What do you do when all productivity hacks, parenting tips, and writing tricks lead to the same outcome — a total, pandemic-induced inability to focus?
Personal Essay
Posted inEditor's Pick
Beneath the Black Rocks
“The same unknown that makes me nurse the thought of my mother’s death, makes me think of the loneliness of everyone who died of the virus. Their loved ones will carry the same wound I carry in my heart. For decades, for the rest of their lives they will be imagining the last moments of […]
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Story
Phone Call in The Age of Coronavirus
Marcia Aldrich on why cell phones, so thin and light and little, don’t seem fitting for momentous calls, for life and death communications, or for last words.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The New York You Once Knew Is Gone. The One You Loved Remains.
In this pandemic-inspired variation on the Goodbye to All That essay, Glynnis MacNicol writes about what it’s like to have stayed in the current ghost town version of New York City when so many other New Yorkers have departed for greener pastures, and considers the city’s, and city-dwellers’ history of resilience through hard times.
Posted inEditor's Pick
I’ve Fled New York with My Wife, Kids and Dog – Just as my Ancestors Fled the 1918 Pandemic
After covering the plights of refugees around the world as a journalist, Bryan Mealer finds himself a refugee, fleeing New York City for his childhood home of west Texas — where his great-grandmother and her oldest daughter died in the influenza epidemic of 1918.
Posted inEditor's Pick
All That Is Lost and All That Is Remembered
On the 30th anniversary of her Navy captain father’s political execution, Naz Riahi recalls her love for him, and reveals a persistent grief that is always with her.
Posted inEditor's Pick
When Your Barber Assumes You’re a Racist Too
At 37, Isaac Fitzgerald reviews his relationship to his hair and his appearance throughout his life. But more than that, he considers the ways in which he’s grown past staying silent when racist barbers —and others who took his Gavin McInnes-inspired cut to mean he was a white supremacist, too — ran their mouths, uncensored, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Storykiller and His Sentence: Rebecca Solnit on Harvey Weinstein
Rebecca Solnit considers Harvey Weinstein’s 23-year prison sentence through the lens of storytelling, and who gets to do it now that at least two men who were “in charge of stories” — Weinstein and Woody Allen — have in the past week lost so much of their power, and women are now finding their voices.
Posted inBlog Post, Longreads News, Quote Posts
With Your Support, We Can Continue to Be a Space for First-Person Storytelling
Personal narratives are powerful. Help us support writers and artists who have these stories to tell.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
A Survey of My Right Arm
Why couldn’t this ailing appendage get over itself? Diagnosing a mysterious malady.