New research suggests that more money makes people act less human. Or at least less humane. In a windowless room on the University of California, Berkeley, campus, two undergrads are playing a Monopoly game that one of them has no chance of winning. A team of psychologists has rigged it so that skill, brains, savvy, and luck—those ingredients that ineffably […]
The Money-Empathy Gap Read More
Cornel West is a self-proclaimed prophet who believes in the virtues of love and justice. But in his own life, he can’t seem to find either. In November 2007, Cornel West got onstage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and before a hollering crowd of more than a thousand people, with much arm-waving and wrist-flapping, along with a certain amount of ass-wagging,
“I Want to Be Like Jesus.” Read More
How America learned to stop worrying about worrying and pop its pills instead. Last summer, near the end of my mother’s life, I woke up in my childhood bedroom in the middle of the night in a fever of panic. My heart was thrumming, my mind racing. In 1819, the English poet John Keats called anxiety a “wakeful anguish,” and
New York Mag Cover Story: Listening to Xanax Read More
I am sometimes aghast at how much money I spent on my wedding dress. Four figures, more than I’d ever spent on any item of clothing before or since — enough, ten years on and one kid in, to cover one monthly mortgage payment, a family vacation to Cancun, six weeks of summer day camp, a high-end cooking range, a
Marriage is Now a Luxury Good Read More
Time wasted wisely. As fantasies go, this one is beyond innocent, involving neither a bemuscled UPS man nor an indulgent yoga boot camp with my best friend in Tulum. In it, husband and child are elsewhere but safe, returning home soon but not imminently. I have an hour alone in the apartment, with which to do what I please. And
Are we all secretly kid-haters at heart? To the tally of those requiring protection from the constant, corrosive prejudice of the dominant culture, another group must now be added. It turns out that American children—whose wants and whims support untold industries and whose very existence causes property taxes to rise in the neighborhood of a better-than-average middle school—are victims of
She had just picked up 11-year-old Alexis, one of her twelve children, from school at Brownsville’s P.S. 298. They turned up Watkins Street and walked past the firehouse, on their way to retrieve another one of her girls. They had reached the Peanut Lucky Supermarket—where a sign in the window says “Welcome to Our Store” and graffiti scrawled on the
Heroes: Because Zurana Horton Took a Bullet to Save Her Daughter’s Life. Read More
Is there anything wrong with being 53 and pregnant? The first time they had sex, during that initial exploration of unfamiliar flesh, John Ross uttered words to Ann Maloney that would sound to her like prophecy. “You have the body of a young girl. You need a baby.” This compliment, though gallant, could not have been objectively true. The first
New York Mag Cover Story: Parents of a Certain Age Read More
A potent coalition forms and fractures. More than 1,600 people lost spouses or partners in the attacks; 3,000 children lost parents. There were also parents who lost children, and hundreds more who lost siblings (or cousins, nephews, nieces, in-laws, grandparents, best friends). You don’t choose your family, they say, your family chooses you, and initially the 9/11 families depended on
On April 19th, 2010, This essay by Lisa, “In Search of Heaven,” appeared in the Huffington Post: Of course I believed in heaven as a child. Every weekend, driving up to our country house in Vermont, I’d gaze out the window from the backseat of the family car and see the shape of God in the clouds. But I
The Huffington Post: In Search of Heaven Read More