Tag: America

“Yet money was a lie—pieces of paper and metal suggesting prices for goods, services, labor, and human beings themselves in a way that often had more to do with profit than with true value.”

Despite its fear-mongering tactics to sell guns, the future of the NRA — and gun manufacturers in general — is in question.

When you bury a body, it stays in the cemetery. Cremation presents a whole new issue: where to store the deceased.

What does it mean for the Midwest to think of itself as a featureless land full of average Americans?

Am I proud of my lawn? Absolutely not. I am completely ashamed of it. I have a terminal case of lawn guilt.

Is the rise of HGTV celebrities a window into, or a reprieve from, a “culturally divided America”?

“Begin by writing about anything else,” says Porochista Khakpour, until she becomes conflicted about writing about being Iranian-American.

Contemplating history, family, and today’s America, Dane A. Wisher tells the story of spreading his father’s ashes on the battlefield at Gettysburg National Park and coming to terms with his life and death.

Sarah Menkedick suggests that America has everything to lose if it can’t reject the resurgence of nativist (white) populism to embrace this generation of smart, ambitious, second-generation Mexican Americans.

What we can learn from one refugee family’s journey from Iraq to Colorado.

“Who am I and how did I get here? The way I was doing it was through books.”

This is me, just as I was about to immigrate to the United States. Before 1965, it was legal to ban immigrants based on nationality, and Asians in particular were targeted. It was actually referred to as an Asiatic Barred Zone. Then, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, banning discrimination on the […]

Lauren Alwan narrates her family’s migration from Syria to California to explore how people’s evolving identities help gain them a foothold in America and create unintentional tensions across generations.

Billy Barr moved into a remote part of the Rocky Mountains in search of solitude over 40 years ago. To avoid boredom, he documented snow levels, animal sightings, and the date flowers first bloomed. “…collectively his work has become some of the most significant indication that climate change is rearranging mountain ecosystems more dramatically and quickly than anyone imagined.”

If there are two things Americans are good at, it’s mishandling our finances, and using Twitter to judge those who are in worse shape than us. Thus we have the perfect Atlantic cover story this week—a refreshingly honest and desparingly relatable personal essay by writer Neal Gabler about his many financial mistakes, as well as […]

In The New York Times Magazine Susan Burton profiles “national interviewer” Terry Gross, who celebrates 40 years behind the microphone as the host of NPR’s Fresh Air.

As I described in the Making of Ferguson, the federal government maintained a policy of segregation in public housing nationwide for decades. This was as true in northeastern cities like New York as it was in border cities like Baltimore and St. Louis. In 1994, civil rights groups sued the Department of Housing and Urban […]

The legendary Ellen Willis (first-ever pop critic for The New Yorker, feminist role model extraordinaire, etc.) passed away in 2006, but her work is enjoying a second renaissance thanks to The Essential Ellen Willis, a 2014 collection edited by her daughter Nona Willis Aronowitz. Earlier this month the National Book Critics Circle posthumously awarded Willis their top prize in criticism […]

Peter deemed my proposed plan — driving 12 hours back east to Maine to glimpse my dreamed-of American landscape — completely unrealistic, and rightly so, as I realized with a sudden sense of shame. At the same time, I had the feeling that he really wanted me to see Detroit. And why not? It was […]

On “being a woman in a place where women could be in demand as much as the oil”

“I’ve been teaching high school social studies for 18 years, so it’s hard for me to be shocked by the behavior of students. But every once in a while, someone manages to surprise me. One day last year I looked up at the auditorium stage to hear one of my students deliver a speech that […]