Let me explain something about me: When I was 12, I started having panic attacks, brought on by fears that I couldn't shake, even though I knew they were irrational. I was terrified, for example, that I'd become depressed-but I'd never been depressed before, and didn't feel depressed. My junior high school devoted a series of assemblies to warning us budding teenagers that we were entering the most dangerous years of our lives, now ripe targets for cutting, suicide, eating disorders, overdoses, AIDS, and fatal car accidents. I would spend hours, even days, worrying that one of these things might be coming for me. My mind seemed to spin out of control couldn't stop fixating, I couldn't calm down, and I couldn't understand what was happening.
Finding language to describe suffering of any kind is hard, but eventually, fearing I was going irreversibly insane, I tried first for my mother, then for a doctor. Soon I was told there was a name for my particular distress: obsessive-compulsive disorder. Receiving this news at 13 was both relieving and shattering. (And surprising. There had been no assembly suggesting we watch out for anxiety disorders.) With the diagnosis came explanations and context for what I had not been able to interpret, as well as a body of scientific knowledge about treatment. Still, OCD can be an upsetting diagnosis, partly because according to current psychiatric understanding, it's a chronic illness. You don't typically get cured. You "learn to manage it" and, like most chronic conditions, it ebbs and flows based on a variety of factors. I felt horror at being indelibly marked and feared that I'd never get back to "my old self." Who was I now?
Denne historien er fra October 2022-utgaven av The Atlantic.
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Denne historien er fra October 2022-utgaven av The Atlantic.
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Catching the Carjackers - On the road with an elite police unit as it combats a crime wave
On August 7, 2022, Shantise Summers arrived home from a night out with friends around 2:40 a.m. As she walked from her car toward her apartment in Oxon Hill, a Maryland neighborhood just southeast of Washington, D.C., she heard footsteps behind her. She turned and saw two men in ski masks. One put a gun to her face; she could feel the metal pressing against her chin. He demanded her phone, wallet, keys, and Apple Watch. She quickly handed them over, and they drove off in her 2019 Honda Accord.
The Most Remote Place in the World - Point Nemo is Earth's official "middle of nowhere." A lot seems to be going on there.
It’s called the “longest-swim problem”: If you had to drop someone at the place in the ocean farthest from any speck of land—the remotest spot on Earth—where would that place be? The answer, proposed only a few decades ago, is a location in the South Pacific with the coordinates 48 52.5291ᤩS 123 23.5116ᤩW: the “oceanic point of inaccessibility,” to use the formal name. It doesn’t get many visitors. But one morning last year, I met several people who had just come from there.
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?
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.
