Blackstone Hotel, at 1016 17th St NW, opened in 1926. Architect Robert O. Scholz (1895-1978) designed the small 72-room hotel. One of many inexpensive hotels that catered to both short-term guests—mostly tourists—as well as long-term residents. Closed and torn down in 1974. …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 15, 2022
Today in History - January 15 https://t.co/eGqQ4SalJz Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., twentieth-century America's most compelling and effective civil rights leader, was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. Continue reading. Click here to search Today in History …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 15, 2022
Quote of the Day: "Thank you, God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough." - Garrison Keillor
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 15, 2022
In consideration of COVID-19, the DC History Center is extending building closures until January 23. More information about re-opening and availability for research library appointments is forthcoming. Thank you for your understanding as we work together to keep DC safe! In…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 14, 2022
Here are five stories that moved us this week, and the reasons why.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
Abigail Hauslohner | The Washington Post | January 7, 2022 | 3,700 Words
The United States began detaining men at Guantánamo Bay 20 years ago this week. Nearly 800 prisoners have spent time in the facility’s cells; today 39 men still remain behind bars there, 27 of whom have never been charged with a crime. This haunting, must-read story is about men who’ve been released and resettled in third countries — a Tunisian in Slovakia, for instance, and a Yemeni in Serbia. Abigail Hauslohner describes them as “the discarded men of one of America’s darkest chapters.” After enduring torture and other horrors at Guantánamo, they’ve been forced to live hundreds or thousands of miles from any family or friends. They face persecution and poverty, as well as the lingering effects of trauma. If they can rely on anything, it’s each other. “They trade advice, news and jokes in text-message chains,” Hauslohner writes. “And when things get bad, they call each other.” —SD
* Subscription required. (Note: the vast majority of the pieces we recommend are free to read online. Occasionally, we will share a story that requires a subscription when we strongly believe that piece is worth your time.)
Roberto Lovato | Alta | January 4, 2022 | 5,279 words
For Alta, Roberto Lovato reports on the coming psychedelic therapy wave, led by Silicon Valley companies and investors who view psychoactive substances like mushrooms as the next disruptive technology. Treatment, however, is pricey: one session of guided ketamine therapy can cost as much as $2000. An analysis Lovato cites found that Black, Latinx, and Asian people have also been severely underrepresented in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy studies over the past 25 years. So who exactly will have access to these powerful medicines and experiences? Who will lead psychedelic policy reform? And how will this “psychedelic renaissance” play out in a place like San Francisco’s Mission District, which was once a center for psychedelic culture, and a majority Latino and non-white neighborhood before the techies drove them out? Lovato, who grew up in the Mission, weaves some of the neighborhood’s history with that of his own, and explains that people in this community, like the elders who came before them, have been exploring altered states of consciousness through sacred, mind-altering medicinas in underground and community-based spaces for a long time. This is a powerful, moving, yet sobering read on the tech-fueled psychedelic-industrial complex, spiritual extractivism (the mining of Indigenous tradition, ritual, and wisdom for profit), and the psychedelic underground. —CLR
Bathsheba Demuth | Granta | November 18th, 2021 | 4,746
“In the time and place where I was born, we were taught that the right way to consume a whale is with your eyes,” writes environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth. As she looks at the history of whaling in Russia, she considers the many ways in which whales have served humans in providing food, employment, and even housing. “I approach one house by crawling on my belly to peer down. In the dimness, the pale heavy brow of a whale’s skull holds back the earth. A bone wall. The people who lived here lived in the heads of whales.” Later, in speaking about her work to American audiences, she’s encounters rigid opposition to eating whales, from those who feel themselves superior partly because they hunt for food only at the grocery store. Demuth’s essay eloquently reminds us that reality is far more complicated than black and white; all of us inflict damage on the earth and on wildlife, in our own ways. “Here whales have been homes. A practical space, shelter and host to meals and births and deaths. Host to the least abstract kinds of love. Familial, romantic, parental. Here whales have made those intimacies, by giving people the capacity to live.” —KS
