Tag: grown-ups
How Mike Birbiglia Got Sneaky-Famous
Early next year, on January 24, the comedian Mike Birbiglia will perform in Walla Walla, Washington, for the first time since the night in 2005 when he nearly died after sleepwalking—sleep-running—through the second-story window of his hotel room at a La Quinta Inn. He’d been having issues with sleepwalking for years, and on this night, he was dreaming that a missile had been fired on his infantry platoon, so he took drastic evasive measures. He crash-landed on
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
Barbie Understands Mother-Daughter Relationships – The Atlantic
When I was a little girl, I played with Barbie for the most basic reason you can imagine: She was so pretty. The cute outfits, the shiny blond hair, and all the fun she would have going around, looking like that. When I went to see the Barbie movie years later, as a grown woman, I had no doubt that the film was going to tackle the obvious issues related to how Barbie is seen: the impact that her
The Elegant, Utterly Original Comedy of Alex Edelman
In the long and checkered history of possibly terrible impulse decisions, here’s one for the ages: A few years ago, the comedian Alex Edelman decided on a whim to show up uninvited to a casual meeting of white nationalists at an apartment in New York City, and pose as one of them. Why? He was curious. He wanted to see what it would be like to be on the inside of a gathering that would never have knowingly included him,
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.
A Censored and Forgotten Holocaust Masterpiece
“There is no possible way of responding to Belsen and Buchenwald,” Lionel Trilling wrote in 1948. “The activity of mind fails before the incommunicability of man’s suffering.” The crimes of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes in the 1930s and ’40s defied all precedents of analysis and feeling. No ism could account for them; no wisdom could make them bearable. Though inside the stream of history, they seemed to belong to a realm of occult, pure evil. Today we’re
13 Feel-Good TV Shows to Watch This Winter
Call it the First Law of Winter Viewing: The colder the weather, the stronger the urge to watch something warm. Although there’s nothing wrong with, say, returning to Stars Hollow for the umpteenth time or indulging in TV’s bounty of feel-good programming for the new year, why not press “Play” on an unconventional—yet equally comforting—pick? Below, we’ve compiled a guide to under-the-radar shows and nostalgic favorites that are stuffed with heartfelt themes, soothing settings, and wholesome narratives. All are perfect
Why Are So Many Black Men Shot in New Haven?
We are all products of our environments. This familiar phrase assumes that most of us spent our youth in one neighborhood, one delimited world. But I came of age in between spaces—a white kid with a single mother who filled my life with books and worried about making her salary last the month, and a father with severe mental illness in and out of institutions, I spent my adolescent nights on a rented floor of a two-family house and
10 Readers on Opposing Anti-Semitism
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he 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 is the best response to anti-Semitism in America?”
Yosef responded with acid observations about the type of anti-Semitism that prompts the most media coverage:
I find it ironic that those who are the most
Hernan Diaz: ‘The Generation,’ a Short Story
We’re gathered around Victor’s body. I can’t look at his face and don’t want to look down like the others. Find myself staring at the glass of water on the counter. The nervous little ripples. This is why I know the hum is there, although I can’t hear it. None of us has ever heard the hum, because we were born into it. But the surface of the water, a crumb dancing on the table, or, sometimes, my face trembling