A beautiful homage to swimming. Diane Mehta explores what swimming means to her, alongside some keen observations of those she shares the pool with.
I observed other swimmers intensely, memorising their moves, admiring their technique, and I probably seemed a little creepy. Instead of dreading the hard slap of cold water, I let it flow over me and refused to tense my shoulders. I told myself that, like ice, the water would help prevent migraines. When I pushed off the edge, I said to myself, “blue”, like a mantra key to the sublime. My mind emptied when I was submerged. Time was blue. My old friend who died was blue and every day she met me there underwater. Thinking got left behind as I entered the thrill of that quiet blue world.
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After an annoyingly enlightening Dry January this year, I was on the lookout for non-alcoholic beverage options that would not only taste great but also replicate, at least in part, the ritual of a rewarding nightcap. That quest led me to Athletic Brewing, which makes non-alcoholic beers that taste amazingly like beer beer. (And high-quality beer at that; their Hazy IPA is nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.) It was no surprise then that I found myself frequently nodding in agreement—along with other imbibers, I’m sure—while reading Gabriella Paiella’s piece about how Athletic found a way to make a great product and take the social sting out of teetotaling.
And that might be the single most appealing thing that Athletic has provided people. We’re already in an existing nationwide loneliness epidemic. If you’re not drinking alcohol, for whatever reason—from sobriety to marathon training—it can add to the sense of isolation.
Even if chugging beer isn’t physically healthy, there’s something about cracking open a cold one around other people that is. Athletic proved that it doesn’t have to be alcoholic to provide the same much-needed ritual pleasure.
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The incalculable human cost of institutionalization. An homage to rappers gone far too soon. A profile on the trans son of an anti-trans zealot. A summer camp that helps children to process grief, and bearing witness to the survivors of the 2020 explosion at the Port of Beirut.
Jennifer Senior | The Atlantic | August 7, 2023 | 13,585 words
Fair warning, dear reader: This will be among the best stories you read this year. Prepare yourself to be wrecked. In this masterpiece of longform journalism, Jennifer Senior reports on her aunt Adele, a woman later diagnosed with Coffin-Siris syndrome 12, a genetic condition that manifests in intellectual disability and physical delays. Adele was institutionalized at 21 months old on the advice of doctors who insisted that a care placement was the best thing for her, leaving her older sister Rona bereft “as though she’d lost an arm or a leg.” At its core this story is about trauma and loss, suffered chiefly by Adele who was deprived of her family and early chances to expand her intellectual capacity, warehoused in the notorious Willowbrook State School. The shockwaves of loss extend outward to Adele’s mother, father, and sister, deprived of Adele’s presence in their lives, and to society at large, deprived of Adele and the person she could have become had she received more enlightened, loving care much earlier in life. Glimpses into Adele’s psyche, including her need for order, her penchant for needlepoint, and delight in matching her clothing, hint at the contours of Adele’s personality. Senior, in trying to name her aunt’s condition to attempt to understand the scope of loss, confronts the many ethical concerns of writing about someone who is not able to give consent. Tracing her aunt’s living conditions and likely treatment at Willowbrook makes for extremely difficult, but absolutely necessary reading, to ask and attempt to answer a vital question: How do you tally the cost when, despite the best of intentions, we fail to provide essential care to the most vulnerable among us? —KS
Danyel Smith | The New York Times Magazine | August 8, 2023 | 4,548 words
Things don’t always match up as neatly as this: Exactly 50 years ago tonight, a young woman named Cindy Campbell threw a back-to-school party in their Bronx apartment building’s rec room. The DJ was her older brother, known as Kool Herc; the ensuing soirée would come to be known as the night hip-hop was born. If you’ve been on the internet anytime this week, of course, you probably already know the broad outlines of this story; celebrating the culture’s golden anniversary has become the most ubiquitous editorial peg in recent memory. Every outlet imaginable has done every story imaginable—and NYT Mag’s special issue has some of my favorites, from Tom Breihan’s Too Short profile to Niela Orr’s exploration of the norm-breaking current generation of female artists. But Danyel