All posts tagged: best friend

2 Painfully Honest Reasons Friendship Is Hard For People With ADHD | Leslie Rouder

2 Painfully Honest Reasons Friendship Is Hard For People With ADHD | Leslie Rouder

Published by skeptic

For many individuals with ADHD, maintaining healthy friendships can prove a significant struggle. How does one balance the many demands that life puts upon us while keeping our vital connections to those people we truly value? Many individuals with ADHD attract tons of friends due to their zany sense of humor, high energy, and creative, fun, loving nature. However, maintaining good friendships over a sustained period is quite a different story for a plethora of reasons, which include: boredom, poor time management, problems with memory, and behaviors that are sometimes interpreted as being selfish or unresponsive to other’s needs. RELATED: Why Answering This One Question Changed My Life 2 key ways friendships are a challenge when you have ADHD & how to overcome them  1. The inability to acknowledge and appreciate their friends consistently People with ADHD often feel so besieged by all they have to do adding one more thing to a long list may feel overwhelming. This is why they might not send a birthday card, thank you notes, or call to let their friends know …

A 17th-century nun’s feminist manifesto

A 17th-century nun’s feminist manifesto

Published by skeptic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Gisela Salim-Peyer, an assistant editor who has written about the fantasy of heritage tourism, the Venezuelan government’s project to redeem a dead rapper, and Italy’s millennia-old ambition to build a bridge to Sicily. Gisela fell in love with Mexico City and Mexico’s national anthropology museum on her first visit last spring, was transfixed by the opening paragraph of Juan Rulfo’s novel, Pedro Páramo, and views the 17th-century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz as the last word on everything. First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: The Culture Survey: Gisela Salim-Peyer The last museum show that I loved: Last year, I went to Mexico City for the first time and loved …

Jodie Foster’s Life On-screen – The Atlantic

Jodie Foster’s Life On-screen – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

Jodie Foster has spent much of her career playing the lonely woman under pressure. A young FBI agent-in-training having an underground tête-à-tête with a cannibalistic serial killer. A scientist launching into space, solo. A mild-mannered radio host who becomes a vigilante after strangers assault her and kill her boyfriend. A mother whose child vanishes in the middle of a transatlantic flight. A wife whose husband is having a suicidal psychotic break and will talk to her only through a hand puppet. It’s not a relaxing oeuvre. Explore the Special Preview: April 2024 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More There are exceptions, of course; Freaky Friday (1976), which Foster made just after Martin Scorsese’s grisly Taxi Driver, was a family-friendly romp. But her 58 years in film, which began during her preschool days, have been almost entirely devoted to outsider characters—women who are emotionally isolated, fighting to be believed, striking out perilously on their own. For a long time, this was how Foster liked it. She …

City Planning’s Greatest Innovation Makes a Comeback

City Planning’s Greatest Innovation Makes a Comeback

Published by skeptic

Growing up in Lexington, Kentucky, my best friend and I lived only a quarter mile apart as the crow flies. We had nearly identical houses, both clad in a blend of brick and vinyl that allowed our newly minted middle-class parents to signal status without breaking the bank. Getting to each other’s homes should have been simple. The trouble was, we lived on opposite ends of two cul-de-sac neighborhoods, each fronting a busy corridor that had once been a farm road. A strictly legal trip from his house to mine involved a 25-minute, mile-long trek along aimless streets, largely without a sidewalk. So we cheated, cutting through backyards to the howls of homeowners. This was the early 2000s; privacy fences have since been installed that probably would have ended our friendship. Ours was a problem that city planning was supposed to prevent: Cities were meant to grow along a coordinated pattern of easily navigable streets and public spaces. Until the 20th century, they did. The street grid—an innovation as useful today as in antiquity—reigned. But …

What If Your Best Friend Is Your Soulmate?

What If Your Best Friend Is Your Soulmate?

Published by skeptic

A lot of the language we use to describe the crucial phases of friendship is borrowed from romantic relationships: friend “crush,” for example, or friend “break up.” A friend can stick around longer than a spouse and be the key to your daily sanity, and still lack a satisfying title. “Best friend”? “Buddy”? “BFF”? All of those fail to convey the weightiness such a relationship deserves. And what if you do “break up” with a best friend? Where do you put your grief? What are the rituals of mourning? In her new book, The Other Significant Others, Rhaina Cohen imagines how life would be different if we centered it on friends. She explains the extremes of friendship—situations in which pairs describe each other as “soulmates” and make major life decisions in tandem. We talk with Cohen about the lost history of friendship and why she cringes when couples at the altar describe each other as their “best friend.” Listen to the conversation here: Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | …

