Tag: good friends
The Gaps Between Media and Reality
Readers share examples of media portrayals that are at odds with their own life experiences.
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week I asked readers what they experience or observe personally that is most at odds with
In Kari Lake, Trumpism Has Found Its Leading Lady
As election returns rolled in on the evening of November 3, 2020, a local news host in Phoenix was starring in an intensely awkward broadcast. The Fox 10 anchor Kari Lake was refusing to call Arizona for Joe Biden—even though her network had already done so. “If [voters] wake up tomorrow or two days later and it flips,” she insisted, her pendant earrings swinging, “there’s distrust in the system.” Lake’s co-anchor, John Hook, lost patience. “Well, we’re taking our
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
What It Feels Like to Lose a Child in a Mass Shooting
Nicole Hockley has done all of this before. The bewildering phone call in the middle of the day. The anxious drive, followed by the waiting, the endless waiting, alongside other frantic or frozen parents. Then, at last, learning the impossible, mind-numbing news: Your child is dead. The tiny person you made with your own body, whom you fed, dressed, and taught to say thank you, was shot to death in his classroom.
Hockley’s son Dylan was 6 years old
The Meat Allergy That Spreads Through Ticks
A few months ago, Candice Matthis and Debbie Nichols sat down with their husbands to have some bacon. It was an unremarkable scene, except for two details.
First, there were the EpiPens, which Matthis and Nichols both had ready in case of emergency. The two women can’t eat red meat, not after they were each diagnosed with a dangerous red-meat allergy that develops, oddly enough, after tick bites. They had bonded as friends over their strange shared fate, where a
Finding a Best Friend After Loneliness
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 two friends who met doing AmeriCorps. Though they were only together for six weeks, they got matching tattoos at the end of the program, and have been best friends for seven years. They both say the bond has been important for their mental health and
Robert McGill: ‘Something Something Alice Munro,’ a Short Story
Editor’s Note: Read an interview with Robert McGill about his writing process.
Nessa was sitting in Hadi’s car, letting the AC run with the engine off, thinking that if the battery died, it served him right for taking so long in the pharmacy, and surveying the main street of Bayfield, which was nearly deserted even on a sunny summer morning, when whom did she see approaching the discount rack outside the clothing boutique but Alice Munro? At least, she
A Twitter Addict Realizes She Needs Rehab
I’m almost 60, and in these many decades I’ve seen people—some of them good friends—taken down by all kinds of things. Alcohol and drugs, mostly. A few years ago, I lost someone to heroin, and hundreds of us sat at his funeral in wordless communion. I know a couple of people who couldn’t shake gambling, and many plagued by food and sex and all the other great distractions. But in all these years—almost 60! —I haven’t had trouble with any