Oliver Milman | The Guardian | January 11, 2022 | 3,092 words
On New Year’s Day, I went for a walk in a local park and was struck by how much I was sweating in my huge coat. My lack of fitness was not the only culprit; it felt like a warm spring day in the middle of winter, an illusion rendered complete by a confused bumblebee buzzing past me. Oliver Milman provides an explanation for the unexpected bee in quoting Simon Potts, a bee expert: “There’s good evidence here in the UK that under climate change things are warming up early, so we’re got all these bees coming out early but not the flowers…” Bees are not the only insects suffering; early springs are unsettling the established life cycle of many insects. Even when rising temperatures benefit an insect population, it is not positive. In 2020, East Africa suffered its worst plague of locusts in decades. This fascinating and concerning essay reminds us that the disruption of these tiny insects is a crucial part of a very big problem. —CW
Ryan Hockensmith | ESPN | January 5, 2022 | 4,311 words
There’s nothing quite like it. You’re out an outdoor event when nature calls; looking around, your heart sinks when see that your only option is a flimsy plastic shed, behind the door of which untold horrors lurk. Odd as it is, though, you might fear that prospect a bit less after reading Hockensmith’s breezy tour through the history and importance of port-o-potties (and, crucially, the professional maintenance thereof). Whether following a crew of Buffalo sanitation workers undertaking a frenzied early-game half-suck in the parking lots around the Bills’ stadium or speaking with academics about the future of equitable sanitation, the piece never strays from its founding charm. By the time you’re finished, you may not be ready to leave indoor plumbing behind, but you’ll have a newfound equanimity the next time you do have to hazard a trip to the Box of Uncertainty. (Not always, though; as Hockensmith knowingly writes, Sometimes the cost of having to hold it isn’t as bad as the price of getting to go.) And no matter how much pre-gaming you’ve done, I promise you this: you’ll never try to run across the roof of one. —PR
Check out this detailed map of Greece from the early 18th century! It was published by prolific Dutch map publisher Pieter van der Aa and shows the region when it was part of the Ottoman Empire. Explore it here: https://t.co/8yugJ7KvqD https://t.co/oPFfsZFCSu Check out this d…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 14, 2022
Another snapshot from 1952. View is facing south along 14th St, from just north of Pa Ave NW. The Willard is on the far right. A streetcar begins the climb up 14th St. Behind the streetcar is a temporary bldg that had housed a welcome center for visitors during World War II. …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 14, 2022
Today in History - January 14 https://t.co/lQwTH6ixLw The Continental Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris on January 14, 1784, officially establishing the United States as an independent and sovereign nation. Continue reading. Click here to search Today in History for ot…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 14, 2022
Color Explosion; Beautiful Earth via NASA https://t.co/3I2CvBKf1S https://t.co/nWZzhlVp24
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 13, 2022
https://t.co/iimBk6vnxn
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 13, 2022
https://t.co/GPW1S46UV9
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 13, 2022
https://t.co/Xp3h446uOK
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 13, 2022
https://t.co/8lMwpLKXk2
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 13, 2022
https://t.co/N4rZkqhYMw
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 13, 2022
https://t.co/w9YEG5Y7DD
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 13, 2022
Today in History - January 13 https://t.co/mIamBeTLv3 On January 13, 1833, President Andrew Jackson wrote Vice President Martin Van Buren expressing his opposition to South Carolina's defiance of federal authority. Continue reading. Sophie Tucker was born Sonya Kalish to a…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 13, 2022
https://t.co/kgRsS94wMm
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 13, 2022
From a closer look at the future of food delivery at Eater to a thoughtful roundup of food-writing advice at Chapter 16, these five longreads about or related to food are our recent favorites.
What can we do about invasive species? Well, we can eat them. Imagine starter of cannonball jellyfish from coastal Georgia, main courses of Asian shore crab from Chesapeake Bay and dumplings stuffed with wild boar from Texas, and ice cream flavored with mugwort, whose aggressive roots push aside native plants. In this Popular Science story, Matt Hongoltz-Hetling introduces us to the invasivore movement.
