In Joy Williams’s 1988 novel, Breaking and Entering, a drifter named Willie finds himself, inexplicably and as if against his will, saving people. A young man is struck by lightning and Willie gives him CPR. An elderly couple drives off a boat ramp and Willie pulls the door open. Willie isn’t actively looking to help anyone; he just kind of falls into it. As Williams writes, “He had never had a penchant for the saving.
When the doctor sliced open the body,
soft still to the touch, apprenticed
to expression, when the fleshwas pulled back between index and thumb
revealing the armor of breastbone,
imagine he who saw the heart froth,the heart bubble over like soda water.
Then think of grief leaving the body,
flitting like salt to the nearby sink,and joy like atoms joining in air
toward another living promise.
Just long enough for her to try it.
The city has not released NYCHA-specific Covid data in more than a year.
Parenting advice on gender, coming out, and new motherhood.
In The Card Counter, William Tell (played by Oscar Isaac) keeps his emotions under strict control. He’s a poker player, and the slightest facial expression could give away his hand. William’s life is equally circumscribed: He travels around the country from casino to casino, subsisting on low-stakes games and doing nothing to draw attention to himself.
The Pentagon is not the most inviting place for first-time visitors, and it was no different for Chris Lynch. When he rode the escalator out of the Pentagon metro station, Lynch was greeted by guard dogs and security personnel wearing body armor and toting machine guns. He lost cell service upon entering the building and was forced to run through more than a half mile of hallways to make his meeting in the office of the secretary of defense.
The president’s critics—and the media pretending they have a point—are being ridiculous.
9/11 marked the final gasp of the ministerial anchorman.
My granddaughters are no longer speaking to each other.
Doing a solid for voters who won’t notice you helped them for years.
Conservative media is awash in pandemic conspiracy. But it’s mostly local talk radio hosts who are actually getting sick and dying.
Two of the analyses suggest that as the Delta variant spread this summer, the shots became less effective at keeping people 75 and older out of the hospital.
As the left tries to stay united, its different factions are at odds over a critical word: “women.
The agency has deferred its decision on the largest vaping companies, including Juul.
The six-part plan includes an order that all executive branch federal workers get vaccinated.
The plan — developed by DHHS — largely backs Democrats’ ongoing efforts to lower drug prices.
Tomorrow marks 20 years since the attacks on September 11, 2001. The adrenaline shock of that morning has long worn off, leaving behind only the horror, the loss, and two decades’ worth of grief.
It’s tempting to use this anniversary to consider the attacks as a greater political or cultural moment, to analyze where the country went right or wrong in its response. And doing so is important.
Jonathan Neman really seemed to think he was onto something. Last week, in a lengthy, now-deleted post on LinkedIn, the CEO and co-founder of the upscale salad chain Sweetgreen expounded on a topic that might seem a little far afield for a restaurant executive: how to end the pandemic. “No vaccine nor mask will save us,” he wrote. (The vaccines, it should be noted, have so far proved to be near-miraculously effective at saving those who get them.
Parenting advice on a sudden breakup, a hostile friend, and an unexpected gender transition.
Things are different when you’re hot.
“You had 11-, 12-year-olds being like, ‘Aymann, what is jihad? And why does your family want to kill my family?
Biden laid blame for the sluggish growth of U.S. jobs on the “impact of the Delta variant” of the coronavirus.
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.
On the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we revisit a conversation we hosted in January of 2002 between Masuda Sultan, an Afghan American woman who lost 19 members of her family in a U.S. air raid, and Rita Lasar, a New Yorker who lost her brother in the World Trade Center attack. Lasar would become an active member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. Masuda later wrote the memoir, “My War at Home.
Twenty years ago, Rep. Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against war in the immediate aftermath of the devastating 9/11 attacks that killed about 3,000 people. “Let us not become the evil that we deplore,” she urged her colleagues in a dramatic address on the House floor. The final vote in the House was 420-1. This week, as the U.S. marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Rep.
In his new book, Yale historian Samuel Moyn explores whether the push to make U.S. wars more “humane” by banning torture and limiting civilian casualties has helped fuel more military interventions around the world. He looks in detail at the role of President Obama in expanding the use of drones even as he received the Nobel Peace Prize. “What happened after 2001 is that, in the midst of an extremely brutal war on terror, a new kind of war emerged.