Two days after the Japanese tsunami, after the waves had left their destruction, as rescue workers searched the ruins, news came of an almost surreal survival: Miles out at sea, a man was found, alone, riding on nothing but the roof of his house. “And that’s when you know you’ve been caught out, that you’ve […]
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LOGAN: So it’s not necessarily the idea that media coverage of this event will make anyone that has any power change anything, but that it will inspire us to change stuff ourselves? SAM: I mean, partially. Anything like this always has 500 million different goals and other things that it’s going to accomplish without even […]
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John Howard Griffin had embarked on a journey unlike any other. Many black authors had written about the hardship of living in the Jim Crow South. A few white writers had argued for integration. But Griffin, a novelist of extraordinary empathy rooted in his Catholic faith, had devised a daring experiment. To comprehend the lives […]
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I fucked up with Aunt Mimi, the first time I met her. I was greeted, I was shown the bird feeder where the birds came to keep her company, I was shown around the place. And then I said, “wow, I’ve never been in a trailer before.” I meant it nicely. I liked trailers; I […]
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Longtime Republicans have been satisfied enough to have their candidates run down activist government as a campaign tactic, even as they themselves retained a more nuanced view of the federal government’s role (which is why a Republican Congress, working with a Republican president, managed to pass a Medicaidprescription-drug bill in 2003). But when you talk […]
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The late Marjorie Williams on her cancer battle: We have all indulged this curiosity, haven’t we? What would I do if I suddenly found I had a short time to live … What would it be like to sit in a doctor’s office and hear a death sentence? I had entertained those fantasies just like […]
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When she came back to her desk, half an hour later, she couldn’t log into Gmail at all. By that time, I was up and looking at e‑mail, and we both quickly saw what the real problem was. In my inbox I found a message purporting to be from her, followed by a quickly proliferating […]
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At the end of his remarks, Obama turned to Warren and kissed her on the cheek. She smiled gamely, though if there are kisses a woman can do without, this was one of them. A Judas kiss, some would say. But if so, the betrayal was not just of Elizabeth Warren. In his remarks, Obama […]
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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 […]
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Here is what we know about the death of Sammy Wanjiru: It happened late in the early hours of May 15 at his posh home in Nyahururu, a Rift Valley town about 100 miles from Nairobi. Sammy fell from a second-story balcony — a drop of about 16 feet — and landed on the pavement […]