Tag: old man
Did We Fall in Love With the Wrong House?
I can’t talk about our house in the Bronx without telling you first about the pond out front. Given how much worse flooding can be elsewhere in New York City—even just two blocks to the east along the valley of Broadway, where the sewer is always at capacity—not to mention elsewhere in the world, I’m embarrassed to gripe about my personal pond. These days, such bodies of water are everywhere. Mine is not the only pond, but merely the pond
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
Ukraine After the Deluge – The Atlantic
On a hot summer day in Ukraine, two young boys named Timur and Slavik were playing on what used to be the banks of the Kakhovka Reservoir, part of the Dnieper River. I met them when I was visiting the area in July. The air’s tranquility was occasionally pierced by the sounds of fighting in a frontline town not far away. This region is a focal point of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, and in June, evidence suggested that Russians, trying to
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
Arthur Brooks: The Secret to Satisfaction
I glanced into my teenage daughter’s bedroom one spring afternoon last year, expecting to find her staring absentmindedly at the Zoom screen that passed for high school during the pandemic. Instead, she was laughing uproariously at a video she had found. I asked her what she was looking at. “It’s an old man dancing like a chicken and singing,” she told me.