Smith’s elegy delivers something altogether different. Death has long lurked within hip-hop, as it does within most creative pursuits; however, given this country’s systemic ills that face the culture’s overwhelmingly Black artists, the actuarial tables here tip ominously askew. Lives cut agonizingly short by violence, by health, by drugs, by flukey tragedy. Smith contends with all of these in turn, saying the names of the people who matter to many of us, but are anonymous to many others. This is a tally I’ve been keeping and a story I’ve been telling — conversationally, journalistically, eulogistically, bitterly, in novel form — since the late 1980s, she writes. Her three-plus decades as a journalist and a fan have given her a cruel proximity to these tragedies, and you feel the accrual of that pain in her writing. Yet, as Smith so often does, she manages to end the piece by embracing life; the final act is so buoyant, so transcendent, so defiant, that you’ll likely run it back just to re-experience the frisson it causes. In another piece of synchronicity, this essay was published on the death day of one of my favorite artists, Sean Price, and I’d woken up that morning with hip-hop’s mortality on my mind. Even if he and the rest of these dearly departed never get the credit they so richly deserve, pieces like Smith’s give me hope that they’ll never be forgotten. —PR
Christopher Mathias | Huffington Post | June 30, 2023 | 7,864 words
Thisis how you write a story about a moral panic: You call it dehumanizing and terrifying, you don’t entertain even an ounce of both sides-ism, and you center the targets of the panic without stripping them of agency. Kudos to Christopher Mathias, one of the best reporters covering right-wing extremism in America, for his profile of Renton Sinclair, the trans son of a zealous anti-trans advocate. Renton’s mother, a former Miss America contestant, has used him to advance her odious agenda. Here Mathias lets Renton tell his story, on his terms. It contains chapters about his mother putting him in conversion therapy, overlooking his suicide attempt, cursing the testosterone that sustains him, and humiliating him before national audiences. But Renton’s story is also about resilience, respect, and joy. He has a message for trans people afraid to come out because they fear a loved one might abandon them. “That is 100% not on you,” he says. “It doesn’t mean you’re fucking bad. It doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It doesn’t mean there’s something broken with you. That is someone else being fucked up.” Amen. —SD
Mitchell Conksy | The Walrus | August 9, 2023 | 3,500 words
At Camp Erin, a group of boys from the same cabin name three caterpillars Gerry, Larry, and Harry. It’s one of several small details sprinkled throughout this beautiful essay that is incredibly affecting. These boys are having fun—rolling down hills, dancing on stages, naming caterpillars—despite having recently lost their dads. Camp Erin recognizes that children process grief differently from adults, that they can transition from devastation to joy in a moment, and that joy is still worth celebrating. I loved that these kids had the respite of naming caterpillars, that grief didn’t weigh them down every second, and that “grief camp” encouraged this. The boys form a close bond with Mitchell Conksy, their counsellor, and his first-hand account of how he steers them into realizing they all share the loss of their fathers (Conksy included) is gentle and touching. I expected an essay on child grief to be gut wrenching, and while I did wipe away the odd tear, I came away feeling that Camp Erin was a special place. The children realize they are not alone and can talk about their grief. They also just have a summer camp. —CW
Tamara Saade | The Delacorte Review & Literary Hub | August 3, 2023 | 3,971 words
When a disaster strikes affecting thousands, the only way you can possibly begin to understand the toll is to learn the stories of survivors. On August 4th, 2020, 218 were killed and 7,000 injured in an ammonium nitrate explosion at the Port of Beirut. Through personal accounts, and as a way to confront her own trauma over the event, Tamara Saade bears witness to those that were there. “I had thought that telling the stories of other people would make writing about August fourth easier for me,” she writes. “But I came to see that it was as hard, if not harder, to do justice to these people and their stories of that day.” In this beautiful braided essay, Saade processes her own thoughts, reactions, and feelings, alongside those of the citizens she profiles in the aftermath of the explosions. Sentence by sentence, scene by scene, Saade’s measured prose makes cogent the post-blast chaos and confusion, creating order out of disorder, in a bold attempt to find peace where once was pandemonium. —KS
Audience Award
Here’s the piece our audience loved most, this week.
