The Man with the Lapdog

[Fiction] Almost every morning, as Lyle was getting ready to take the dog for a walk along the bay, his wife would ask, “Are ye down the prom, then?” They had met and married thirty years before, in Vermont, when she was Mary Curtin and he’d thought her a happy combination of exotic and domestic. At sixty, after their life in the States, she still called herself a Galway girl; at sixty-seven, after two years of retirement in Galway, Lyle still considered a prom a high school dance, not two miles of sidewalk beside the water.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Feb 1, 1999
Length: 21 minutes (5,492 words)

Our Man in Kandahar

While beatings in police custody have been common in Kandahar for as long as there have been police, a number of Afghan and international officials familiar with the situation there told me that Raziq has brought with him a new level of brutality. Since his arrival, Raziq has launched a wave of arrests across the city in coordination with the government intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security. One human-rights official who has conducted prison visits in Kandahar told me that the number of prisoners is up more than 50 percent since Raziq’s arrival.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Sep 27, 2011
Length: 22 minutes (5,537 words)

God’s Goodness

(Fiction) First, last, and foremost, Ling Tan thought of herself as a Christian. So when Mrs. Sheriday said, “Tell me a little something about yourself,” Ling didn’t even draw breath before responding, “I am good Christian.” And so saying, she sat up even straighter in her chair, like a star pupil providing the correct answer to a teacher. But the employment counselor didn’t smile. She didn’t even look up. She went on regarding the papers on her desk and said, “Well, yes, I’m sure that you are. But what I meant was, tell me more about your work experience. I see that you were enrolled in a practical-nursing program at Long Beach Memorial Hospital but you didn’t complete the course of study.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Mar 1, 2002
Length: 22 minutes (5,714 words)

The Hunter’s Wife

(Fiction) It was the hunter’s first time outside Montana. He woke, stricken still with the hours-old vision of ascending through rose-lit cumulus, of houses and barns like specks deep in the snowed-in valleys, all the scrolling country below looking December—brown and black hills streaked with snow, flashes of iced-over lakes, the long braids of a river gleaming at the bottom of a canyon. Above the wing the sky had deepened to a blue so pure he knew it would bring tears to his eyes if he looked long enough.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 1, 2001
Length: 37 minutes (9,293 words)

The Most Racist Thing That Ever Happened to Me

I asked my 105 interviewees, What is the most racist thing that has ever happened to you? The response I received most often was indicative of modern racism: The answer is unknowable. “I imagine it’d be a thing I don’t even know ever happened,” Aaron McGruder said. “It would be that opportunity that never manifested and I’ll never know that it was even possible.” A decision is made in a back room or a high-level office, perhaps by someone you’ll never see, about whether or not you get a job or a home loan or admission to a school. Or perhaps you’ll never be allowed to know that a home in a certain area or a job is available. This is how modern institutional racism functions and it can weigh on and shape a black person differently than the more overt, simplistic racism of the past did.

Author: Touré
Source: The Atlantic
Published: Sep 14, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,258 words)

The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense Belief Kills

Something was killing Hmong men in their sleep, and no one could figure out what it was. There was no obvious cause of death. None of them had been sick, physically. The men weren’t clustered all that tightly, geographically speaking. They were united by dislocation from Laos and a shared culture, but little else. Even House would have been stumped. Doctors gave the problem a name, the kind that reeks of defeat, a dragon label on the edge of the known medical world: Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome. SUNDS. It didn’t do much in terms of diagnosis or treatment, but it was easier to track the periodic conferences dedicated to understanding the problem.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Sep 14, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,078 words)

L’amour, CA

(Fiction) My sister, Isa, speaks English and Tagalog. But one word, she could say in many languages: koigokoro, beminnen, mahal, amor. “It’s the most important thing,” she used to say, “the only thing. L-O-V-E. Love.” So when we learned that we would be moving to California, to a city called L’amour, she called it home, the place where we were always meant to be. I believed her. This was January of 1974, our final days in the Philippines. Isa was sixteen, I was eight, and we were from San Quinez, a small southern village surrounded by sugar-cane fields and cassava groves, with a single paved road winding through. Every house was like ours, made of bamboo and nipa and built on stilts, and every neighbor was somehow family. No one was a stranger where we lived.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Sep 14, 2011
Length: 30 minutes (7,740 words)

The Shame of College Sports

For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Sep 13, 2011
Length: 57 minutes (14,417 words)

Wounded in Iraq: A Marine’s Story

I am positive that every other wounded warrior’s caregiver has had to make personal sacrifices to take care of those who need them most. The situation of an Army Specialist (E-4), who lost a leg in Afghanistan, serves as a good example. His recovery at Walter Reed was expected to take 18 months, so his young wife moved from Idaho with their baby. That meant forfeiting her job, her health care, and any in-person contact with family. The wife and baby lived in a small room with the bare necessities for six months until the Specialist was no longer an in-patient. The three of them moved to a (somewhat) bigger facility for 18 months while he was an out-patient. After feeling out of control and disrespected by the staff many times over, she could not take her family home soon enough. As another caregiver put it to me, she was her husband’s chauffeur, cook, case manager, therapist, personal shopper, nurse, legal aide, job coach — and on really good days, his wife.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Sep 6, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,529 words)

Someone I’d Like You to Meet

(Fiction) Veblen MacKay-Sim was engaged to Paul Vreeland, a postgraduate research fellow in neuroscience, and the time had finally come to bring him home to meet the family. A classic rite of passage, except that the irregularities of her mother’s personality held a certain terror for her. She was often reminded that humans were flawed, no families faultless, and no matter what happened that day, it was all part of the rich tapestry of life. Her mother would surely rise to such an occasion. And Paul, who routinely examined brain-injured cadavers, could surely endure it too.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Aug 14, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,690 words)