Paul wants his baby girl to have the world, and he’s participating in the President’s 16-part fatherhood course to get there. But his girlfriend won’t return his calls, he can’t hold down a job and he lives in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Milwaukee.
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A Visit to the Outer Banks
At Vela, Eryn Loeb returns to the shores of North Carolina, juxtaposing the subtle changes to the landscape with the familiarity of her family’s routine.
Signs of Change on the Streets of Baghdad
Indeed, for a city that only last summer feared it would be overrun by jihadis, Baghdad feels uncannily lacking in trauma. Perhaps Iraqis have learned how to live with their fears, but ISIS feels more threatening in European capitals than it does in Baghdad. Too complacently, Iraqis talk about ISIS in the past tense, as […]
What Happens When Your Writing Professor Is William Zinsser
The weekly writing assignments—thousand-word limit, a safeguard for Bill’s sanity—required us to try our hands at a wide range of forms: humor, interviewing, travel, science, sports, criticism, editorials. This regimen inevitably yielded the occasional face-first failure, soon to be transmuted by pedagogical alchemy into an edifying failure. At the end of class, Bill would return […]
The Big Business of International Kidnapping
As we drive to an office in nearby Pembroke Pines, Wilson briefs me on the bourgeoning business of international kidnapping. The White House’s recent acknowledgment of the accidental killing of two al-Qaida hostages in Pakistan in January, as well as the dark news from Syria in recent months, both overshadows and underscores the fact that kidnappings are […]
Judy Blume, on the Age that Defined Her for Life
Judy Blume in The New York Times Magazine.
Cass Sunstein Remembers Thurgood Marshall
You clerked with Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. What was he like? He was very, very quick. He had a sense of the human reality of the cases, which he could size up in an instant partly because because he had been a trial lawyer. He was a repository of experience such as the human […]
How the Skater Kids From the Movie ‘Kids’ Were Cast
[Harmony] Korine, nineteen at the time, and [Larry] Clark, then over fifty, wrangled the troops from the skate clique, supplementing them with more non-actors from Washington Square Park and the club scene, and across downtown—including Chloë Sevigny, from tony Darien, Connecticut, who had been hanging out with the crew in Washington Square Park for years. They […]
The Unlikely Union of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush
One year earlier, it had been inconceivable that Reagan’s and Bush’s destinies would seamlessly merge and propel them both to the White House. In the Pennsylvania GOP primary, Bush uttered three words that almost doomed his political rise. At Carnegie Mellon University, he dismissed Reagan’s plan to cut taxes, increase defense spending and balance the […]
Obsessed With Racking Up Credit Card Reward Points
At Racked, Chavie Lieber investigates the dedicated—obsessive?—credit card users who rack up millions of points and thousands of dollars to travel first-class and score the best deals, as well as their busy, blogging mentors.