Roman decided to make his appeal for invasivorism another way. That year, he started a website, EatTheInvaders.org, to try to convert foodies with an appetite for the unusual into believers. His weapon? Visions of plates piled high with periwinkle fritters and European crabcakes.
“Is the American dream never having to go outside?” For Eater, Jaya Saxena asks key questions in this deep dive into the future of the food delivery industry, as she recounts her experience at the Food on Demand conference in Las Vegas.
Walking out at the Bellagio, looking across the fountains at the faux Eiffel Tower sitting on top of the Cabo Wabo Cantina, I couldn’t think of a better place to sell the concept of everything you want, all the time, immediately. This is what the Food On Demand attendees want to build — celebrity concepts, national brands, and anything you could think to want brought to you with no time to second-guess your choices. If they’re bringing the world to the block, the block they’re modeling it after is the Vegas strip.
Last month, we picked Kim and Chantha’s Hippocampus essay for our Best of 2021: Personal Essays list.
“Accidental food writer” Kim Green, who’s co-writing Chantha Nguon’s memoir-in-recipes project, Slow Noodles, turned to Tennesee food writers and colleagues for food-writing guidance. The result is a lovely collection of advice (and recommended reads) from writers like memoirist Lisa Donovan, Knoxville author John Coykendall, and historian and social justice activist John Egerton.
“So many people are food writers but don’t call themselves food writers,” explains Nashville Eats author Jennifer Justus. She ticks off recent examples: Erica Ciccarone’s Nashville Scene story about the Nashville Food Project (where Justus now works); Steve Cavendish’s feature on the evolution of Porter Road Butcher; and, I would add, Justus’ elegy for the storied Hermitage Café. What those pieces have in common is humanity: They’re insightful, conscientious profiles of the people who create, and are enriched by, our local foodways, from businesses to food justice nonprofits.
Because food writing — or for that matter, all writing — is really about people.
Recently at LitHub, Mayukh Sen also shared great food-writing advice: “Tie food to feeling above all else.”
French cook and author Simone “Simca” Beck was a friend and cookbook collaborator of legendary chef Julia Child. But while Child became a household name, Beck never rose to stardom. As Mayukh Sen explores in this Hazlitt piece, she likely never wanted to.
People in Child and Beck’s orbit took note of friction between the two. “It became clear to me, in working so closely with Julia, that her relationship with Simca was growing more and more strained,” their editor Jones wrote in her 2009 memoir, The Tenth Muse. The two women “were like sisters who had long nourished each other but were ready now to go their separate ways.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about various slow movements, and was reminded of this meditative personal essay about the time-consuming, careful, yet transformative process of making rich, thick bone broth. As Samli stirs a pot of bones, she recalls growing up in North Carolina and how her grandmother tended fire, and reflects on other examples of tending, like one’s evolving language or growing and raising a child.
Back then, for me, everything was fast: dinner came from the drive-through, friendships blazed like matches, and love hit hard and quick. But, now, in my forties, I want to be a part of the making. I want to build something from its most elemental parts as my thoughts swirl in tandem with a wooden spoon. I would join the ranks of those who heated up water and waited, who dedicated their time, their hours, toward care. Learning a new task, like cooking or chanting a mantra, hems you in with humanity, and you take your turn, your moments or decades, in the timelessness of tending. Electric burners have replaced open fires, but work remains the same; we labor, and we wait.
Want more recommendations? Sign up for our weekly #LongreadsTop5 email, sent to your inbox every Friday.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter
https://t.co/xFfWQz06Nr
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 12, 2022
This map illustrates a 1908 treaty between France & Germany defining one of their colonial boundaries in Africa. Except for one small change, this line remains Cameroon's border with Chad, Central African Republic, the Republic of the Congo, & Gabon: https://t.co/X5I6foOoiW …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 12, 2022
Interested in further reading on plastics? Editor Seyward Darby recommends “How Plastic Liberated and Entombed Us” by Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader in our Top 5 Picks of the Week. Sign up to receive our Top 5 reads on Fridays.
