essays
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Our Passions, Our Day Jobs
Diary of a Post-Adrenaline Junkie
Some decisions are best made heedlessly, based on the chance for an epic story—and some people think like that all the time. A report on what it’s like to slide down a volcano on a piece of sheet metal at 55 mph.
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Personal Essays
Call and Response
Sometimes a book appears in your life and starts to pester you. The characters act like your friends. Events occur in the plot that reappear inside your home. It’s enough to drive a man to wonder which world is more real, until danger appears.
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China Welcomes You
How to Officially Forget
More than two decades later, a return visit to Tiananmen Square finds it scrubbed clean—just as it was immediately following the Incident. Except now there is thick smog, and ghosts. In contemporary Beijing, the past is like Kentucky Fried Chicken: unavoidable.
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Opinions
Enjoy the Silence
Just because no one uses payphones doesn’t mean the phone booth needs to go the way of the dodo. One man’s plea for preserving society’s greatest unused invention.
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Witch Hunt
The Devil’s Trumpet
History is an imperfect science—the truth often weaves within nuance and mystery. For those playing the role of historian, the trick is knowing what you’re looking for.
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Letters From Tel Aviv
Herbivore, Carnivore, Omnivore
A grocery visit or dinner out in Israel can sometimes leave your stomach churning, but not for the reasons you might think.
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Closing the Door
The Year That Wasn’t
As much as 2011 was filled with noteworthy events, it was also littered with meaninglessly overhyped blips that, try as we might, we shouldn’t forget. We asked our group of writers and thinkers: What was the least important event of 2011?
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Closing the Door
The Year That Was
We gathered writers and thinkers around the world and asked them to sift through the past year of revolutions, deaths, discoveries, and breakthroughs to answer: What was the most important event of 2011?
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Growing Up
The Truth Will Set You Free
I knew when I was in trouble—like the time I was 13 and was caught watching porn on my dad’s computer—and I knew I couldn’t escape my fate. Nor would I have wanted to.
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Personal Essays
Along the Horizontal
The link between Occupy Wall Street, the environmental doom of Czech villages, and the noise of a wailing child on a freezing, black morning in Sweden is not obvious—but it does count for everything.
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Personal Essays
Now That Books Mean Nothing
When you’ve long been identified as a “literary type,” how can it be that receiving books as get-well gifts leaves you feeling empty, angry, and determined to chug YouTube straight?
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Personal Essays
Address Unknown
In New York’s St. John the Divine Cathedral, a letter to a dead man, tucked under a plaque near his ashes, offers the first and only clue in a mystery about faith.