Search Results for: Love

The Feels of Love

Longreads Pick

Yes, kids are cruel and adolescence is challenging, but when we equate sexual assault with the standard teasing of adolescence, we normalize rape culture, and that is not normal. Madden’s story of rape and redemption is still too familiar to the many young woman who men routinely victimize. If America is going to progress as a culture, we must talk openly about our sexual traumas, the victimizers who commit these assaults, and remove the victims’ shame. In this essay, Madden does that her for herself, and for us of all, masterfully.

Published: Dec 12, 2016
Length: 24 minutes (6,063 words)

She Loved Him, and He Died in the Holocaust. Now Her Son Is Bringing His Music Back to Life

Longreads Pick

A son spends years trying to learn what happened to a talented young musician whom his mother loved and never forgotten, and recovers some of the music he left behind.

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Jan 5, 2017
Length: 17 minutes (4,398 words)

Basking in Reciprocated Love: Can Molly Save a Marriage?

Mark Ordonez CC-BY SA 2.0

What we did was talk. For six hours, we talked about our feelings for each other, why we love each other, how we love each other. We talked about what we felt when we first met, how our emotional connection grew and deepened, how we might deepen it still. The best way I can describe it is that we were transported emotionally back to our relationship’s early and most exciting days, to the period of our most intense infatuation, but with all the compassion and depth of familiarity of a decade of companionship. We saw each other clearly, loved each other profoundly, and basked in this reciprocated love.

The feeling lasted not for hours or for days, but for months. Actually, the truth is, it lasted forever. We’ve done the drug since, every couple of years, when we feel we need to recharge the batteries of our relationship. Though the experience has never again been quite so intense, it has been a reliable method of connection, of clearing away the detritus of the everyday to get to the heart of the matter. And the heart is love.

At Lenny, read an excerpt of Ayelet Waldman’s memoir of LSD microdosing, A Really Good Day.

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Geek Love: On Nerditry as Salvation in ’70s Small-Town Canada

Longreads Pick

At The Walrus, Kevin Patterson writes on how his fraternal twin brother embraced nerditry to navigate the homophobia of small-town Canada in the ’70s.

Source: The Walrus
Published: Nov 30, 2016
Length: 12 minutes (3,080 words)

Geek Love: On Nerditry as Salvation in ’70s Small-Town Canada

Photo by Benjamin Esham CC-BY SA 2.0

When Tom became sick in the winter of 2003, we revisited the subject of quantum entanglement. It was early winter, and we sat in his small, comically messy apartment in Toronto, surrounded by jagged lightning-bolt towers of piled books. Dead insects and tendrils of cobweb and cat dander were heaped up in giant fuzzy swaths along the baseboards; the carpet erupted with geysers of dust at the slightest touch. The windows admitted only a diffused glow even at midday.

He wanted me to understand the concept of entanglement — how, once two subatomic particles have been part of the same nucleus, even if they’re subsequently separated by an enormous distance, they remain in a kind of sympathy with each another. A change in one produces an instantaneous change in the other. The notion captures the attention of quantum-physics enthusiasts because it suggests a kind of indivisibility of matter. It also seems to contradict Einstein’s insistence that nothing, not even information, can travel faster than the speed of light.

At The Walrus, Kevin Patterson writes on how his fraternal twin brother embraced nerditry to navigate the homophobia of small-town Canada in the ’70s.

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