All posts tagged: entire life

Two Jewish Writers, a Bottle of Whiskey, and a Post–October 7 Reality

Two Jewish Writers, a Bottle of Whiskey, and a Post–October 7 Reality

Published by Sam

Hamas’s attack on October 7 had the effect of stopping time. Many Israelis and concerned Jews I’ve spoken with describe a day that has not yet ended for them—a continuous nightmare from which they can’t wake, a reality compounded by the knowledge that so many of the kidnapped are still in captivity. The fiercist critics of Israel’s actions over the past three months don’t want to hear, let alone acknowledge, these feelings, because the weeks of ongoing death and destruction in Gaza have erased for them the hours of rampant torture and rape and murder that preeceded them. Understandable though this reaction might be, it ignores the sense of rupture that many Jews now feel. In the weeks just after the attack, this was the dilemma I faced. Attuned to Palestinian suffering, I didn’t want to lose my ability to take in what happened that day—the concepts and sureties it shook loose, the troubling questions it prompted about the Jewish condition. And so I did what I always do in moments when human complexity threatens …

Trump Hasn’t Killed Political Accountability

Trump Hasn’t Killed Political Accountability

Published by skeptic

On September 22, when federal prosecutors accused Senator Robert Menendez of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, Representative Andy Kim, a fellow New Jersey Democrat, asked one of his neighbors what he thought of the charges. “That’s Jersey,” the man replied. The neighbor’s shrug spoke volumes about not only a state with a sordid history of political corruption but also a country that seemed to have grown inured to scandal. In nearby New York, George Santos had settled into his Republican House seat despite having been indicted on more than a dozen counts of fraud and having acknowledged that the story he’d used to woo voters was almost entirely fiction. Criminal indictments have done nothing to dent Republican support for Donald Trump, who is currently the front-runner for both the GOP nomination and the presidency next year. It turns out, however, that the supposedly cynical citizens of New Jersey did care that their senior senator was allegedly on the take. In the days after the indictment was unsealed, multiple polls found that Menendez’s …

The New Family Vacation – The Atlantic

The New Family Vacation – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

The next time you’re at the airport or checking into a hotel, you might notice a traveling group that looks, at least at first glance, a little unwieldy: young kids, their parents, and their grandparents, all vacationing together regardless of age or mobility limits. A scene like this would have been rare a few decades ago, according to Susan Rugh, a history professor at Brigham Young University who wrote about the history of family travel in her book Are We There Yet?: The Golden Age of American Family Vacations. The classic 20th-century family vacation was typically a nuclear one, comprising a mom, a dad, and their young kids. Grandparents and other relatives seldom came along. But more and more, research shows, families tend to bring multiple generations with them. This, in turn, has changed people’s preferred travel destinations, and even the very purpose of travel: Multigenerational groups are much more likely to take simple, relaxed beach vacations than to embark on logistics-heavy city visits or road trips. The benefits of multigenerational trips are numerous. In …

We Hardly Knew George Santos

We Hardly Knew George Santos

Published by skeptic

So long, George Santos, we hardly knew ye—and that was pretty much the problem. This morning, House members evicted one of their own for only the sixth time in history, terminating the congressional career of the Long Island Republican barely a year after he won election on a campaign of lies and alleged fraud. The vote to expel Santos was 311–114, easily clearing the two-thirds threshold needed to pass. As with most other consequential votes this year, a unified Democratic caucus carried the resolution along with a divided GOP, whose members struggled with the decision of whether to trim their already narrow majority by kicking Santos out of Congress. A slim majority of Republicans stood by Santos, while all but four Democrats voted to expel him. Santos’s tenure was as memorable as it was brief; to the bitter end—and it was bitter—he seemed to be auditioning for a reality show, or perhaps the title role in a sequel to Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can. Ultimately, a Republican Party that has largely embraced a …

