Back, the memoir Ford has written about her testimony, its origin, and its aftermath, she repeats the line. She feels that terror again, she writes. She is afraid of having her words taken out of context, of being a public
Michael R. Jackson’s Subversive Vision of the American Musical
In the summer of 2020, the playwright Michael R. Jackson received an unusual message from a fan of A Strange Loop, his musical about a gay Black man’s path to creative self-awareness through the process of writing a musical about a gay Black man’s path to creative self-awareness. “Can I buy you a bulletproof vest?” the fan inquired over Instagram.
Jackson, who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for A Strange Loop and lived on a perfectly safe
How to Rest – The Atlantic
Between making time for work, family, friends, exercise, chores, shopping—the list goes on and on—it can feel like a huge accomplishment to just take a few minutes to read a book or watch TV before bed. All that busyness can lead to poor sleep quality when we finally do get to put our head down.
How does our relationship with rest affect our ability to gain real benefits from it? And how can we use our free time to rest
How to Keep Time: How to Look Busy
Many of us complain about being too busy—and about not having enough time to do the things we really want to do. But has busyness become an excuse for our inability to focus on what matters?
According to Neeru Paharia, a marketing professor at Arizona State University, time is a sort of luxury good—the more of it you have, the more valuable you are. But her research also revealed that, for many Americans, having less time and being busy can
Spiders Might Be Quietly Disappearing
This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.
Jumping spiders are an obsession for me. But it wasn’t always so.
Although never a spider hater or an arachnophobe, I was pretty ambivalent about them for most of my life. Then I learned about jumping spiders: I’ve reported on their impressive vision (as good as a cat’s in some ways!), their surprising smarts (they make plans!), and the discovery that they have REM-like sleep (and may even dream!). I was hooked.
I
A Novelist Relentlessly in Search of Her Other Selves
In the early days of the pandemic, it became harder for us to see one another. The human face, the ultimate marker of individuality, what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called “the first disclosure,” was suddenly sheathed in fabric. Strangers encountered on the street were even stranger—and the masks that covered their visage became a screen on which to project anxious thoughts.
In August Blue, the South African–born, North London–based novelist Deborah Levy’s latest, a concert pianist named Elsa Anderson
Who Leaves, Who Stays – The Atlantic
When U.S. troops abruptly left Afghanistan after 20 years, the consequences were devastating both for the people who remained and for those who managed to escape. For many women in Afghanistan, their lives changed dramatically in a matter of days. Women and girls who had previously gone to work and to school were suddenly forced entirely out of public life.
Bushra Seddique, a journalist and fellow at The Atlantic, was one of those women. The decision that she, her
The New Kabul – The Atlantic
The streets are silent. Women and schoolgirls are completely covered, if they are seen at all. Food is scarce for many. But it was not always like this in Bushra Seddique’s home. Before she fled Afghanistan, before the Taliban returned just over a year ago, Seddique had days and nights in cafés with friends, a job as a journalist, and a full life in bustling Kabul.
Seddique’s escape from Afghanistan happened as abruptly as the United States’ withdrawal from her
Scenes From Ukrainian Summer Camp
Summer camp, at its purest, is like Never-Never-Land—a place that exists only in childhood or in memories of it: lake swimming, tree climbing, secret telling, frog catching, and youth everlasting. When I found myself recently on a train platform in Lviv, Ukraine, surrounded by teenagers heading to summer camp in the Carpathian Mountains, such wholesome pleasures seemed almost ridiculously out of reach.
The train was running late, for one thing. And shortly after we’d learned of the delay, an air-raid
What Did Medieval Peasants Know?
In the foreword to her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, the historian Barbara W. Tuchman offered a warning to people with simplistic ideas about what life was like in the medieval world, and what that might say about humanity as a whole: You think you know, but you have no idea.
The period, which spans roughly 500 to 1500, presents some problems for people trying to craft uncomplicated stories. “No age is tidy or made of whole