Tag: last day
Fiction: Second Life – The Atlantic
During Donnie’s first week in the mixed unit (drugs and crazy), a girl threw a TV set out the window because she thought it was criticizing her. Donnie walked to the window to look. “Probably was,” he mumbled. He’d grown up with a mother who came alive when insulted. The guy sleeping across the room, who’d dealt heroin with his own now-jailed dad, was woken up by the noise and asked, “Are we dead yet?”
“No. You’re just sleeping,”
What the Body Means to Say
Patient: Mechanism of injury: self-immolation. Pt conscious upon EMT arrival. Lighter fluid and matches on scene. When asked about the incident, pt reported intent to “turn herself into a phoenix.” Psych eval ordered.
The summer before last, I met a woman who lit herself on fire. I’ll call her R. One evening in June, she poured lighter fluid over and into her body—down her mouth and up her rectum—and struck a match.
Self-immolation isn’t unheard of on the burn unit.
How I Finally Learned My Name
The email came from a stranger. “Dear Mr. Temple,” it said. “My name is Andrea Paiss, and I live in Budapest, Hungary. I do not know whether I write to the right person. I just hope so.”
It reached me in San Francisco on January 1, 2020, and told of a “Granny,” then 92, who wanted to know what had happened to her cousin Lorant Stein. Andrea had found a document online about Lorant in the Central Database of
Maria Ressa: ‘Where Is the Line Where Immoral Becomes Evil?’
Editor’s Note: In yesterday’s keynote at Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy, a conference hosted by The Atlantic and the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, Maria Ressa compared the impact of social media on our information ecosystem in recent years to that of an atom bomb: destructive, all-consuming, irreversible. Afterward, Ressa sat down with Atlantic executive editor Adrienne LaFrance to discuss Rappler, the news site she co-founded in the Philippines; press freedom; social-media platforms; and how journalists and audiences
Tumblr Is Everything – The Atlantic
The CEO of Tumblr—a social platform that was once worth more than $1 billion, and in its time was among the internet’s most popular and talked-about cultural spaces—quietly worked his last day on January 21. The company has not explained Jeff D’Onofrio’s departure, nor even referenced it publicly; I learned about it incidentally, several weeks after speaking with him, in a “wanted to let you know” email from a company spokesperson. Five days after that, Matt Mullenweg, whose company, Automattic,