Trading Stories: Notes from a Literary Apprenticeship
For much of my life, I wanted to be other people; here was the central dilemma, the reason, I believe, for my creative stasis. I was always falling short of people’s expectations: my immigrant parents’, my Indian relatives’, my American peers’, above all my own. The writer in me wanted to edit myself. If only there was a little more this, a little less that, depending on the circumstances: then the asterisk that accompanied me would be removed. My upbringing, an amalgam of two hemispheres, was heterodox and complicated; I wanted it to be conventional and contained.
I Was There When Acid House Hit London and This Is How It Felt
One day, I bought a small stack of acid house records from a stand in Camden Market. I listened to them, read about the movement in the music papers, and got a rough picture. If there were some way of returning to Harare and reconvening the crew (at the time, I was the only one who had left the country to attend college), I would have explained that acid house was indeed house music, but in the condition of a virus. It actually came from Chicago, from cats like Phuture and the great Armando, but it had taken on a life of its own in the streets of London.
Women in China: A Social Revolution
When I arrived in the university town of Nanjing on my first visit to China in 2007, I spent days on end watching and talking to students, marvelling above all at the confidence, competence and poise of the girls. I was working on a book about Pearl Buck, who grew up in the Chinese countryside before teaching on the Nanjing campus in the 1920s, so I knew a lot about the world of these girls’ grandmothers: a slow-moving world where traffic went by river steamer or canal boat, and the only wheeled vehicle most people ever saw was a wheelbarrow. Girls were shut up at home on reaching puberty with no further access to the outside world, and no voice in their own or their family’s affairs.
On My Mother, and Dr. Kevorkian
My mother died twenty years ago this month—on June 19, 1991. At least, that’s the date I observe. It was on the 19th that she gathered the family together and took a lethal dose of Seconal to end her life after a long struggle with ovarian cancer. To allow her to die as she wished, we had to lie, and cheat, and break the law, and that behavior was antithetical to the way we had and have lived. It was bizarre that being a party to my mother’s getting the Seconal would be like helping a junkie get heroin, when all she wanted was to die at home, with us beside her, under what she held to be optimal conditions.
Destroying Detroit (in Order to Save It)
On this June morning, with the heat and humidity rising, residents emerge from their homes one by one: mostly women, mostly older, mostly taking care of their mothers and grandkids. They’ve been calling the city, they say, for years without response and feel as abandoned as the houses that surround them—the foreclosed, devitalized structures that require immediate wrecking. They have questions for Lorenzo. Comprehensive to-do lists for this man who has powerful machines and, so, they figure, actual power. They ask when the dead trees are coming down. They want to know when the drug dealing will stop. Does Lorenzo’s boss have a job for their sons, by any chance? Or for their nephews? Or what about for themselves?
How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code
I wanted in. So I did what you might expect an over-enthusiastic suburban nitwit to do, and asked my mom to drive me to the mall to buy Ivor Horton’s 1,181-page, 4.6-pound Beginning Visual C++ 6. I imagined myself working montage-like through the book, smoothly accruing expertise one chapter at a time. What happened instead is that I burned out after a week.
The Epidemic of Mental Illness
What is going on here? Is the prevalence of mental illness really that high and still climbing? Particularly if these disorders are biologically determined and not a result of environmental influences, is it plausible to suppose that such an increase is real? Or are we learning to recognize and diagnose mental disorders that were always there? On the other hand, are we simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one? And what about the drugs that are now the mainstay of treatment? Do they work? If they do, shouldn’t we expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising?
The Trial of the Suicide Doctor
(1991) Did Dr. Jack Kevorkian do the right thing when he helped an Alzheimer’s patient end her own life with his homemade “Mercy Machine”? As the issue of medically assisted suicide hits the headlines again, he vows to continue his crusade for “planned death” for the terminally ill. But is he Socrates or Mengele? The author investigates the career of a medical heretic.
The Mystery Guest Has Arrived
If you ask Erik Spoelstra how he rose up through the ranks from The Dungeon all the way to the Miami Heat head coaching position, he’ll offer you a self-deprecating variation of Woody Allen’s old adage that 80 percent of life is just showing up. His willingness to stay late and do the work nobody else wants to do is enough to keep him around. As people come and go from the organization, he invariably moves up because Pat Riley and the organization prefer to tap someone in-house over bringing in someone from the outside.
God Bless You, Mr. Greybeard
The iconic anthropologist and activist on what chimpanzees tell us about our ultimate destiny, the sixth great extinction, and reasons for hope. An excerpt from Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues from The New Press. “Well, first of all, he was the very first chimpanzee who let me come close, who lost his fear. And he helped introduce me to this magic world out in the forest. The other chimps would see David sitting there, not running away, and so gradually they’d think, ‘Well, she can’t be so scary, after all.’ He had a wonderful, gentle disposition. He was really loved by other chimps; the low-ranking ones would go to him for protection. He wasn’t terribly high-ranking, but he had a very high-ranking friend, Goliath. And there was just something about him. He had a very handsome face, his eyes wide apart, and this beautiful gray beard.”
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