At The Atlantic, Rebecca Altman examines the history of plastics, the first elements of which were conceived as a way to make money from the byproducts of antifreeze production. Altman helps us follow the carcinogenic compounds — and the money trail — through the Second World War straight into the American living room (Tupperware parties!) and out the back door with the trash, as disposable plastics were heavily marketed to keep profits flowing.
The piece is a fascinating history lesson on how humans prioritize short-term profits and immediate convenience over the future of the planet. While the Earth absorbs capitalism’s toxic byproducts and climate change is in full swing, we tout recycling, which for plastics is fraught, complicated, and largely unsuccessful.
Dad once believed that plastics could be reused indefinitely. I imagine that, maybe, he thought plastics, like their makers, deserved the chance to begin again. When Union Carbide downsized in the 1970s, Dad took severance and stayed home with my siblings until he could figure out what a life beyond plastics might look like. The answer, it turned out, was public administration: For a time, he ran my hometown’s recycling program. Recycling, though, never lived up to Dad’s ideal. Of all the plastics made over his lifetime, less than 10 percent has been effectively repurposed.
This failure, like so many other aspects of our relationship with plastics, is often framed in terms of individual shortcomings; plastics’ producers, or the geopolitics that have made plastics so widespread, are rarely called out. But to read plastics’ history is to discover another story: Demand for plastic has been as manufactured as plastics themselves. Society is awash in throwaway plastics not because of the logic of desire but because of the logic of history and of integrated industrial systems.
For decades, the industry has created the illusion that its problems are well under control, all while intensifying production and promotion. More plastics have been made over the past two decades than during the second half of the 20th century. Today, recycling is a flailing, failing system—and yet it is still touted as plastics’ panacea. No end-of-the-pipe fix can manage mass plastics’ volume, complex toxicity, or legacy of pollution, and the industry’s long-standing infractions against human health and rights.
Baby Stars in the Orion Constellation via NASA https://t.co/qVhZy7Pp4R https://t.co/JheQKxSBzd
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 12, 2022
5510 Connecticut Ave NW in Chevy Chase has hosted a series of restaurants: the Chevy Chase Inn, on left, was followed by Barnhart's in the 1950s. The Piccadilly, opened in 1964, was one of DC's few English restaurants. It was replaced in 1989 by @ParthenonDC, still going str…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 12, 2022
Today in History - January 12 https://t.co/pQhbabZXz3 On January 12, 1777 Padre Thomas Pena, under the direction of Padre Junipero Serra, officially founded Mission Santa Clara de Asis, the eighth of California's twenty-one missions. Continue reading. Click here to search …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 12, 2022
When WHFS took beloved deejay Damian Einstein off the air in 1989, 8,000 fans staged a "grass-roots rebellion" at Joe’s Record Paradise in Wheaton, Maryland. https://t.co/qwT3vYPNc1 When WHFS took beloved deejay Damian Einstein off the air in 1989, 8,000 fans staged a "grass…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 12, 2022
It's hard to believe now, but now-defunct Jackson City in #ArlingtonVA was once the Monte Carlo of the east. https://t.co/KLVcpYULxx It's hard to believe now, but now-defunct Jackson City in #ArlingtonVA was once the Monte Carlo of the east. https://t.co/KLVcpYULxx — Bound…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 12, 2022
Has is really been 30 years since #Nirvana hit No. 1? #Nevermind don't answer that... (See what we did there?) Instead, let's relive the band's historic gig at the old @930Club. #DCHistory https://t.co/6X9JbqpArn Has is really been 30 years since #Nirvana hit No. 1? #Nevermi…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 11, 2022
Today, #Alexandria's #DelRay is the home of quaint homes and tree lined streets. 120 years ago, it was a hotbed of illicit activity. #AlexandriaVA https://t.co/MGzFt8S6Er Today, #Alexandria's #DelRay is the home of quaint homes and tree lined streets. 120 years ago, it was a…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 11, 2022
The Milky Way's Supermassive Black Hole Has a Leak via NASA https://t.co/1DLnYzFj94 https://t.co/Nsdhcnok6Q
