“You all, who will emerge out of the flood In which we have drowned, Remember When you speak of our weaknesses Also the dark time From which you’ve escaped.” —Bertolt Brecht, “To Future Generations” Translation by Terence Renaud 1. “memento mori” The madness began in the fall of 2000, after General Ariel Sharon swaggered up…
1. “A crack in the walls that ordinarily hem us in.”[1] On September 7, 2017, minutes before midnight, I was alone in a borrowed house when something began to shift: an indeterminate sensation of motion, like lapping waves. I did what I had learned to do as a child, growing up in Kuwait: I looked…
In May 2009, a year after I graduated from college, I found myself in a mangrove swamp thirty miles east of Haikou, the capital city of China’s southernmost province, Hainan Island, standing atop a massive, concrete floodgate. With me were six reporters from a Cantonese television station, the CEO of one of China’s largest telecommunications…
On her first day of sixth grade at Belle Grove Elementary School, Jenny Bergström had imagined herself to be the only girl who didn’t belong, but after a short and restorative cry in what her teacher called the ladies’ lavatory, she had resolved to carry herself as though the opposite were true. So when the…
I lived about fifteen years in New York and Los Angeles, and by the time I moved back to rural Ohio, I’d been gone long enough to forget all the stuff I hated: I forgot about the rules for men (there are none) and the rules for women (the men make the rules). I forgot…
In December of 1936, George Orwell, on his way to fight in the Spanish Civil War, stopped in Paris, where he had a chat with Henry Miller. It would be the two writers’ only encounter. Neither was particularly well-known or financially secure at the time. Miller had published Tropic of Cancer two years prior, but…
We were immersed in the beauty of our place in far northeastern Washington—ponderosa pines, red firs, tamaracks, even spruce trees against the sky, and the Columbia River rolling by. For forty years, my wife, Joanna, and I have enjoyed our vacation home, the more so during the last five when we have lived in it…
I waved goodbye to the Potomac and soon thereafter said hello to the Mississippi. It was 1967, a hot and humid day in the Twin Cities—DC weather for sure. This was my Minnesota welcome, a little warmth to tease me. We left the Minneapolis airport and headed south. We were bound for Southwind. City streets…
When Rajini’s brother Ajay proposed to his girlfriend at a restaurant in New York, their mother grieved that Ajay and Caroline “had gotten engaged on their own, like two orphans.” On a rare visit to India as a teenager, Rajini had accompanied her extended family to her cousin’s engagement ceremony, their side bearing baskets of…
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