​​​​​​​Gift Guides Are Useless – The Atlantic

​​​​​​​Gift Guides Are Useless – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

Perhaps this holiday-gifting season, you’re wondering: What do I get for my dad? It’s a difficult question, to be sure. But if you consult a holiday gift guide, the query shifts. What do you get for a dad? Then the answer becomes as clear as an oversize whisky ice cube: a book about an old president, something for golf or the grill, or—oh, a steak subscription! Your own dad’s personal taste might not be accounted for, but the deed will be done. There are many understandable reasons for being bereft of gift ideas. Perhaps you’re a loving friend and family member but you’ve just never had a talent for gifting. Maybe you have a dozen people to buy for and not nearly enough time. Possibly you need to find something for your third nephew who’s visiting, and, frankly, you don’t know anything about him. In any of these scenarios, recommendation lists can be tempting. They’re also massively popular; plenty of people want to outsource the labor of product research and feel comforted by the support …

I Removed the Internet From My House

I Removed the Internet From My House

Published by skeptic

Before our first child was born last year, my wife and I often deliberated about the kind of parents we wanted to be—and the kind we didn’t. We watched families at restaurants sitting in silence, glued to their phones, barely taking their eyes off the screens between bites. We saw children paw at their parents, desperate to interact, only to be handed an iPad to keep quiet. We didn’t want to live like that. We vowed to be present with one another, at home and in public. We wanted our child to watch us paying attention to each other and to him. The reality, after our son was born, was quite different. In those sleep-deprived early days, I found myself resorting to my phone as a refuge from the chaos. I fell into some embarrassing middle-aged-dad stereotypes. I developed a bizarre interest in forums about personal finance and vintage hats. I spent up to four hours a day looking at my phone while right in front of me was this new, beautiful life, a baby …

Has Alcohol Left Humanity Better or Worse Off?

Has Alcohol Left Humanity Better or Worse Off?

Published by skeptic

“At this point in my life, the pros outweigh the cons,” one reader argued. Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Tom Stoddart Archive / Getty November 15, 2023, 11 AM ET Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here. Last week, I asked readers, “Are humans better or worse off for having beer, wine, and spirits? Or, if you’d prefer introspection, how about you personally?” Several of you pointed out that humanity benefited greatly from alcohol in bygone eras when there was a dearth of clean water. But today we’ll focus on the modern era. Replies have been edited for length and clarity. Dave shared his family background and its effect on his attitudes: On one side of my family, alcohol was generally forbidden and never touched during family gatherings. On the other, it was central to every family event. If you asked me which side is more fun, I’d say …

A Show About the Secrets Parents Keep From Their Children

A Show About the Secrets Parents Keep From Their Children

Published by skeptic

Hulu’s Black Cake explores how marriage, migration, and motherhood can shift one’s sense of self. James Van Evers / Hulu November 9, 2023, 2:03 PM ET One of the most important aspects of any family recipe is its provenance—not only what the dish is, but where it came from. So what happens when the story of a beloved dish conceals profound pain? In Black Cake, a new Hulu show based on Charmaine Wilkerson’s 2022 novel, the titular dessert (one of many culinary emblems of the Caribbean’s colonial histories) connects a woman named Eleanor Bennett (played by Chipo Chung) to the island where she was born. Decades after she flees her homeland, Eleanor dies quietly in California and leaves behind one final cake for her children. The gift comes with a series of voice recordings that challenge everything her daughter, Benny (Adrienne Warren), and her son, Byron (Ashley Thomas), knew about their mother. Through these posthumous messages, which also relay Eleanor’s coming-of-age story, Black Cake considers how marriage, migration, and motherhood can shift one’s sense of …

Why I Got Breast-Reduction Surgery

Why I Got Breast-Reduction Surgery

Published by skeptic

One day, about two years ago, I looked in the mirror and was shocked to discover that my once-fabulous tits had transmogrified into a bosom. Whereas breasts—those sexy appendages that had gotten me past velvet ropes and bar tabs aplenty in my 20s and 30s—might be sexy and evocative, the bosom, despite its large size, is solely utilitarian, meant for comforting crying children against or storing Kleenex at weddings and funerals. As she aged, Nora Ephron felt bad about her neck; I could no longer see my neck. Sometime in my 40s, everything above my hips had, you see, been incorporated into the bosom’s new terrain. My head sort of just perched atop my bosom, which sat atop my waist and my still-skinny legs. I had seen this body before: on my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and an assortment of aunts and great-aunts. It was a physique typically packaged, in my family at least, with short haircuts, a purse full of peppermint candies, and blousy, beaded tops for “dress occasions.” It was what I’d …