What does a year of isolation and anxiety do to a developing brain? Christian Smith was an 8-year-old in second grade when his public school in Schenectady, New York, was shut down by COVID-19. Photo: Brenda Ann Kenneally Starting on April 6, a bearded and earnest neuroscientist at the University of Oregon named Philip Fisher […]
My Therapists Were Right About Uncertainty
Faced with actual, persistent chaos, I’ve realized there was never a way to outpace danger. Michelle Obama wants to know if I have a plan to vote. The financial-services company hopes I have a plan for retirement. (“Will the world always be this unpredictable?” its paternalistic print ad asks.) My family inquires about the plan […]
Why Did I Think She Wouldn’t Die?
I’m not sure why I imagined Ruth Bader Ginsburg would live — not forever, maybe, but long enough to protect us. Long enough to vote to preserve Joe Biden’s victory in what will surely be a contested win and assure the expulsion, finally, of the troll from the throne and the resumption of recognizable government. […]
The Making of a Molotov Cocktail
Two lawyers, a summer of unrest, and a bottle of Bud Light. It’s an audacious choice to pause in front of an Applebee’s restaurant on Flatbush Avenue and grant an impromptu interview to a video journalist shortly before you allegedly throw a Molotov cocktail into a police car. But the city was out of its […]
Two Weeks With Rachel Noerdlinger, the Movement’s Publicist
It was early June when I first spoke to Rachel Noerdlinger, and she was worrying about the casket. George Floyd’s memorial service in Minneapolis was to be held in 48 hours, and she was considering how images of the coffin, conspicuously placed at the front of the university sanctuary, might impact the national psyche after […]
It Hardly Ever Happens But Sometimes It Does
Last spring, about three months after my breast-cancer diagnosis and six weeks after my mastectomy, I received my “oncotype report,” the document that calculated my mortality risk. The report would give me the odds of being healthy for the next decade and help my doctors advise me on what to do next: would I need […]
The Spaces Between Us
Some of my best friends own country houses. This is not a new discovery. One of the things I have loved best about my life in New York is exactly this, the wide diversity in the affluence of my friends — if you can call a group of mostly white, mostly college-educated, striving people living […]
Our Way of Holding You
A Brooklyn rabbi on what it’s like to officiate a funeral over Zoom. Two weeks ago, Rabbi Rachel Timoner of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, New York (where I am a member), performed her first virtual burial service. A member of her congregation had died at home of COVID-19, and because they were quarantined, his […]
Two Hours Daily to Sanitize, Two Hours to Cry
An emergency-room doctor struggles to keep it together — and find supplies. In the middle of the night, Emily Wolfe slipped away from her patients and into the break room. She was aching to get out of her mask. The virus was probably everywhere in the break room, all over everything — on the locker […]
Walking the Dog Is the Only Time I Feel Sane
This morning I walked the dog. I didn’t sleep much last night (who’s sleeping?) and at 2 a.m. was on the couch texting with a friend about earthquakes and World War II and our sudden mutual alienation from our regular lives that seem, in retrospect, almost silly in their prettiness, but then 8 a.m. rolled […]
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