I hate the beach. My skin burns and blisters as soon as the sun touches it, I dislike sweating without exercising, and sand makes no sense at all to me— it’s just hot and gritty dirt that other people apparently enjoy rolling around in. I was raised by parents whose idea of leisure is cutting miles of trails in the woods and painting an entire house by hand, so the prospect of enforced idleness makes me panicky. Plus, the ocean itself, while aesthetically pleasing, is terrifyingly untrustworthy, with its riptides and hurricanes and tsunamis and sharks and microplastics and slithering monsters of the deep. It has just too many sneaky ways to kill you.
When I have gone on beach vacations, it’s been under duress. I married into a family of generous people who are also horrifying extroverts, and whose notion of a good time is a nice, boozy, mostly reclined stay on some tropical island together. But for catastrophists like me, the luxury beach resort raises a whole new set of psychological torments on top of those provided by more ordinary beaches. The entire time that we’re in our ostensible paradise, I’m busy obsessing over the unintended consequences of our stay, such as the environmental degradation caused by bringing wasteful tourists to delicate ecosystems and the racist and classist issues of displacement. The Situationists, as usual, said it best in Paris in the spring of 1968, when, in protest of capitalism, they scrawled graffiti reading Club Med: a cheap holiday in other people’s misery.
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Denne historien er fra July - August 2022-utgaven av The Atlantic.
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Boat Fish Don't Count
The wild, obsessive, dangerous pursuit of Montauk's biggest striped bass
The Anti-Rock Star
Leonard Cohen's battle against shameless male egoism
A Brief History of Yuval Noah Harari
How the scholar became Silicon Valley's favorite guru
Rachel Kushner's Surprising Swerve
She and her narrators have always relied on swagger-but not this time.
Men on Trips Eating Food
Why TV is full of late-career Hollywood guys at restaurants
You Think You're So Heterodox
Joe Rogan has turned Austin into a haven for manosphere influencers, just-asking-questions tech bros, and other \"free thinkers\" who happen to all think alike.
What Abortion Bans Do to Doctors
In Idaho and other states, draconian laws are forcing physicians to ignore their training and put patients' lives at risk.
THE LOYALIST KASH PATEL WILL DO EXACTLY WHAT TRUMP WANTS.
A 40-year-old lawyer with little government experience, he joined the administration in 2019 and rose rapidly. Each new title set off new alarms.
THE RADICAL CONVERSION OF MIKE LEE
IN 2016, HE TRIED TO STOP TRUMP FROM BECOMING PRESIDENT. BY 2020, HE WAS TRYING TO HELP TRUMP OVERTURN THE ELECTION. NOW HE COULD BECOME TRUMP'S ATTORNEY GENERAL.
HYPOCRISY, SPINELESSNESS, AND THE TRIUMPH OF DONALD TRUMP
He said Republican politicians would be easy to break. He was right.