THE TOPEKA SCHOOL, Ben Lerner’s third novel, begins with a self-aware joke. Adam Gordon, Lerner’s protagonist— who also narrates Lerner’s acclaimed first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station—is sitting in a boat, talking. He’s 17, a speech-and- debate whiz and an aspiring poet living in Topeka, Kansas. It’s the middle of the night and he’s with his girlfriend, Amber, monologuing passionately about something or other, when he suddenly looks around and realizes that he’s sitting in the boat alone. She has jumped overboard and swum away, and he didn’t even notice.
Men talking—specifically young white male poets from Kansas talking— have been a fixture of Lerner’s novels. Lerner, a white male poet from Kansas, even gave the name Ben to the narrator of his second novel, 10:04, in addition to endowing him with roughly his own biography. Both earlier books feature the interior monologues and exterior dealings of Lerner-types. Both are also ironic, formally experimental, skeptical of their narrators while deeply enmeshed in their particular way of seeing the world. And both books are beautifully, exasperatingly, transcendently wordy. In Atocha Station, an extremely stoned Adam—again monologuing— marvels, before passing out, at “language becoming the experience it described.” In 10:04, Ben is the kind of guy who admits that he cried on a park bench by referring to “a mild lacrimal event.”
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Denne historien er fra October 2019-utgaven av The Atlantic.
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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.
Kylie Cooper has seen all the ways a pregnancy can go terrifyingly, perilously wrong. She is an obstetrician who manages high-risk patients, also known as a maternal-fetal-medicine specialist, or MFM. The awkward hyphenation highlights the duality of the role. Cooper must care for two patients at once: mother and fetus, mom and baby. On good days, she helps women with complicated pregnancies bring home healthy babies. On bad days, she has to tell families that this will not be possible. Sometimes, they ask her to end the pregnancy; prior to the summer of 2022, she was able to do so
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