“To the Train Lady with Dark Brown Hair … :” Extraordinary Stories of Four Couples who Found Love via Small Ads

For The Guardian, Amelia Tait shares four stories of chance encounters and serendipitous reunions, along with the surprising history of the missed connection ad. She suggests that the world is full of connections waiting to be made, if only we stop staring at our phones.

They spoke for the entire five-hour duration of their flight; Darcy, who was in her 30s, told him about her job sorting out the “instant replays” for sports tournaments, and the pair told “stupid jokes” that made each other laugh. At one point, Scott asked Darcy if she was dating anyone. She hesitated. Technically she was, but she had already decided to break up with her boyfriend the night before, because they had been on the phone and he hadn’t stopped talking about his ex-wife. Darcy stumbled over Scott’s question. She couldn’t tell him the truth: “Well, I’m dating somebody, but I’m thinking about dumping him because I might like you.”

Scott got the hint and changed the subject. The pair enjoyed the rest of the flight together, but Darcy said goodbye abruptly when they landed – her boyfriend was picking her up from the airport, and in those days the people you were meeting could come right up to the gate. She saw Scott again by the luggage carousel while her boyfriend was busy smoking a cigarette – they shared a look. Then they shared another look. He left and turned back to look at her one last time. For weeks afterwards, Darcy couldn’t believe that she had just let him walk away.

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The Foreign Language That Changed My Teenage Son’s Life

Even as a young child, Paul Tough’s son had a tendency to go all in on new interests. “Max would go deep, finding satisfaction not just in the playing but also in the experience of plunging himself into a new and unfamiliar world and mastering all of its contours,” writes Tough. During the pandemic, Max—a shy kid—took up birding as a hobby, and Tough found that he began to interact more with other people. Then, when Max was 12, he decided to learn how to speak Russian, a seemingly random choice that ultimately opened him up to a whole new world. In this essay for The New York Times Magazine, Tough recounts a father-son trip they took to Uzbekistan, where Max could immerse himself in the language he had been studying. The piece is about learning to navigate and communicate in a foreign place, yes, but—more importantly—is about a parent learning how to sit back and watch their grown child navigate the world on their own.

There was a part of me that felt proud of his deep dives, but if I’m being honest, they often made me uneasy. When you’re a kid, knowing a ton about obscure subjects can be an early sign of intellectual curiosity, but just as often, it can be a symptom of misfiring neurons, an omen of future mental struggles. Sometimes the child who can tell you everything there is to know about dinosaurs or baseball statistics or the solar system grows up to be a groundbreaking scientist or a brilliant entrepreneur. Sometimes he just grows up to be a guy who never moves out of his parents’ basement.

As I watched Max walk off with a group of foreign strangers into an unknown land, it felt like a glimpse of my future, and his. I was slowing down, and he was speeding up.

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The Darkness That Blew My Mind

Tim Neville encounters himself in this piece—after immersing himself in darkness for a few days. His thought processes (and hallucinations) during this sensory deprivation are fascinating, and Neville does not hold back in sharing the places his mind takes him to.

At first the visions are fun, because they seem so real. I blink a dozen times to confirm that the room has indeed become a limestone cave illuminated by beams that shoot from my eyes. And the darkness is no longer monolithic, but swirls with shades of black and a parade of textures. Meanwhile, my proprioceptive senses have gone haywire. I take a bath, and when the water cools I can see my foot reach up to find the hot-water faucet handle. I can’t see any detail. My foot just looks like a darker, smoother patch of darkness, but there’s no mistaking that it’s there.

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Is It Even Possible to Become More Productive?

Deep work. Flow states. We’re awash in the language and concepts of “productivity,” all seemingly calibrated to help us escape digital distraction and answer the question of how to be more effective. But for someone like Esquire editor (and Longreads alum) Kelly Stout, who used to literally fantasize about having more work to do, immersing yourself in self-maximization raises some questions of its own.

The main question of my day, every day, was: How can I get myself into a flow state? I would sometimes overshoot the mark and get myself flowing on flow itself, leaving not much for the actual work. On Newport’s advice in Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, I planned out every minute of my day on a sheet of graph paper, dividing the day into optimistically labeled chunks. The joy I felt when I could actually produce was overwhelming yet relaxing. I felt like a hybrid vehicle at a stop sign: silent, sustainable, efficient, morally correct. But I despaired when, instead of using the designated hours for “deep work,” I used them to look at photos of my dog on my phone from when she was a puppy or write an email about a contract. I felt like a third grader telling the teacher his favorite subject was recess when I filled in “lunch!” at 12:30.