Jack Holmes | Esquire | August 1, 2023 | 6,470 words
Inconsistent potency makes doing fentanyl—already up to 50 times stronger than heroine—like playing a game of Russian roulette. Will you get the dose you can tolerate or will you take the hit that leads to overdose? For Esquire, Jack Holmes reports from Portland in Oregon, a state which decriminalized drug possession via Measure 110 in an attempt to treat drug abuse as a behavioural-health disorder. —KS
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Arthur Assaraf considers the time-shifting identities of his father and grandmother who both developed Lewy body dementia, a condition which for meant they thought they were living at a different time in their lives.
While I sat there sipping flat, caffeine-free Coke, which she insisted was the only correct form of Coke, she would tell me many stories about her life. Most of them did not make any sense. She told me, for instance, that she had been born in Morocco. As far back as we knew our family had lived in North Africa. She would also say that at some point the family ‘came back’ to France. I could not understand how you could return to a place you had never lived in before. She would show me pictures of palaces and say, look, this is where I was born, we were rich then, then we were poor, then we were rich again, then we had to leave.
My grandmother was born in 1921 in Oujda, on the border between Morocco and Algeria, to a Jewish family. Her family had roamed that land as far back as we can tell. And when the French came, they opened their mouths for colonialism, ate it, digested it, and made their own. When she told me she ‘returned’ to France when she left her native Morocco in 1956, this was not a lie: in her mind she had lived in an imaginary France her whole life. It is possible to be both native and a colonizer.
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Fifty years into hip-hop’s evolution, you’d be hard-pressed to name another artist with more influence and longevity than the man born Todd Shaw—or less attention from outside the culture. Tom Breihan doesn’t just give Too Short his flowers; he showers him with endless bouquets, making sure that New York Times readers know what the rest of us have known for decades. Life is Too Short.
This is an attitude that has continued to resonate in most rap subgenres, whether mainstream or underground. Too Short was among the first to articulate this worldview on record. He was among the first to prove you could present it to a large record-buying public without radio or marketing. He was among the first to demonstrate that rap could capture the imagination with grit rather than flash; among the first to tap into its vast audiences outside New York and Los Angeles; among the first to understand the winning combination of street talk and seismic slow-crawl bass lines. This is the “second billing” career Too Short has led: He may not always appear in people’s simple, canonical narratives of rap, but there is so, so much in the genre that, traced back to its origins, finds him somewhere remarkably near the source.
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The decision whether or not to have a child is one of the most consequential choices most people make. As I edge past my mid-thirties, it’s a question that has dominated my thinking. When faced with a dilemma I can’t solve, my usual strategy is to read. I order a bunch of books and immerse myself in other people’s experiences. It allows my thoughts to coalesce around a few themes; from there, I can see where I agree and where I diverge. To paraphrase Joan Didion, I read to understand what I think.
A decision as monumental as this is too complex for a straightforward pro/con list. Instead, I’ve found it useful to consider the choice through a variety of lenses. These will likely differ depending on the person and their life circumstances, but my considerations include: the practicalities of having a child as a queer woman in a lesbian relationship; the impact children might have on my often fragile mental health; how parenting would impede my freedom, in particular, my ability to write; and what it would mean to raise children as the devastating consequences of climate change worsen. I think about the impact a child would have on my finances, the lack of high-quality caregiving infrastructure available to me, and the physical toll birthing and raising a child would have on my wellbeing. Inevitably, I bump up against society’s judgments about women like me. The seminal book on the choice not to have children is called Shallow, Selfish and Self-Absorbed, which echoes the criticism directed at childfree women.
That having a child can even be considered a choice is a very contemporary idea. The first oral contraceptive pill was approved by the FDA in 1960. Before that, many women spent the majority of their lives either pregnant, worrying about becoming pregnant, or caring for small children. Following the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the rights of pregnant people have been dramatically eroded. Forty percent of women in the U.S. aged between 15 and 44 now live in states with limited or no access to an abortion. The freedom to choose whether or not to have a child is a privilege shaped by race, wealth, health, and citizenship status. Those of us who can choose should do so carefully, acknowledging that not everyone will be so fortunate.
