Tag: personal history
The Detroit Pistons Were My Father’s Second Family
One night, when I was a sophomore in college, my father came to see me play basketball in Philadelphia. It was 1984. I was on the team at St. Joseph’s, and he was the general manager of the Detroit Pistons. He and my mother were long divorced, and I saw him only two or three times a year, when he came to town for a Pistons game or to scout a player. I had lost my starting spot at the
The Friendship Challenge | The New Yorker
“I don’t really know how competitive I am by nature, because if you can’t consciously acknowledge something you can’t see where you are in relation to it.” I wrote this sentence to an acquaintance with whom I was having a long e-mail exchange about Elena Ferrante’s novel “My Brilliant Friend,” which follows the early phase of an intense, lifelong, and highly competitive relationship between two Neapolitan girls in postwar Italy. Like a lot of things one dashes off in e-mails,
The Fall of My Teen-Age Self, by Zadie Smith
I’ve been thinking about teen-agers. I have one myself now, and of course I was one once—in a different world at a different moment—and can remember the feeling. Everything was extremity. It still is. Four waves of feminism, digital connectivity, a global wellness movement, the injunction to “be kind,” the commonplace “it gets better”—none of it seems to have put much of a dent in teen-age misery, especially not of the kind that concerns me. Watching girls gather outside the
Musk’s fascination with the letter ‘X’
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Elon Musk has a long history with the letter X. What does it signify?
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Solving for X
A few months ago, at the start of an unintended streak of reading novels with characters
The Truth About My Father
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The kingdom of Dahomey, at its peak, dominated the sliver of West Africa known as the Slave Coast. From around 1724 until the eighteen-sixties, when the last slave ships heading for the Americas set out from these shores, the kings of Dahomey used terror and brutality to supply human chattel to the triangular trade. During months-long campaigns, their army, which featured a corps of women warriors who
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh on ‘A Substitution,’ a Short Story
“A Substitution” is a new story by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Sayrafiezadeh and Oliver Munday, the design director of the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Oliver Munday: In your story “A Substitution,” a playwright struggles to figure out his next project. You’ve written other fiction concerned with theater, and you’re a playwright yourself. What about the relationship between playwriting and fiction writing do you
10 Books That Taught Me Why Debate Matters
Less than a year after I read my first book in English, The Magic Finger by Roald Dahl, I joined my elementary school’s debate team. I was a fifth grader and a recent immigrant to Australia, and the two milestones were closely related. As the language and culture of my new home became legible to me, I began to desire more than comprehension. I wanted to talk back and, in turn, be heard.
I soon learned that reading served an
Fintan O’Toole’s Passionate, Angry, Slyly Humorous History of Ireland
Early in the pages of We Don’t Know Ourselves, Fintan O’Toole’s masterful “personal history” of modern Ireland, I came upon a moment in O’Toole’s life that intersected unexpectedly with my own. The date was Tuesday, March 8, 1966. In a Dublin bedroom in the chill dark of early morning—1:31 a.m. exactly—O’Toole’s mother, given to premonitions, awoke and exclaimed, “God, what was that?” Then came the sound of a distant explosion.
I, too, heard the explosion. My American family
The Way She Closed the Door
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It was 2011, and I’d been alone in Paris for four or five days, walking around, going to museums, sitting in parks, watching people, just waiting, really, for my boyfriend to meet me there. I was staying at a cheap one-star hotel called the Tiquetonne, which was on Rue Tiquetonne, by the Étienne Marcel Métro station. One afternoon, I decided to see a movie at one of
Tabula Rasa: Volume Three, by John McPhee
“You would screw it up!” he said, and he started off, aiming upriver at forty-five degrees. The river was only two or three hundred feet wide, but the crossing proceeded slowly, because we were moving southwest and northwest at the same time. My heart was beating between my teeth. The left bank was almost uniformly high and steep there, but Len hit a spot where a gully had worn down. The next day, we crossed the river twice, just to