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Club Med

Colleges and graduate schools. Creative industries. Wall Street. Silicon Valley. Adderall is everywhere*, prescribed and taken by millions of people—some of them the thinkers who have advanced modern society, the visionaries who have created the art and entertainment we consume, the minds who have built the internet to which many of us are addicted. The nine dispatches in this Pioneer Works series (by Daniel Kolitz, Geoffrey Mak, Danielle Carr, Leon Dische Becker, Amber A’Lee Frost, P.E. Moskowitz, Joshua Tempelhof, Elena Comay del Junco, and Kendall Waldman) offer a glimpse into amphetamine culture. What is it like? Why is it so hard to quit? How did we get here? Taken together, they’re a fascinating collection of perspectives on the topic and show the lasting effects of the drug on multiple generations.

*Yes, there’s been an Adderall shortage, which is addressed in a number of these pieces.

On Adderall, I can’t tolerate music unless it’s excellent. I hear it all. Hi-hats pattering like fingernails tapping on glass. The terrifying serenity of a kick drum tuned to a minor key.

Geoffrey Mak

The trouble with taking Adderall for your Instagram addiction is that, neurochemically, amphetamines hook you deeper into the endless scroll. You can’t fix the Internet attention economy crisis with Adderall, because the Internet was made by people on Adderall, for people on Adderall. The more Adderall you take, the better the whole thing gets (by “better” I mean “worse”).

Danielle Carr

Given too much room to roam, an Adderall article or essay can become overly ambitious, wandering and sprawling out into a totally unreadable (and unpublishable) manifesto that usually ends up foundering under the weight of overload. Adderall might help you annex Poland, but you’re not gonna take Russia in winter.

Amber A’Lee Frost

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Endo Days

Endometriosis, a painful condition in which endometrial tissue grows outside the uterus, is poorly understood and hard to diagnose. In this piece for The Baffler, Jess McAllen describes what it’s like to navigate the confusing and toxic online world of endo care, especially the (mis)information found in community forums and the content shared by social media-savvy surgeon-influencers.

All told, the average time from onset of symptoms to a confirmed diagnosis is over seven years.

Seven years is a long time. In the absence of clarity or relief, what’s a patient in pain to do? Recently, a cottage industry operating mostly on social media has sprung up to address this longstanding lack, offering advice and services to thousands of sufferers who turn to the internet for answers. On Facebook, there is Nancy’s Nook, a two-hundred-thousand-member private group run by a retired nurse named Nancy Petersen—the “Nancy” referred to in the Endometriosis Summit video—who maintains an elite list of personally vetted “Nook surgeons.” Then there are the surgeons themselves, who sometimes comment on Facebook support pages, or, like Vidali, entice people via Instagram. Many of these self-identified “endo specialists” are out-of-network, which means the cost of their procedures is often out-of-pocket, without a guarantee of diagnosis. Or of relief: the recurrence rate of endo tissue after surgery can be as high as 67 percent, yet some surgeons promote their operations as a panacea in jaunty posts and videos. The incentives of social media have collided with the complexity of endometriosis to create an environment rife with false promises and conflicting information.

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The Hotel Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave

Mickey Barreto, a man who’d checked into room 2565 of the New Yorker Hotel for one night, was able to claim ownership of the entire building using an obscure New York housing law. How did he do it? Matthew Haag explains in this bonkers story.

While the lawyer scrambled to file a lawsuit to revert ownership of the hotel, Mr. Barreto sent off an email to Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, which manages the property, notifying it that he now owned it. A Wyndham representative asked for a litany of legal and sales documents to be sent as proof. (They were not.)

Mr. Barreto also sent a memo to M&T Bank, the hotel’s lender, and asked for all accounts to be put into his name. (They were not.)

Next, Mr. Barreto walked into the Tick Tock Diner, which is connected to the lobby by double doors. He dropped off a letter addressed to the owners. Monthly rent checks, he wrote, should be sent to a new address: Room 2565.

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