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 11, 2022
Castle William looks lonely on this manuscript map created around 1736. Today the rebuilt bastion fort is known as Fort Independence, and is a Massachusetts state park. Zoom in here: https://t.co/1yskiDSMPo https://t.co/4ljUYyTy0R Castle William looks lonely on this manuscrip…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 11, 2022
Vintage postcard of the elegant Alban Towers apartment building, designed in a Gothic Revival style by Robert O. Scholz, built in 1929 at the intersection of Massachusetts and Wisconsin Avenues NW across from the National Cathedral. https://t.co/rBw4B6R4Rc Vintage postcard of …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 11, 2022
Today in History - January 11 https://t.co/edzjjpMwZR Alexander Hamilton, the first treasury secretary of the United States, was born on January 11 in either 1755 or 1757, on the Caribbean Island of Nevis in the British West Indies. Continue reading. Alice Paul, chief stra…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 11, 2022
The #longreads hashtag on Twitter is filled with great story recommendations from people around the world. Throughout the year, Pravesh Bhardwaj posts his favorite short stories on Twitter, and then in January, we get to share his favorites with you to enjoy in the year ahead.
***
Starting with Kevin Barry’s “That Old Country Music” from Electric Lit to Aleksandar Hemon’s “Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls” from The Baffler, I posted 276 stories in 2021. Here are the ten I most enjoyed reading.
Brandon Taylor’s Real Life was shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 2020. He followed it with the short story collection Filthy Animals, published in June, 2021. The following story is set in the world of academia — Brandon Taylor’s Macondo.
The famous black writer was in town to give a reading, and Coleman was not sure if he would go. He had known the famous black writer for a few years, but only indirectly. They had many friends in common and had gone to the same university, though years apart. The famous black writer had a kind of totally useless fame, which was to say that he was notable among a small group of people interested in highly experimental fiction that was really memoir but also a poem. The famous black writer had built a reputation for pyrotechnic readings that sometimes included slideshows of brutalized slave bodies and sometimes involved moan-singing. Coleman had watched videos of the famous black writer and had felt a nauseating secondhand embarrassment, thinking Is this how people see me?
The famous black writer was handsome—tall, with striking bone structure, and a real classic elegance. He looked like an adult, like a finished version of an expensive product. His hair was quite architectural. The night of the reading, he wore a mohair coat and slim-cut, all-black ensemble right out of a photograph from the 1950s.
Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was a sensational debut collection of short stories. Since reading it, I have been looking forward to his next work. The following story appeared in The New Yorker.
Back in the nineteen-fifties, when old Mian Abdullah Abdalah rose to serve as Pakistan’s Federal Secretary Establishment, a knee-bending district administration metalled the road leading from the Cawnapur railway station to his Dunyapur estate. They also pushed out a telephone line to his farmhouse, the first phone on any farm in the district. Even now, thirty years later, there was no other line nearby. A single wire ran many forlorn miles from Cawnapur city through the flat tan landscape of South Punjab, there on the edge of the Great Indian Desert, then alongside the packed-dirt farm tracks laid out in geometric lines, and finally entered the grounds of a small, handsome residence built in the style of a British colonial dak bungalow.
Now, for the second time in a month, the Chandios had stolen a section of the telephone wire, which served for all the area as a symbol of the Dunyapur estate’s preëminence. The Chandio village sat far from the road at the back end of the estate, buried in an expanse of reeds and derelict land, dunes that had never been cleared. Testing Mian Abdalah’s grandson, Sohel, who had returned from college in America six months earlier and moved onto the estate, they had been amusing themselves and bearding him by cutting out lengths of the wire that passed near their village and selling them for copper somewhere across the Indus.
