When the world is at war, and you’ve endured night after night of fires and bombs going off all around you, how do you make sense of your own survival? For the unnamed narrator of R. P. Lister’s short story “My Grandfather’s Ghost”—published in The Atlantic in 1960—the solution is to transform the experience into a sort of tall tale, playing up the comedic moments over the real fear, long after the danger has passed.
When Marion Crawford, the nanny for then-Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, published a gentle, ghostwritten memoir in the 1950s about her life with the royals, it was an instant sensation. The book, “novelistic and carefully plotted,” as my colleague Caitlin Flanagan noted in 2006, cataloged all the kinds of details that might captivate an outsider: “of dress and of food and of housekeeping on the grandest level imaginable,” she wrote.
For many Filipino Americans, SPAM isn’t just a beloved ingredient in a popular breakfast dish: It is a marker of Filipino identity. But after months of reporting on the canned meat and its cultural meaning, Gabrielle Berbey, an associate producer for The Experiment podcast, came to realize that SPAM’s history was far more complex than she’d originally thought. “SPAM, in my family, had this almost lore-like quality about it,” Berbey says.
“Mr. Higginson,” an unpublished, reclusive 31-year-old poet wrote to an Atlantic contributor—a man she had never met—in 1862. “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive? The mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly, and I have none to ask.” The letter, with its quaint phrases and handwriting that looked almost like bird tracks, was unsigned, and accompanied by a card nestled under a smaller envelope.
The debate over what happiness is, and how to achieve it, goes back thousands of years: As Arthur Brooks, an Atlantic contributing writer, points out, the Greek philosopher Epicurus believed that happiness involved freedom from mental disturbance and the absence of physical pain. In the Stoic school of thought, happiness could be found only in a virtuous life.
The debate over what happiness is, and how to achieve it, goes back thousands of years: As Arthur Brooks, an Atlantic contributing writer, points out, the Greek philosopher Epicurus believed that happiness involved freedom from mental disturbance and the absence of physical pain. In the Stoic school of thought, happiness could be found only in a virtuous life.
After I became a parent, I created a secret ritual: Once a year, I would take a vacation day from work, tell absolutely no one in my family about it, and go see the latest Marvel blockbuster. In the mostly empty theater, I’d forget about the long hours commuting in standstill traffic, the dark circles that had formed under my eyes after a child woke me up multiple times a night, and all the other mundane sources of suburban exhaustion.
A government of the people, by the people, and for the people: That was the idea behind the American experiment. But there has always been tension between the idea and the reality.Inspired by great works of American inquiry, The Atlantic and WNYC Studios earlier this month launched a new podcast, The Experiment: stories from an unfinished country.
Countless writers, with varying degrees of success, have reimagined the life of Jesus Christ. As my colleague Cullen Murphy wrote in a 1986 essay, “It is hard to think of any other figure who, over the years, has been claimed by so many and in so many different ways and for so many different purposes, who yet has never been identified exclusively with any single cause, and who has remained perpetually available for use.
During a period of deep grief years ago, the writer Rosie Schaap opened a copy of the collected works of William Blake. The experience of reading his poem “Auguries of Innocence,” she recalled, “lit a little votive in the small, dark chapel of loss, by whose light I started to see a way through.”Like Schaap, many people have found the words to express their loss in literature.
Newsboy selling the Chicago Defender. (Jack Delano / Library of Congress)Throughout the summer of 1916, “tired of being kicked and cursed,” tens of thousands of African Americans migrated from the South to the North in hopes of a better life—inspired in no small part by the nation’s leading Black newspaper, The Chicago Defender.The paper printed accounts of horrific murders by lynching, and demanded federal military intervention to stop the killings.