Tag: heart attack
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
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
17 Readers Weigh the Risks in Sports
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 do you think about the health and safety risks that are inherent in sports?”
Lauren says she’s grappled with the question as the mother of a teenage athlete:
My son, 16, dislocated his left
The Supreme Court Justice Who Championed Judicial Restraint
In September 1953, with the Supreme Court only months away from rehearing oral argument in Brown v. Board of Education, Justice Felix Frankfurter received word while vacationing in Massachusetts that Chief Justice Fred Vinson had died suddenly of a heart attack. Returning to Washington so that he could attend Vinson’s funeral, Frankfurter bumped into his former law clerk Philip Elman in Union Station. Frankfurter did not exactly appear staggered by grief. To the contrary, Elman observed the
Donald Trump Jr., Aggrieved Instagram Influencer
Donald Trump Jr.’s highest-performing Instagram post of the year (so far) is a piece of misinformation. Shared in March, it’s a black square with “THIS IS A TEST” written in red across the top. “Instagram has been limiting our posts so that no more than 7% of our friends see our posts,” it reads. “If you see this post, please simply comment with ‘Yes’ and then like it.” This exact text—with its specific choice of 7 percent and its ambiguous