The current pandemic has changed our lives; I am one of those who felt that 2021 was tougher than 2020. Hilma Wolitzer’s story, published in her collection, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket tells a tender but sweeping story of a decades-long marriage.
I used to look at Howard first thing in the morning to see if he was awake, too, and if he wanted to get something going before one of the kids crashed into the room and plopped down between us like an Amish bundling board. Lately, though, with the children long grown and gone to their own marriage beds, I found myself glancing over to see if Howard was still alive, holding my breath while I watched for the shallow rise and fall of his, the way I had once watched for a promising rise in the bedclothes.
Whenever I saw that he was breathing and that the weather waited just behind the blinds to be let in, I felt an irrational surge of happiness. Another day! And then another and another and another. Breakfast, vitamins, bills, argument, blood pressure pills, lunch, doctor, cholesterol medicine, the telephone, supper, TV, sleeping pills, sleep, waking. It seemed as if it would all go on forever in that exquisitely boring and beautiful way. But of course it wouldn’t; everyone knows that.
This story was selected as an O. Henry Prize winner in 2021.
My sister threw upon the door so that it banged against the little console table she kept by the entrance. “Silas,” she said breathlessly, before even removing her coat, “I have to tell you something.” Which was enough to make me feel trapped, as though the words out of her mouth were expanding and filling up the space in her tiny apartment. I told her to calm down and apologized, and then I began making excuses for myself. I had assumed she would be angry at me because of the previous night, so I was primed for what she might say when she got home from work.
“Don’t be so defensive,” Bernice said. “I’m not talking about that.” She tapped my legs so I would move them and then plopped down next to me on the love seat. The chill from outside clung to her body. I saved my reformatted CV, set my laptop on the floor, and listened.
The man who sang out of tune had been waiting for her again. He had started standing near the card shop on Amsterdam Avenue during her lunch hour two weeks earlier, and she had quickly noticed his repeated presence. As she passed him that afternoon, he faced her directly and gave her a meaningful look, which was more than he had ever done before. “But all he did after that was keep belting it out in that terrible voice,” she told me. “A sentimental song, you know? The sweetness of making love in the morning.” Even though he was thin and light skinned and wore those big, clunky headphones—“ Not my type at all,” she said—Bernice did find him somewhat handsome. But since he didn’t say anything, she just went inside the shop.
Lauren Groff had a lovely novella What’s the Time, Mr.Wolf? published in The New Yorker as well, but this story is special and carries a punch.
Pretend, the mother had said when she crept to her daughter’s room in the night, that tomorrow is just an ordinary day.
So the daughter had risen as usual and washed and made toast and warm milk for her brothers, and while they were eating she emptied their schoolbags into the toy chest and filled them with clothes, a toothbrush, one book for comfort. The children moved silently through the black morning, put on their shoes outside on the porch. The dog thumped his tail against the doghouse in the cold yard but was old and did not get up. The children’s breath hovered low and white as they walked down to the bus stop, a strange presence trailing them in the road.
When they stopped by the mailbox, the younger brother said in a very small voice, Is she dead?
The older boy hissed, Shut up, you’ll wake him, and all three looked at the house hunched up on the hill in the chilly dark, the green siding half installed last summer, the broken front window covered with cardboard.
The sister touched the little one’s head and said, whispering, No, no, don’t worry, she’s alive. I heard her go out to feed the sheep, and then she left for work. The boy leaned like a cat into her hand.
He was six, his brother was nine, and the girl was twelve. These were my uncles and my mother as children.
Lisa Taddeo won her first Pushcart Prize for this story. Her novel Animal was published in 2021.
In a small wooden box at her nightstand she kept a special reserve of six joints meticulously rolled, because the last time she’d slept with someone on the regular he’d been twenty-seven and having good pot at your house means one extra reason for the guy to come over, besides a good mattress and good coffee and great products in a clean bathroom. At home your towels smell like ancient noodles. But at Joan’s the rugs are free of hair and dried-up snot. The sink smells like lemon. The maid folds your boxers. Sleeping with an older woman is like having a weekend vacation home.