In my own life, I’ve settled comfortably into the don’t know camp. My partner and I are happily cohabitating (living in so many different kinds of sin!) with our two cats. Our lives are full of travel and friends and work, and most days it doesn’t feel like anything is missing. There is no chance that we—two cis women—could get pregnant accidentally. If we decide to have a child, they would cost time, money, and intention, to create.
The internet is fullofguides that aim to streamline this decision and finally steer the reader toward the right choice. But there is no right choice when it comes to a question as monumental as creating life. There is no way to know which path will be the correct one. I find it much more interesting to explore the messy process of making a decision, of weighing the various factors against your own desires and preferences. In my view, how we think about the decision is as important as whatever the eventual outcome will be.
This reading list offers a range of perspectives that I hope will shape your thinking as you consider parenthood. From the impact of climate change to the ethical and philosophical dimensions of the choice, I’ve selected pieces that I hope will challenge our assumptions and encourage us to consider the question more deeply. I’ve also included stories that explore how this topic can be more complex for queer people, and how race and ethnicity shape both our historical and current approaches to child-rearing.
We may never be sure we are making the right decision, but we can strive to understand our choice’s contours thoroughly and fairly. For now, I am happy to embrace the uncertainty—to know that whatever the future might hold, I have found joy and contentment in the present.
The choice to have a child as climate change continues to warp our lives is fraught with fear and anxiety. This thoughtful essay refuses to shy away from the horrors of what’s unfolding, while also challenging the idea that individuals opting not to have children should be part of the solution. The author’s helpful reframing of climate catastrophe as a scourge fossil fuel companies must be held accountable for, rather than paid with reparations from our bodies, has stayed with me long after I finished reading. If concern for the climate is impacting how you think about your decision, I really recommend this piece. You may decide not to have children rather than subject them to the horrors of climate change—or you may benefit from realizing that climate change is a consequence of corporate greed, and instead refocus the blame where it belongs.
I remember, at one point, being distinctly aware of my mind – the conscious everyday mind that talks to itself and to other people, the self where language is loud – floating like pond scum on top of the vast, rich dark where I now labored, a wordless inner world of sensation and drive to which I had never before had access. I was two selves at once. A double consciousness. If I had to, I knew I could still speak to the people around me, but it seemed so silly and small up there. I let it go.
In this podcast, host Ashley C. Ford talks to well-known people about how they decided whether or not to have children while also considering the question for herself.
The choice to have a child is influenced by many factors, which vary depending on the identities of the prospective parents. This piece examines the history of Black motherhood and speaks with Black women who’ve decided not to become parents. US maternal death rates have risen sharply in recent years, with many experts predicting that they will continue to worsen. Black women are more than twice as likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth as white women. In this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that Black women are opting out of motherhood. This piece also rebuts the idea that childfree women don’t like children or that children won’t be an important part of their lives. Rather, it celebrates the decision to invest your time, resources, and energy into yourself. As Aria, a 28-year-old journalist from Long Island, tells the reporter, “My life is for me, my time is for me, my money is for me, it’s all for me. I am going to invest all of my energy and resources into making my life as excellent and comfortable and happy as possible.”
In the United States, Black women’s children were considered property, sources of wealth for white slave owners during slavery. As such, they didn’t belong to their parents, and their parents ultimately had no say over their care. That legal and historical framing of Black birth and motherhood echoes down through culture today, most prevalent in the phenomenon of state intervention in Black parenting that some have called Jane Crow.
Refinery 29 has also published a series of articles about queer families. Through articles, interviews and photo essays, the collection examines the challenges of queer parenthood and celebrates those who are challenging hetero- and cis-normative narratives of parenthood.
