In the eerie, quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s 2021, halfway through a Fulbright to Hungary, I went to a medical clinic in Budapest to have a lump in my breast examined. I wasn’t too worried. I was young, it was probably a cyst...
Somewhere on the internet you can find a photograph of Meshell Ndegeocello sporting a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan, “Meshell Ndegeocello is a band.” The doubled meaning is perhaps obvious enough: She is herself a musical outfit and...
Periodical cicadas do not rely on camouflage to survive. They overwhelm their predators with numbers, billions of them crawling out of dime-size holes in the ground, an evolutionary strategy known among biologists as “predator satiation.”
My dream of being a professional writer, which I’d been pursuing in earnest since I was a teenager, had objectively come true. This wasn’t misery, not really. This was happiness, hiding. Nevertheless, the nagging dissatisfaction I felt made...
Over the course of thirty-six hours, my daughter and I rode with Mr. Toad into the depths of hell, squinted at a bonfire of sewing spindles, choked on hairspray, broke the fourth wall at least fifteen times, smiled at a thousand strangers...
By my late twenties, it had gotten so bad I could barely sleep. Many people toss and turn after, say, a baked brie or Blazin’ Buffalo Wings. But at twenty-eight, even less-quarrelsome foods—steak, carrots, celery, pork chops, hummus, jicama...
I was perched, fully clothed, on Erich Honecker’s toilet seat, hoping for the night to end. My friend Isa was turning fifty and she’d invited every Berliner of her acquaintance from the over three decades she’d lived in the city to her...
I spent my seventy-first birthday driving an hour from our home in rural Tennessee and sitting for six hours in and around the Murfreesboro Medical Center while my wife, Erin, had four toes on her left foot operated on. The right foot was...
We were two women on either side of thirty throwing punches at one another’s faces in a concrete stairwell abuzz with florescent light. Our instructor showed us how to make a fist (thumbs on the outside), take aim, and put our weight into...