Mary Morris’ story is one of heartache and loss, about a family and their newly found rescue dog.
The dog is a rescue. He was dumped from a moving car right in front of Dr. Katz’s office. Pete, the vet technician, was on the stoop, smoking a cigarette, when it happened. Dropped like a sack of potatoes, Pete told Dr. Katz. Pete picked up the dog—a mangy black-and-white with deep dark eyes—and brought him to Dr. Katz, who was finishing up a Rottweiler with glass in its paw. The dog is a mongrel—a Lab and something-else mix. Maybe shepherd or border collie. Dr. Katz isn’t sure. A gentle dog. About two years old. He is mostly white but with a black tail and black patches, including one that encircles his left eye. The minute Roger Katz lays eyes on the dog he knows he’ll call him Pirate.
Roger wasn’t planning on adopting a dog. It’s kind of a joke among his wife, children, friends, and extended family. The cobbler’s family has no shoes. The Katz family has no pets. They’d had the occasional fish and hamster—none of which had survived very long in that household. But never a cat and never a dog. In fact, Roger’s name is a bit of a joke for his line of work. Katz Animal Care. Danny, his middle child, had thought up the motto: “We do dogs. And Katz too.” But the family itself has never had either of these as a pet.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Breynah’s story about a father and his writer son is a part of his celebrated collection Friday Black.
“What are you looking for?” said a woman who I hoped knew I was already lost and scared. She stood in front of me in purple scrubs and colorful nurse-type shoes. Her brown hair was spun into something that let everyone know she was very busy and hadn’t slept in a long time. The tone of her voice, spiced with the Bronx, said I was one of many inconveniences in her life.
“I’m looking for my dad; he just came through here a second ago.”
“Is that all?” She tapped her clipboard with a pen. “What department?” I had no idea what department my father was looking for, so I told her the truth about that. “Well, I don’t know how you don’t know, but —” She was about to take great pleasure in telling me that I was in this situation due to my own incompetence and that even though she could not help me, she herself was very competent. I walked away from her before she could finish.
Sally Rooney won an O. Henry Prize for this story in 2021. Her third novel Beautiful World, Where Are You was published last year.
At twenty past twelve on a Wednesday afternoon, a woman sat behind a desk in a shared office in Dublin city center, scrolling through a text document. She had very dark hair, swept back loosely into a tortoiseshell clasp, and she was wearing a dark-gray sweater tucked into black cigarette trousers. Using the soft, greasy roller on her computer mouse she skimmed over the document, eyes flicking back and forth across narrow columns of text, and occasionally she stopped, clicked, and inserted or deleted characters. Most frequently she was inserting two full stops into the name “WH Auden,” in order to standardize its appearance as “W. H. Auden.” When she reached the end of the document, she opened a search command, selected the Match Case option, and entered “WH.” No matches appeared. She scrolled back up to the top of the document, words and paragraphs flying past illegibly, and then, apparently satisfied, saved her work and closed the file.
At one o’clock she told her colleagues she was going to lunch, and they smiled and waved at her from behind their monitors. Pulling on a jacket, she walked to a café near the office and sat at a table by the window, holding a sandwich in one hand and a copy of “The Brothers Karamazov” in the other. At twenty to two, she looked up to observe a tall, fair-haired man entering the café. He was wearing a suit and tie, with a plastic lanyard around his neck, and was speaking into his phone. Yeah, he said, I was told Tuesday, but I’ll call back and check that for you. When he saw the woman seated by the window, his face changed, and he quickly lifted his free hand, mouthing the word Hey. Into the phone, he continued, I don’t think you were copied on that, no. Looking at the woman, he pointed to the phone impatiently and made a talking gesture with his hand. She smiled, toying with the corner of a page in her book. Right, right, the man said. Listen, I’m actually out of the office now, but I’ll do that when I get back in. Yeah. Good, good, good to talk to you.
