“People will see your ad. It will work.” He wasn’t wrong. There are few places better suited to be the poster child for billboard advertising than Harrison, Arkansas, which was dubbed “the most racist town in America” after a string of...
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...
In the face of all this time-distress, I try to keep foremost in mind that this world is full of beautiful and true things rather than reasons to watch the clock and become anxious, and one should be grateful rather than oppressed by...
Katie said they were nettles and I guess she was right. I think they’re very pretty—taller than I am, thin-throated and headed with a pink bulb made of linear petals. I don’t know what they feel like, though I’ve wanted to touch.
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...
We don’t exist in a soup of probabilities. We each carve a narrow path through the breadth of the possible—the sum of all choices we’ve made and all that were made for us.
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...
