What are friends for?
For knocking around with, cracking a joke, sharing a doobie, firing a paintball? Or for guarding in the angelic citadels of their being the essential soul image of you and everything you might eternally come to mean, while you in shining symmetry and perfect vulnerability do the same for them?
The time has come for me to write a full confession of my life to you,” Jack Kerouac typed thunderously to Neal Cassady in December 1950, in the first of a sequence of massive, rumbling-and-rolling autobiographical letters, steeped in memory and mystery, that he would mail from Queens, New York, to San Francisco. “Bullshit is bullshit. Everything's got to go this time. No one can take it but you. From the very start, we were brothers.” Cassady at the time was supporting a young family by working as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific Railroad; Kerouac was in retreat, annoying his new wife, Joan; brooding over the poor sales of his big, Thomas Wolfean debut novel, The Town and the City; trying and failing to find a new voice/style/idiom/rhythm in which to project his own experience, and the flavor of his distinctly bruised consciousness, more immediately onto the page. Despite grave auto-examinations, it wasn't happening: false starts, loose ends, quarreling selves. His next book-working title: Gone on the Road—had been trapped in a state of unbecoming.
Denne historien er fra April 2022-utgaven av The Atlantic.
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Denne historien er fra April 2022-utgaven av The Atlantic.
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You Are Going to Die - Oliver Burkeman has become an unlikely self-help guru by reminding everyone of their mortality.
"The average human lifespan," Oliver Burkeman begins his 2021 megabest seller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, "is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short." In that relatively brief period, he does not want you to maximize your output at work or optimize your leisure activities for supreme enjoyment. He does not want you to wake up at 5 a.m. or block out your schedule in a strictly labeled timeline.
Washington's Nightmare - Donald Trump is the tyrant the first president feared.
Last November, during a symposium at Mount Vernon on democracy, John Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general who served as Donald Trump's second chief of staff, spoke about George Washington's historic accomplishments— his leadership and victory in the Revolutionary War, his vision of what an American president should be. And then Kelly offered a simple, three-word summary of Washington's most important contribution to the nation he liberated.
The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books - To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University's required greatbooks course, since 1988. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading, College kids have never read everything they're assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames's students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem.
What Zoya Sees
Long a fearless critic of Israeli society, since October 7 Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi has made wrenching portraits of her nation's sufferingand become a target of protest.
Malcolm Gladwell, Meet Mark Zuckerberg
The writer’ insistence on ignoring the web is an even bigger blind spot today than it was when The Tipping Point came out.
Alan Hollinghurst's Lost England
In his new novel, the present isnt much better than the past—and its a lot less sexy.
Scent of a Man
In a new memoir, Al Pacino promises to reveal the person behind the actor. But is he holding something back?
CATCHING THE CARJACKERS
ON THE ROAD WITH AN ELITE POLICE UNIT AS IT COMBATS A CRIME WAVE
THE RIGHT-WING PLAN TO MAKE EVERYONE AN INFORMANT
In Texas and elsewhere, new laws and policies have encouraged neighbors to report neighbors to the government.
The Playwright in the Age of AI
In his new play, McNeal, Ayad Akhtar confronts, and subverts, the idea that artificial intelligence threatens human ingenuity.
