A brother lost, a son born, and the strange arithmetic of love.
Personal Essay
Posted inEditor's Pick
Phantom Pains
“These losses—my limb, my students’ hopes, Thoreau’s mammals, the wings falling from our skies—they are not all that distinct from one another. They can’t be, because all of us, all of the material world, we are one and the same thing.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
To the Old Man in the Cowboy Costume
“All the parts about me that I hate the most, I got from you. All the parts I love the most, too.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Living in Tracy Chapman’s House
“Fresh out of college, we were a bunch of misfits, in a chaotic, run-down communal home, desperately trying to figure out who we were meant to be.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Persimmon Tree at Stand Five
“My Japanese-American grandma spent her final years on a hunting preserve in Alabama. She taught me how to be comfortable as an anomaly in the South.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Car Talk
“I’d kept up my license, but now I needed a car. What kind of car? As in the usual run of things—a congenital tilt towards irreality, an obdurate wistfulness—I pined for something that did not exist: the car at the end of the mind.”
Posted inFeature
Beloved Bother
A typo in my great-uncle’s obituary held the key to understanding him.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Mal à la Tête
“My neurologist says anything can be a headache. Or rather, a headache can cause anything, since all sensations start in the brain.”