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 […]
The Stabbing in Morningside Park
Every generation, a crime tells a new story about New York. The murder of Tessa Majors is ours. At the 26th precinct, the baby-faced boy had to empty his pockets and hand over his backpack. He was holding $6 in cash. In the backpack, he had a small collection of school notebooks, all blank —“You […]
When You Hit Send Even Though You Know You Shouldn’t
The Cut on Tuesdays A weekly podcast from the Cut and Gimlet Media, with host Molly Fischer. Old emails are a fossil record of our lives. The constant everyday boring things, the big dramatic once-in-a-lifetime things — they’re all in there, trapped like ammonites in the sediment of your inbox. The thing is, it’s so […]
A Joyful Testament to Middle Age
When did Elinor Carucci enter my apartment and take photos of my life? This was exactly how I felt looking at her new book, Midlife, a gorgeous documentary account of domesticity, 20 years in. There is the messy kitchen counter, unpicturesque. There is the couple (at the same counter) paying bills and unpacking groceries, each frame a frozen section of time, implying decades of repetition of household chores.
In 2029, AI Will Make Prejudice Much Worse
If you’re female, the machines may not recognize you as human. They may not see you if you’re trans or a person of color, nor, possibly, if you have poor dental hygiene or carry a cane or are diminutive in stature or extraordinarily tall. The machines understand the world based on the information they’ve been […]
One Night at Mount Sinai
Aja Newman went to the emergency room for shoulder pain. Her doctor was a superstar. What’s the worst that could happen? Sometime after 2 a.m. on January 12, 2016, Aja Newman roused herself from her hospital gurney and made her way down the long hallway to the bathroom. She had checked in at Mount Sinai’s […]
Dressing for a Wound: How my body and I reconciled after a mastectomy.
How do you dress for your mastectomy? The surgery itself is easy, actually. During the cutting, you’re wearing nothing at all, unconscious and strapped to a table in a martyr’s pose, arms out in a T, while an OR crew that looks like the cast of a reality show bustles around doing God knows what. […]
Men Know It’s Better to Carry Nothing
Several weeks ago I saw a young woman on the subway accidentally dump a full cup of iced coffee into the seat next to her. A large puddle rippled in the molded plastic divot, threatening to overflow at any moment. Panicked and helpless, the embarrassed woman gazed at her mess. She couldn’t disown it. And […]
How a Predator Operated in Plain Sight
In 1972 or 1973, I went to the circus with my friend and afterward her father picked us up. We were 9 or 10 years old, and while we had been enjoying the circus, her father and his new girlfriend had gone to see the porno Deep Throat, which at the time was a groovy thing […]
Measles for the One Percent
On an unseasonably chilly morning in May, three dozen or so plaintiff-parents, most of them from the Green Meadow Waldorf School, showed up at the Rockland County Courthouse, looking, in their draped layers and comfortable shoes, like any PTA from Park Slope or Berkeley.
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