After the 2011 disaster, which killed his grandmother and laid waste to his ancestral home, an American journeys to Japan to search for what the tsunami left in its wake.
Story
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Pearls
Born from irritation and intrusion, luminous and complex, surprisingly durable: pearls are rich with symbolism and saturated with pain.
Remembering Mark Hollis of Talk Talk
The singer of “It’s My Life” left us a brilliant solo album, then chose to be a family man.
How To Hide An Empire
Daniel Immerwahr says studying the history of the Greater United States opens our eyes to how “racism has shaped the actual country itself. The legal borders of the country, but also the borders of the heart.”
The Teen Idol Vanishes
Luke Perry’s untimely death reminds us that Dylan McKay was one of the last icons of adolescence.
If Only There Were Someone Who Would Listen
Dror Burstein’s “Muck” sets a difficult course through themes of power, pita bread, and invasion, mixing up the biblical past and the just-as-lamentable present.
Shelved: Brian Wilson’s Adult/Child
Music from the time after the good vibrations ended.
Helen Oyeyemi on ‘Gingerbread,’ Fairy Tales, and What Self-Branding Is Doing to Childhood
“I was thinking a lot about childhood as this special status, an almost endangered status … that is eroded the more that we start thinking of ourselves as these units of value and worrying about what we’re worth.”
Where the Trouble Started
Decades after a childhood sexual assault, Saidee Sonnenberg tries to make sense of what happened.
The Problem With Nostalgia
Michael Musto argues that wearing rose-colored glasses always leads to an unfair distortion — looking back on the best of the past while comparing it to the worst of the present.
