Editors’ Picks
Highlights Page 76
I need to tell you about the Cirque of the Unclimbables. Ever since I went there, I’ve tried to describe it to friends and family, tried to explain its power and its perfection. It is, I tell people, the best natural campsite I have ever visited. It’s also among the most beautiful eyefuls of landscape […]
Indeed, for a city that only last summer feared it would be overrun by jihadis, Baghdad feels uncannily lacking in trauma. Perhaps Iraqis have learned how to live with their fears, but ISIS feels more threatening in European capitals than it does in Baghdad. Too complacently, Iraqis talk about ISIS in the past tense, as […]
The weekly writing assignments—thousand-word limit, a safeguard for Bill’s sanity—required us to try our hands at a wide range of forms: humor, interviewing, travel, science, sports, criticism, editorials. This regimen inevitably yielded the occasional face-first failure, soon to be transmuted by pedagogical alchemy into an edifying failure. At the end of class, Bill would return […]
As we drive to an office in nearby Pembroke Pines, Wilson briefs me on the bourgeoning business of international kidnapping. The White House’s recent acknowledgment of the accidental killing of two al-Qaida hostages in Pakistan in January, as well as the dark news from Syria in recent months, both overshadows and underscores the fact that kidnappings are […]
You clerked with Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. What was he like? He was very, very quick. He had a sense of the human reality of the cases, which he could size up in an instant partly because because he had been a trial lawyer. He was a repository of experience such as the human […]
[Harmony] Korine, nineteen at the time, and [Larry] Clark, then over fifty, wrangled the troops from the skate clique, supplementing them with more non-actors from Washington Square Park and the club scene, and across downtown—including Chloë Sevigny, from tony Darien, Connecticut, who had been hanging out with the crew in Washington Square Park for years. They […]
One year earlier, it had been inconceivable that Reagan’s and Bush’s destinies would seamlessly merge and propel them both to the White House. In the Pennsylvania GOP primary, Bush uttered three words that almost doomed his political rise. At Carnegie Mellon University, he dismissed Reagan’s plan to cut taxes, increase defense spending and balance the […]
There is a lesson in the past fifty years of litigation. When the fight for equal rights for women narrowed to a fight for reproductive rights, defended on the ground of privacy, it weakened. But when the fight for gay rights became a fight for same-sex marriage, asserted on the ground of equality, it got […]
Today I was so relieved to get a migraine. For the past thirty-plus years I’ve gotten migraines regularly; they were part of the whether that happened within and without. I would get a migraine after a manic jag. I would get a migraine before a blizzard. Now I rarely get them. I don’t want to […]
A reporter for the Baltimore American was there when the coffin was first re-opened, where it was inspected by a small gaggle of curious onlookers. According to him, the skeleton was “almost in perfect condition, and lying with the long bony hands reposing one upon the other,” while the skull had “some little hair…still clinging near […]
Cosmology’s hot streak has stalled. Cosmologists have looked deep into time, almost all the way back to the Big Bang itself, but they don’t know what came before it. They don’t know whether the Big Bang was the beginning, or merely one of many beginnings. Something entirely unimaginable might have preceded it. Cosmologists don’t know […]
Huckleberry seized my hand, clasping it so tight he brought back in a quick flood of feelings those years with the Widow Watson, and whispered as if he wanted only me and not his friend to hear, “You take care of yourself, Jim, and keep out of all that trouble, please, cause this world is […]
I love it here. I love girls, my three girls in particular. But I also love the hormonal girls who fill the ranks of 1D’s fans, Directioners. They are unembarrassed by their extreme passions. They are honestly mad for love or whatever chemistry the band is brewing in their bodies. The documentary film Crazy About One […]
Ice cream is Proustian. One bite can send you time-traveling decades back, to a hot summer day, when you walked barefoot on shell-dappled Gulf sands, vanilla ice cream dripping over the sides of a cone and onto your fingers. Maybe it was a reward for the first time you lost a tooth, a sweet, cold dish […]
But the Maasai of Loliondo are not alone in disputing these supposed benefits. Worldwide, 8 million square miles—a landmass almost as large as the entire African continent—have been classified as protected areas by governments and conservation groups. In turn, the locals have mostly been pushed off their lands. Though no one formally counts people displaced […]
I was brought up in Cincinnati, Ohio. My parents were very nice. The first time I wrote a poem, my mother gave me a big kiss and said, “I love you.” The whole idea of writing poetry had a lot to do with escaping, escaping from the bourgeois society of Cincinnati, Ohio, escaping from any […]
Each episode of Inside Amy Schumer usually contains a number of sketches, but last week the entire show was composed of a single extremely ambitious sketch. Bryan Moylan recently profiled Jessi Klein, the show’s head writer and co-executive producer of the show in New York Magazine. In the excerpt below, Moylan provides context for how the much-talked-about episode came together: Tuesday night’s […]
One challenge for Andreessen is whether venture itself has a skills problem. If software is truly eating the world, wouldn’t venture capital be on the menu? The AngelList platform now allows investors to fund startups online. Its co-founder Naval Ravikant said that “future companies will require more two-hundred-thousand-dollar checks and way fewer guys on Sand […]
You don’t know what it’s like to be an emergency services provider until you’ve stood in the piss-soaked bedroom of a house and watched a team of medics try to revive an old, lonely guy though 15 minutes of automated CPR. It’s a small part of the job, but unavoidable. When the call goes off […]
Kris and her children didn’t do much press for Season 10, unheard-of for this family or anyone promoting a TV show, really. Call it an educated guess to say that perhaps they didn’t want to be asked about Bruce’s transition. But not because they were shielding Bruce, whom they love. It was not because he […]
Because the area is full of Buddhists, most people stayed positive and were not shocked by the realization that death is inevitable. The earthquake was actually a great Buddhist teaching that everything is an illusion and things are never as they seem to be. Like a rope on the ground can be mistaken for a […]
Preppers are, not surprisingly, a paranoid bunch. Locating people willing to speak with me about their habits was more challenging than finding vegans at a gun range. After emailing a dozen members of Northern Illinois Preppers, a Meetup online community whose membership has grown from about 110 to more than 150 in the past six […]
The day after Madison jumped, Jim walked to the top of the parking garage. He read the phrase, She had wings on. He spoke with Madison’s friends. He compiled clues. Then he stopped. He could spend his life trying, in vain, to make his child whole again, he thought. Or he could work to keep […]
The other day I got some good news and, wanting to share it, reflexively typed “dad” into my phone. There are moments in grief when the finality sets in, and here it was: I would never be able to hear his voice again. But I’ve realized, strangely, that instead of resenting the Internet, I’m grateful […]