Tag: old people
Life Really Is Better Without the Internet
Before our first child was born last year, my wife and I often deliberated about the kind of parents we wanted to be—and the kind we didn’t. We watched families at restaurants sitting in silence, glued to their phones, barely taking their eyes off the screens between bites. We saw children paw at their parents, desperate to interact, only to be handed an iPad to keep quiet. We didn’t want to live like that. We vowed to be present with
Why I Got Breast-Reduction Surgery
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
One day, about two years ago, I looked in the mirror and was shocked to discover that my once-fabulous tits had transmogrified into a bosom. Whereas breasts—those sexy appendages that had gotten me past velvet ropes and bar tabs aplenty in my 20s and 30s—might be
Why Do I Only Appreciate My Health After I’ve Been Sick?
A few months ago, I got food poisoning. The sequence of events that led to my downfall began with a carton of discounted grocery-store sushi purchased and consumed on a Thursday, which led to me waking up a little queasy on a Friday, which devolved into a 12-hour stretch of me vomiting and holding myself in a fetal position, until my legs ached from dehydration. On Saturday the smell of my partner cooking breakfast still made me gag; I sipped
Liz Cheney, the Republican From the State of Reality
LARAMIE, Wyo.—Liz Cheney will probably lose her job on Tuesday, in large part due to her crusade against Donald Trump. Trump will surely taunt her as a big RINO loser, but Cheney has no plans to end her fight against him. She is already looking past her anticipated defeat here and into a future that could include—I suspect—a primary challenge to the former president in 2024.
“It’s clear that our party is really sick right now,” Cheney told me when
Are Democrats Really Settling for Joe Biden?
The old saying is “Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line.” But that’s not quite true. Democrats wait for a dream candidate to come along—a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama—and they go out of their minds with excitement and ardor. But when they don’t find one, they kiss a frog and wait to see what happens. Then they stand at the altar wondering what the hell they’ve gotten themselves into, the church doors swing open, and Michael
20 Reader Ideas for Who Could Replace Biden
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, “Should Joe Biden run for reelection? If not, who would you choose to replace him on the Democratic ticket?” If Up for Debate correspondents were representative of the American electorate, Biden would be in trouble––the overwhelming
Why America’s COVID-19 Vaccine Rates Are Plummeting
America’s vaccination rates have fallen off a cliff, and nothing seems to help.
On June 2, President Joe Biden announced a frantic plan to reverse what already seemed to be an awful, exponential slide: At the peak of the country’s vaccine rollout in mid-April, almost 3.5 million doses were being put into arms every single day, but that number had quickly dropped by half, and then by half again.
Biden’s “month of action” came and went, and nothing really changed;