Tag: memory

Why do we keep what we keep — and who decides? An archivist digs and collects longreads on how objects and materials shape public memory.

Women in Sinaloa, Mexico, are searching for the remains of “disappeared” loved ones — and cooking to keep their memories of the dead alive.

One hundred years later, journalists look back on the massacre of “Black Wall Street.”

“Far from our barrios, mountains, and islands, we cook, so that we may practice swallowing our undesirable truths, acidic and blood-heavy.”

“If you have the depth, the surface can be as light as it’s possible to make it…I don’t mind that ‘Swimming Home’ is sometimes described as a ‘beach read’ — actually that’s a triumph.”

Peering into the mirror of her mother, Marcia Aldrich wonders whether she too is sentenced to dementia.

The psychology behind America’s obsession with Hallmark Christmas movies.

Steve Edwards revisits an early heartbreak to ask: “How do we find compassion for who we used to be?”

“But who gets to impose those rules and who becomes subject to them can be decisions tainted with sexism and racism and transphobia and homophobia. “

One woman reconciles with her father’s death on her family’s property.

A pastry chef reflects on taste, memory, and literature’s most famous confection.

Perfumers evoke the elegance of an imagined tennis game, not the stench of a real one.

Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about how ghosts and authors of fiction share a similar role in today’s culture.

A 1992 murder of a young boy unravels a journalist’s dark family secrets.

For Maria Browning’s mother, Alzheimer’s Disease has dimmed old torments.

Lonni Sue Johnson was a successful illustrator, when the herpes simplex virus attacked her brain; she lost almost her entire lifetime of knowledge, along with the ability to form new memories. Michael Lemonick describes how she’s invaluable to neuroscientists working to understand how we make and store memories.

Adrian Daub’s fascinating essay in the LA Review of Books on the Stephen King classic IT — now 30 years old — reveals that the real horror of IT wasn’t Pennywise the supernatural clown, but our own, entirely human ability to forget the horrors of the past.

At Oxford American, Ronni Lundy maps her past with family recipes.

Sophie McBain asks what will become of human memory at the age of smartphones, social media, and unlimited storage in the cloud.

After three decades, author Linda Spaldin tries to help exonerate a woman on whose trial she had been a juror.

The celebrated memoirist uses a little deception and a judicious ‘fuck’ to make a point.

Ice cream is Proustian. One bite can send you time-traveling decades back, to a hot summer day, when you walked barefoot on shell-dappled Gulf sands, vanilla ice cream dripping over the sides of a cone and onto your fingers. Maybe it was a reward for the first time you lost a tooth, a sweet, cold dish […]

Sigmund Freud called dreams ”the royal road to the unconscious” and theorized that they reflected highly individual unconscious wishes. His student Carl Jung, who later broke with him, thought the recurring use of enduring symbols in dreams, like mazes, mirrors and snakes, reflected something more collective and universal. *** Many people interviewed said they dreamed […]

Memory is your greatest ally and your primary source material, because memory is your body as it was in the world and the world as it was and will be; memory is the people you have loved or wanted to love in the world, and what are we if not bodies filled with reminiscences about […]

I had come to his house, in this sunny spot between Ben Gurion Airport and the Mediterranean coast, for an unlikely reason: not long ago, after decades of unwavering silence, Sigmund Schiller spoke about his Holocaust experience. “People talk about ‘Sophie’s Choice’ as if it were a rare event,” he said. “It wasn’t. Everybody had […]