Editor’s Note: Read Karen Brown’s new short story, “Needs.” “Needs” is a new short story by Karen Brown. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Brown and Oliver Munday, the design director of the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.Oliver Munday: Your story “Needs” takes place in a disquieting domestic setting in rural 1960s America.
Editor’s Note: Read an interview with Karen Brown about her writing process. Patty’s murder happened on a Tuesday afternoon in June, overcast and cool. You needed a sweater if you were going to work in the yard. It was 1966, a small town in Windham County, Connecticut. Milkweed and moths at screens, fields of corn and goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace. There were woods behind her new house, a cape, and small animals emerging from the shadows to scamper over the clover.
I’ll never be able to look at her the same way.
Parenting advice on classroom duties, racism, and youth sports.
Effective pay cuts and brutal hospital bills may be in store for Americans refusing to get the jab.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom says his burning state needs more giant DC-10s. He’s right.
He spends his meager income on his motorcycle and cigarettes.
We’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on unnecessary takeout and groceries.
But he said the administration would remain flexible based on the data as it comes in.
Prospects for Medicare expansion are further complicated by a price tag that could exceed $350 billion over a decade and surpass the cost of other health priorities under discussion.
I feel so weird and alone.
Parenting advice on career choice, college, and homeschooling.
Central bank chief seeks to avoid market turmoil as president weighs tapping him for a second term.
Thursday’s report from the Labor Department showed that jobless claims fell to 375,000 from 387,000 the previous week.
“We’re not trying to hide this,” the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s executive director said.
Some economists have already begun to ease back on forecasts for the rest of this year.
The growth is another sign that the nation has achieved a sustained recovery from the pandemic recession.
In the news today: It’s August 31st in Afghanistan, and the United States military has officially “withdrawn” from the country, ending two decades of war. Mainstream political reports simply refuse to stop fluffing Florida’s pandemic-spreading Ron DeSantis even after the state becomes the epicenter of an outbreak now spreading throughout the South. Hurricane Ida slammed into Louisiana and Mississippi yesterday, causing widespread damage.
On Sunday, President Joe Biden traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to witness the return ceremony for the bodies of 13 U.S. service members killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan, last week. It may not be the last such memorial; there is no good way for the United States to extricate itself from a war it has lost. Each remaining ceremony will be given the sort of attention the last decade’s worth of U.S.
This tweet is spot on:
The 4 stages of COVID denial: 1. It’s a hoax. 2. Don’t be a sheep. 3. Prayers needed. 4. Visit our GoFundMe.— SP384 (@SpacePirates384) August 29, 2021
And what’s amazing is just how spot-on it is. Several subreddits over at Reddit, like the Herman Cain Award, have sprung forth to document these stories, repeated time and time again, every single day.
“What went wrong with the Pandemic in Florida?” queried a New York Times headline over the weekend.
Hmm. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis may have come to mind for any reader who has even remotely paid attention to the recent delta surge plaguing the state. But not according to the Times’ triple-bylined piece.
House committees are presumably hard at work now, trying to meet a Sept. 15 deadline for completing their parts of the budget reconciliation bill that will fund President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan, the $3.5 trillion companion bill to the $550 billion hard infrastructure deal agreed to in the Senate. The reconciliation bill will originate in the House, but passage in the Senate requires that they work closely with committees there to avoid pitfalls.
“The level of stupidity — and we had a great deal,” Trump boasted in his usual mangled syntax.
To overcome what ails you, you must surrender. That is the third directive on the famous 12-step road map to sobriety and stability. Recovering from an internal battle that has had external repercussions means deciding “to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God,” according to the Alcoholics Anonymous guidebook, from which multitudes of 12-step programs—treating multitudes of psychological conditions—are modeled.
Regulators are now left to chart a path forward despite limited, and sometimes confusing, data on vaccines’ effectiveness over time.
Annual budget deficits reflect years of policy decisions, not just the most recent spending bills.
Pennsylvania’s Steve Lynch told a crowd this weekend, “I’m going in with 20 strong men and I’m gonna give them an option — they can leave or they can be removed.
Even my therapist thinks I need to loosen up about this.
Steve Martin and Martin Short’s rapport isn’t that of a comedic partnership so much as that of a musical duo. Since their first collaboration more than 30 years ago in Three Amigos, they have developed a natural rhythm: Martin is the straight man with a wise-ass streak; Short produces over-the-top characters with wild facial contortions. Martin gets the audience to laugh with him; Short, to laugh at him. Theirs is a harmony that comedians often dream of developing but rarely achieve.