Te-Ping Chen’s debut collection In Land of Big Numbers was included in Barrack Obama’s favorite reads of 2021. This story is about a flower shop assistant’s involvement with a professional who has a fountain pen that costs more than the assistant’s yearly salary.
The man who lived upstairs had died, and it had taken the other tenants days to notice, days in which the sweetly putrid scent thickened and residents tried to avoid his part of the hall, palms tenting their noses as they came and left. At last someone sent for the building manager, who summoned his unemployed cousin to break the lock and paid him 100 yuan to carry the body down the three flights of stairs.
There was a squabble as the residents who inhabited the adjoining rooms argued that they should have their rent lowered; the death was bad luck. Xiaolei stood listening as the building manager shouted them down. She felt sorry for the man who had died, whom she recalled as middle-aged, with tired, deep-set eyes, a chain-smoker who’d worked at the local post office. She supposed that if she ever asphyxiated or was stabbed overnight, the same thing would happen to her.
***
Be sure to check out Pravesh Bhardwaj‘s story picks from 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015.
Overreact much? #OTD 1917, suffragists began what one newspaper called "the most militant move ever made by the suffragists of this country"... It involved standing quietly outside the #WhiteHouse gates with signs. #DChistory https://t.co/hBB9jvpLtg Overreact much? #OTD 1917…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 10, 2022
Interested in what our scan team was up to last year? Read our latest blog post highlighting newly scanned maps of 2021! Read post here: https://t.co/7Ou5tOuVg5 https://t.co/DX6RT3bBe2 Interested in what our scan team was up to last year? Read our latest blog post highlightin…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 10, 2022
Sidney Poitier's Visit to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory via NASA https://t.co/UD2TLiySEP https://t.co/T4GD1XSWcD
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 10, 2022
This colorful map of the Danish capital of Copenhagen once belonged to US President Millard Fillmore: https://t.co/MTGnd0UhuA https://t.co/uu3oKdb1nb This colorful map of the Danish capital of Copenhagen once belonged to US President Millard Fillmore: https://t.co/MTGnd0UhuA…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 10, 2022
A chartered Capital Transit bus, sometime in the early 1950s deposits sightseers (a class field trip?) at the entrance to the grounds of Mount Vernon. https://t.co/wQOn2cicLH A chartered Capital Transit bus, sometime in the early 1950s deposits sightseers (a class field trip?)…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 10, 2022
Today in History - January 10 https://t.co/AzAAkRpYUt On January 10, 1861, delegates to the Florida Convention in Tallahassee voted to secede from the United States of America. Continue reading. Click here to search Today in History for other historic moments.
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 10, 2022
https://t.co/3wWCNxVNl6
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 10, 2022
https://t.co/IWgZDVOOVf
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 10, 2022
https://t.co/MudCBM4mHD
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 10, 2022
https://t.co/dZNUaDV4yS
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 10, 2022
https://t.co/wpaiUQCYk9
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 10, 2022
https://t.co/DvsRSK3AUU
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 10, 2022
https://t.co/RGoqjfV91Y
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 9, 2022
“In its thirst for blood and its rage for vengeance, the mob has blindly, boldly and defiantly supplanted sheriffs, constables and police.” - Frederick Douglass, Metropolitan AME Church, January 9, 1894. #DCHistory https://t.co/EFBIvheNJk “In its thirst for blood and its rag…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 9, 2022
St. Thomas Episcopal Church, at 18th and Church St NW, designed by Theophilus Chandler in the English Gothic style and completed in 1899. Destroyed by arson in 1970. The site was recently redeveloped with a large, boxy structure that includes housing and a new church. …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 9, 2022
Today in History - January 9 https://t.co/BvQWkg0m9P On January 9, 1788, Connecticut ratified the Constitution, becoming the fifth state in the Union. Continue reading. The Fisk School, forerunner of Fisk University, convened classes for the first time on January 9, 1866, …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jan 9, 2022