michelleweber

“Barre feels like exercise the way Sweetgreen feels like eating: both might better be categorized as mechanisms that help you adapt to arbitrary, prolonged agony.”

Come to Europe for the Grand Tour! See the Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower, the Sagrada Familia, and the newest addition, a colony of wild boars holding up traffic.

“As darkness fell, Nhek and Soem, clutching the tree trunks as flotation devices, eased into the flow of the Mekong, submerging their sweaty bodies into the dark torrent. Water soaked their clothes and splashed their faces as the current carried them south toward freedom.”

Does a building become less authentic if it’s restored to its original state after being damaged? Does Notre-Dame?

Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses, a 1985 collection of testimonials from then-Soviets who were children during the Second World War, has been translated into English and excerpted at the Paris Review. “It became connected like that in my memory, that war is when there’s no papa.”

“But twenty-three years after Genesis, Alter has completed his work: a finished Hebrew Bible, three volumes lovingly footnoted; an altogether worthier object of contemplation than some fantasy series, or Lyndon Johnson. And I, who am but dust and ashes, review it.”

Does helping poor urban families access fresh vegetables reduce health disparities? Probably not, but universal health care sure would.

““This heffer is trippin… She was clean and smellin good, ain’t no way that shit happened like she said.” Defense witness trying to discredit a rape victim? No, a detective’s notes on a 14-year-old sexual assault victim.

Capitalism is one strange beast.

You buy cage-free eggs, free-range beef, hormone-free milk. What about produce that was grown without injuring a migrant or depriving a kid of a normal childhood?