Travis Kelce Is Another Puzzle for Taylor Swift Fans to Crack

Travis Kelce Is Another Puzzle for Taylor Swift Fans to Crack

Published by skeptic

This Thanksgiving, America is divided: One half knows why the word squirle is funny, and one half does not. Are you in the latter group? Then you should know that earlier this month, a series of tweets surfaced by Taylor Swift’s new boyfriend, the Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce. In one of them, from 2011, he offered this observation: “I just gave a squirle a peice of bread and it straight smashed all of it!!!! I had no idea they ate bread like that!! Haha #crazy.” Many more Kelce tweets like this soon emerged, rife with spelling near misses, extravagant punctuation, and a charmingly retro belief in the power of hashtags. They were indeed #crazy, but also sweet, funny, and sincere. This might be the first recorded instance of “offense archeology”—the writer Freddie deBoer’s term for digging through someone’s old posts—that enhanced the subject’s reputation. Yes, Kelce had written tweets about “fat people falling over”—the kind of thing that any 20-something dude might have said online in the early 2010s, unaware that he would …

Jeff Tweedy: The Songs That Shaped My Life

Jeff Tweedy: The Songs That Shaped My Life

Published by skeptic

I love other people’s songs. How much they’ve taught me about being human—how to think about myself and others. And, most important, how they absorb our experiences and store our memories. No matter how many people hear the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” there’s only one version that belongs to you. Our appraisals might align, but I doubt your version includes a memory of waiting for the doors to open at an all-ages Jodie Foster’s Army concert on Laclede’s Landing, in St. Louis, as a flooding Mississippi River rages down Wharf Street and heaves up onto the steps of the Gateway Arch. Your mind melting down on mushrooms, watching a husband-and-wife street-performing duo sing “A Day in the Life” while their toddler does laps around you keeping shockingly good time on a tambourine. This article has been adapted from Tweedy’s new book. It’d be cool if we could see the worlds within the songs inside one another’s heads. But I also love how impenetrable it all is. I love that what’s mine can’t be …

Dear Therapist: My Mother Is Marrying Her Abuser

Dear Therapist: My Mother Is Marrying Her Abuser

Published by skeptic

Dear Therapist, My mother has been in a verbally and at times physically abusive relationship for more than two-thirds of my life. After my parents split up when I was a child, my dad had custody, but during visits with my mom, and a brief time living with her, I witnessed physical violence and sexually inappropriate talk, and was verbally abused myself by this man. Sometimes the police were involved, but my mom always dropped the charges. I suffered immense trauma, which to this day has still not been validated by her; at times she has even denied that certain things happened. After many years of therapy in adulthood, and a really bad incident that led to her boyfriend’s arrest a few years ago, during which I provided emotional support to my mom only for her to later return to the relationship, I chose to no longer have any contact with this man. I also set boundaries around my relationship with her for the first time. At first, there was a huge strain on our …

The Left Refuses to See Jewish Suffering

The Left Refuses to See Jewish Suffering

Published by skeptic

“Did they really decapitate babies?” my 14-year-old daughter asked me yesterday. She was pointing to a text message on her phone from a friend. “They’re saying they found Jewish babies killed, some burnt, some decapitated.” And I froze. Not because I didn’t know what to say—though in truth I didn’t know what to say—but because for a moment I forgot what century I was in. All of the assumptions I had made as a Jewish father, even one who had grown up, as I did, with the Holocaust just a few decades past, were suddenly no longer relevant. Had I adequately prepared her for the reality of Jewish death, what every shtetl child for centuries would have known intimately? Later in the day, she asked if, for safety’s sake, she should take off the necklace she loves that her grandparents had given her and that has her name written out in Hebrew script. The attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians last Saturday broke something in me. I had always resisted victimhood. It felt abhorrent, self-pitying …

There’s a New Drug for Eczema—Actually, a Ton of New Drugs

There’s a New Drug for Eczema—Actually, a Ton of New Drugs

Published by skeptic

Up until a few years ago, Heather Sullivan’s 14-year-old son, Sawyer, had struggled with eczema his entire life. When he was just a baby, most of his body would be covered in intensely itchy rashes that bled and oozed when he couldn’t help but scratch. His family tried steroid creams, wet wraps, bleach baths, and all of the lotions. They tore up their carpet and replaced their sheetrock in hopes of eliminating triggers. At 15 months, he went on cyclosporine, a powerful immunosuppressant usually given to organ-transplant patients. It cleared him up, but the drug comes with potentially dangerous side effects over time. Doctors, Sullivan recalls, were “just appalled that my child would be on this amount of medicine at this age”—but his eczema came roaring back as soon as he went off it. When a new eczema drug called Dupixent finally became available to Sawyer a few years ago, his turnaround was fast and dramatic. Within a week, his itchiness and redness started calming down. He felt and looked better. The condition that had …