If my partner and I wanted to become parents, our first step would be to visit the fertility clinic. As with all queer couples, the work toward childbearing would begin long before conception. We would look at donors, test our hormones, and prepare to spend thousands. We would need significant medical intervention to do something many straight couples can do accidentally, and yet in our heteronormative society, these stories are rarely told. This expansive piece recalls the experiences of queer, trans, and non-binary people looking to become pregnant and bear children. Collectively, their stories highlight the persistent biases that exist in the medical community against trans and queer people. It is also a celebration of the families who strive to break down traditional, gendered ideas of what it means to have and create a family. Despite all the information that exists around birthing and raising children, there is very little that centers on queer and trans stories. This piece is an excellent place to start.
Obviously, the pregnancy and family-building processes aren’t easy or straightforward for all cishet pregnant people. When you’re a queer or trans person of color trying to start a family, though, things can be exponentially more complex.
When deciding whether or not to have children, people tend to draw on their emotions, instincts, memories, and desires. Few people actively consider the ethical dimensions of their decision. This piece argues that the decision to procreate needs to be thoughtfully considered through an ethical lens, particularly in light of the child’s inherent vulnerability and dependence: Choosing to have a child means taking responsibility for a new life. I enjoyed the clear, ethical framework this piece put forward, and how it locates the decision to have a child in a broader societal framework. It also reinforces the need for this decision to be a choice, rather than an inherent assumption, and calls on prospective parents to carefully analyze their decision before taking action.
No one says to a newly pregnant woman or the proud father of a newborn, “Why did you choose to have that child? What are your reasons?” The choice to procreate is not regarded as needing any thought or justification.
Strayed’s “Dear Sugar” columns have been collected in the book Tiny Beautiful Things, which has been adapted into a show for Hulu. Episode 3 of Season 1 is built around this column, examining the consequences of the protagonist’s decision to have a child.
Sometimes I just want someone to tell me what to do—and I can’t think of a wiser guide to all of life’s messy questions than Cheryl Strayed. In one of her most celebrated “Dear Sugar” columns, she responds to “Undecided,” who is considering the possibility of becoming a father. Strayed, of course, can’t answer that question, but she frames it as one of parallel lives. In one life, you bear children and devote yourself to parenting. In another, you don’t and devote yourself to other things. Neither choice is inherently better than the other, though you might find yourself better suited to a particular path. She encourages the questioner to write, to make lists about how he imagines his future life. It’s advice I’ve found to be very useful. She concludes by embracing the certainty that, whatever we choose, there’s no way to know the path not taken. That, she argues, is less a tragedy than an acceptance of the unknowable mysteries of life.
I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.
For me, the most useful resource toward making this decision has been other people’s stories. In her newsletter, Rosie Spinks writes about her decision to have a child and how, in the process of childbearing and rearing, she hopes to challenge the capitalistic instincts involved in modern parenting. She celebrates the chaos that comes from leaning into the messiness of life and embraces the human frailties that exist beyond the narrow lens of optimization. She quotes Kahlil Gibran’s poem “On Children”: “Your children are not your children. / They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.” This mystical perspective helps to deflate the self-importance that sometimes accompanies the decision, balancing it with the knowledge that whether or not you decide to have children, it is often a choice that’s beyond your control.
In my twenties, I used to observe the act of modern parenting as a kind of capitalist slog, where the goal is to optimize another first world consumer to succeed under this wretched system. I know that sounds dark, but I suppose that’s because back then, I subconsciously saw my own life that way, too. Bringing another human into that would only make that task harder—and submit someone else to the messiness, chaos, and disorder of life. Why would I do that to them, and to myself? The answer, I’ve come to find, is because doing so reminds you of how human you are.
Clare Egan is a queer freelance writer based in Dublin. She writes a regular newsletter and is working on her first book.
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I thought an essay on children dealing with grief would be unrelentingly sad—and it is, I got tearful a couple of times—but there are also moments of happiness in Michael Conksy’s beautiful essay. Grief is messy with no set rules, and the children actually have fun at the camp, which feels like a lovely release for them. As a camp counselor, Conksy shares an inside perspective of the camp techniques, and I came away feeling that this place really does make a difference.
Grief is non-linear. One day, three years after a death, grief can return and feel as extreme as it did in the immediate aftermath of the loss. The ultimate difference between child grief and adult grief, she said, is how children will re-grieve throughout their lives.
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