Roddy Doyle Reads Lorrie Moore

Roddy Doyle joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss "Community Life," by Lorrie Moore, from a 1991 issue of the magazine.

from Everything https://ift.tt/2QnrKgI

The Confusion Surrounding the F.B.I.’s Renewed Investigation of Brett Kavanaugh

Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow write on the F.B.I.’s renewed investigation into Brett Kavanaugh, and how several people hoping to contribute salient information about him, Christine Blasey Ford, and Deborah Ramirez are struggling to make contact with the Bureau.

from Everything https://ift.tt/2zHTS8N

How the Protests Against Brett Kavanaugh Reached the National Stage

Emily Witt writes on the Washington, D.C., protests against Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, on Friday, following the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford the day before.

from Everything https://ift.tt/2NcaV6g

Could Smithfield Foods Have Prevented the “Rivers of Hog Waste” in North Carolina After Florence?

Charles Bethea writes on the flooding of hog-waste lagoons in North Carolina following Hurricane Florence, and Smithfield Foods’ inability to curtail the damage from them.

from Everything https://ift.tt/2y59hxI

Merrick Garland Says He Enjoys a Nice Lemonade Now and Again

Andy Borowitz makes a joking comparison between the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who repeatedly discussed his love of beer before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Merrick Garland, the Obama nominee who never received a hearing.

from Everything https://ift.tt/2Qk0rUj

What Your Snack Choice Says About You

In a humor piece, Eugenia Viti illustrates what your snack choice says about you.

from Everything https://ift.tt/2zGn5kA

Christine Blasey Ford’s Experience Was Just as Bad as Anita Hill’s—Maybe Worse

Ford spoke with disarming directness and vulnerability, but the hearing unleashed in Brett Kavanaugh a bitter, partisan rage pumped up with conspiracy theory, Margaret Talbot writes.

from Everything https://ift.tt/2NU0SYM

Sunday Reading: Schemes, Frauds, and Swindles

Stories about grifts, cons, and rackets, from The New Yorker’s archive, including pieces by Patrick Radden Keefe, Lizzie Widdicombe, David Grann, Tad Friend, Mark Singer, and Walter Kirn.

from Everything https://ift.tt/2P3bdhP

How can May avoid another terrible Tory party conference?

Four experts give their view on how the prime minister can keep the party faithful happy

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2OpwMMa

I want to get married, but my partner won’t go through it again… | Dear Mariella

Your partner’s intransigence is unfair – but start by examining your own motives, Mariella Frostrup tells a woman who says she’s ‘always wanted to be a wife’

The dilemma My partner and I have been together for three years, have a child together and are trying for a second. He was married before he met me and his divorce was nasty and dragged on for years. It wasn’t finalised until just after the birth of our child. I desperately want to be married, but he does not. I have told him it’s not a deal-breaker – and it isn’t. Marriage does not make a family and us not being married doesn’t mean we don’t love each other any less. He has said that marriage is a big deal and I should respect the reality of what he’s been through.

I can’t really explain why I want it so badly, but I can’t help it. I’ve always wanted to be married, to be a wife, to wear the dress, etc. It eats me up inside that he gave some other woman this commitment but not me, the mother of his child. I feel I’m being selfish and I probably am, but every time the conversation arises I feel hurt. I love this man and want to spend my life with him. Can I have the happily ever after even if we never get married?

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2zFBU6G

Topless Serena Williams covers Divinyls hit for breast cancer awareness

Tennis star strips off and sings I Touch Myself to remind women to self-check

Serena Williams has produced a new video to promote breast cancer awareness in which she covers her bare chest with her hands and sings a cover of The Divinyls’ hit I Touch Myself.

The video is shared on her Instagram page, where she wrote: “This Breast Cancer Awareness Month I’ve recorded a version of The Divinyls global hit ‘I Touch Myself’ to remind women to self-check regularly.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Oocx1r

Shakespeare in the age of Brexit and Trump: the play’s still the thing

In his new book, Peter Conrad explains how the Bard’s plays are the perfect mirror for our troubled times

Next time you go to a Shakespeare play, don’t think you can settle back into a safe invisibility when the lights go down. You will be under observation: the actors we watch are in turn watching us, examining our personal flaws and the fault lines in our fractious society. We receive fair warning of the test that is in store. Hamlet invites a troupe of itinerant players to perform at Elsinore in the hope that they will embarrass and with luck incriminate his guilty uncle. Their purpose, he tells them, is to “hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature” and expose “the very age and body of the time”.

It’s our age and body, our manners and manias, that Shakespeare’s plays now probe, perhaps more pointedly than ever before. The film-maker Errol Morris, introducing American Dharma, his sulphurous documentary about Trump’s ideologue Steve Bannon, recently remarked that we are suffering through a period resembling “bad Shakespeare” – a mismanaged chaos that matches Horatio’s summary of the plot at the end of Hamlet, when he reflects on “accidental judgments, casual slaughters” and “purposes mistook”. History, while you’re living through it, doesn’t have the cyclical predictability discerned by Marxists; like Shakespeare’s plays, it is a melee of upsets and reversals, driven by capricious individuals whose actions seldom turn out as they are supposed to do.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Orsns2

Out of my mind: Sarah Perry on writing under the influence of drugs

When a medical condition left her in agony, The Essex Serpent author was prescribed powerful opiates. They gave her terrifying visions - and a new insight into literary drug culture

The poet Mary Robinson was, said Coleridge, a woman of undoubted Genius. She published her first book while a child bride in a debtors’ prison; she was a political radical who took the future George IV as a lover; in portraits her eyes are serious and her mouth is not. But sickness being no respecter of even the most fascinating people, she acquired an infection at the age of 26, and afterwards lived with paralysis and pain. One night in Bath, finding her suffering intolerable, she dosed herself with 80 drops of a tincture of alcohol and opium, and drowsily composed a poem called “The Maniac”, “like a person talking in her sleep”. Inspired by the memory of a vagrant, it is not a work on which to pin a reputation, but has a place in the history of letters as the first of the English Romantic opium poems. In my Puritan youth I held the cult of the drug-addled artist in contempt. Thomas De Quincey in his voluminous sleeves? A sap, I thought, of doubtful moral fibre. William S Burroughs? What did I want with a man who shot his wife? Besides, Naked Lunch was nothing like as nasty as it thought it was. If marijuana had caused Jack Kerouac’s sentences to be as affectless as the rap of a fork on a Formica table, it was a pity he hadn’t confined himself to tobacco. Susan Sontag wrote on speed: this I admired, since it indicated a solid work ethic. I adored Coleridge, but flinched from the thought of him in the arms of Morpheus as I’d flinch from seeing my father naked. Secretly I admired Middlemarch’s Casaubon, whose ascetic and studious life was directed towards “thoroughness, justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement”.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2InYCTG