After a couple has trouble having a second child, they turn to genetic screening and in vitro fertilization: When I awoke, the embryologist relayed the excellent news: We had 20 eggs—five more than we thought possible. As soon as the April sunshine hit my face, I called my mom. Heath called his. For the first […]
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A first-person account of an Olympic career, a violent attack, and what happened next: My coach calls me up and says, ‘Listen, If you want to keep your scholarship’—by the way, he’s totally devious here —he said, ‘If you want your scholarship, all you have to do is show up for the meets. Don’t do […]
The hype and marketing behind the “fastest man in the world”: It’s no surprise that every sports meeting in which he participates is organized around him. When he ran in Ostrava in the spring, there were posters featuring Bolt all over the Czech city, the stadium was sold out weeks ahead and there were young […]
A sitcom writer recalls a memorable meeting with Al Franken in the spring of 1998: After a few moments the telephone rang at the host’s station, which sat in the lobby, a few feet outside the dining room entrance, and about 20 feet from where I was sitting. The host answered the call, listened for […]
[Not single-page] On the lives of three gay men who live as a “throuple”: It is important, perhaps, that each pair within the throuple has a private bond: Jason and Adrian have their history, Jason and Benny work together, and Benny and Adrian are close in age. Benny tells me there is zero jealousy among […]
Alfred Hitchcock made Tippi Hedren into a star—and then sabotaged her career when she rejected his advances: It started at the end of The Birds. To depict the notorious final sequence, when Melanie is attacked by dozens of birds on her own in an upstairs bedroom, Hedren was reassured that mechanical birds would be used. […]
A look at the rights of same-sex parents after a mother abducts her daughter and heads to Nicaragua after a civil union dissolves: Isabella’s tumultuous life has embodied some of America’s bitterest culture wars — a choice, as Ms. Miller said in a courtroom plea, shortly before their desperate flight, ‘between two diametrically opposed worldviews […]
A memoir of “growing up black, on parole, in Mississippi”: I enroll at Jackson State University in the Spring semester, where my mother teaches Political Science. Even though, I’m not really living at home, everyday Mama and I fight over my job at Cutco and her staying with her boyfriend and her not letting me […]
For centuries, humans who were infected with the rabies virus had a fatality rate of 100 percent. A new treatment is providing hope, but its effectiveness is being called into question: Not long ago, the medical response to this grim situation would have been little more than ‘comfort care’: administration of sedatives and painkillers to […]
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, The Rumpus, Financial Times, Newsweek, fiction from Boston Review, plus a guest pick from Brian Kahn.
