All posts tagged: family member

Please Upgrade to 1TB If You Want to See Your Baby Again

Please Upgrade to 1TB If You Want to See Your Baby Again

Published by skeptic

Here I was, going about my day and minding my own business, when a notification popped up on my phone that made my blood run cold: Your iCloud storage is full. I am, as I’ve written before, a digital hoarder whose trinkets, tchotchkes, and stacks of yellowing newspapers (read: old pixelated memes) are distributed across an unknown number of cloud servers around the globe. On Apple’s, I’ve managed to blow through 200 gigabytes of storage, an amount of data that, not even a decade ago, felt almost infinite: my own little Library of Congress, or that warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, filled with screenshots of bad tweets. The overwhelming majority of this space is dedicated to 31,013 photos and 1,742 videos I’ve personally taken. The rest is likely brain-cell-destroying junk that others have sent me in texts and group chats. Running out of iCloud storage is obviously not an unusual circumstance. But I have also recently been forced to upgrade my Google storage from 100 to 200 GB. I started …

Four Ways to Quit Complaining

Four Ways to Quit Complaining

Published by skeptic

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. In 15th-century Germany, there was an expression for a chronic complainer: Greiner, Zanner, which can be translated as “whiner-grumbler.” It was not a complimentary term. A popular tavern song at the time (which the great renaissance composer Heinrich Finck also arranged as an instrumental piece) had lyrics that ran, by my rough translation, “Greiner, Zanner, you know what? I’ll sit at your table and kiss your wife on the mouth! How do you like that?” In other words, quit your whining, or I’ll give you something to whine about. Are you a bit of a Greiner, Zanner? If so, you’re not alone: Survey data show that American customers today are more than twice as likely to complain about a product or service as they were in 1976. People are grumbling more at work too. Nearly a third of employers in one U.K.-based survey witnessed an increase in employee grievances over a two-year period prior to …

Reactions Are Swallowing the Internet

Reactions Are Swallowing the Internet

Published by skeptic

I’ve been emailing with a small group of people at another organization about a mutual project. You know how this goes. Many of the messages we pass back and forth contain no content, just acknowledgment: Great! or Thanks or Will do. But the other day, I received an unexpected note from one of my collaborators, Jacob. Perhaps note is not the word—I’d sent an email to the group (“Got it!”), and now, apparently, Jacob had responded by sending all of us a picture of confetti. This wasn’t a reply. It was something else: a reaction. Last October, Google’s Gmail started letting users send emoji reactions to “quickly and creatively acknowledge an email.” That’s what Jacob did: He quickly and creatively informed me that he was in a state of celebration about the fact that I’d understood his prior message. Thus, confetti. I saw this spelled out in my inbox: “???? Jacob reacted to your message.” In other words, I got another email. As a matter of official policy, reactions are supposed to relieve you of …

“American Fiction” Is More Than a Racial Satire

“American Fiction” Is More Than a Racial Satire

Published by skeptic

Who decides what qualifies as a “masterpiece of African American literature”? The question is central to an audacious scheme that unfolds in Erasure, a 2001 novel by Percival Everett about a Black professor of English named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, whose high-concept retellings of Greek classics haven’t endeared him to a wide readership. Monk is beguiled by rave reviews of a novel called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, which earns praise for its “haunting verisimilitude” in depicting the ghetto “in all its exotic wonder.” The author resolves to conduct an experiment: He writes a stereotype-driven manuscript meant to reflect the racist appetite of the white publishing industry, then instructs his agent to submit it to book editors for consideration. And so begins the saga of My Pafology, a ribald anti-bildungsroman about a violent, fatherless 19-year-old whose own mother calls him “human slough,” which Monk publishes under the pseudonym “Stagg R. Leigh.” Monk’s satirical exercise thrusts Stagg into the literary limelight as the industry lavishes praise on the book’s gritty rendering of an ostensibly authentic Black experience. …

​​​​​​​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 …

A Book That Changed How I Think

A Book That Changed How I Think

Published by skeptic

The right book read at the right time can alter not just what you think, but how. The effect can feel like putting on a new set of glasses: Everything remains the same, but you view reality with sudden clarity. It can also be more unsettling—great writing may make the ordinary utterly unfamiliar, so that the reader experiences it unmoored from prior assumptions. Many books can pull off this life-altering trick, depending on how we encounter them; the timing is as important as the subject. The transformation can happen in childhood, when transcendent writing has the power to let loose imagination. Sometimes the book in question might look deceptively simple—an author reconsidering something as automatic as sleeping or breathing. The information may not be news to everyone: A revolution in one’s thinking can be both obvious and meaningful. You may find a writer who deploys language in unfamiliar, thrilling ways, or who changes your philosophy on raising children. The books below, selected by The Atlantic’s staff, demonstrate how writing can take a person apart and …

Images of the Mass Kidnapping of Israelis by Hamas

Images of the Mass Kidnapping of Israelis by Hamas

Published by skeptic

More accounts are emerging of kidnappings, rapes, and torture committed by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians. So far, at least 150 Israelis, most of them apparently civilians, were kidnapped by Hamas gunmen and stolen across Israel’s border with Gaza. Among the kidnapped are elderly women and small children. Human rights groups are tracking these kidnappings as evidence of war crimes. Within hours of the attacks on Saturday, photos and videos began to circulate showing the mass murder of Israeli civilians—including people killed in their cars, and left dead on the ground in the streets and at a bus stop—as well as the kidnapping of children, young women, and the elderly. Two widely circulated videos have sparked outrage because of the  the apparent sexual assaults they depict, the Times of Israel reports. One video shows a woman who appears to have been beaten and who seems to be bleeding into her shorts being forced out of a Jeep in Gaza. The other video shows a woman, later identified by her family as 22-year-old Shani Louk, stripped …