Author: Michelle Korhonen
Frank Zappa was an unruly figure of 1960s rock, a free-speech advocate and devout parodist defined by his opposition to authority. His albums assembled the bones of rock and roll into an idiosyncratic style coursing with disbelief at just about every aspect of the American zeitgeist: hippies, cars, college, drugs, California, and, eventually, yuppies. He also hated record labels, government, and the police, positions stoked by a brief jail stint at age 24 due to charges of “conspiracy to commit pornography,” after an undercover vice cop entrapped him into making a fake, audio-only sex tape. The experience changed his life:…
A double-barrel colostomy is a type of ostomy surgery that creates two openings in the abdomen, called stomas. These stomas are connected to the colon, which is the large intestine. The purpose of a double-barrel colostomy is to divert stool from the colon to the outside of the body. This may be necessary for a variety of reasons, including:Bowel obstruction: A blockage in the colon that prevents stool from passing through.Bowel perforation: A hole in the colon that allows stool to leak into the abdominal cavity.Bowel cancer: Surgery to remove a section of the colon that contains cancer.Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD): Chronic inflammation of…
Before our first child was born last year, my wife and I often deliberated about the kind of parents we wanted to be—and the kind we didn’t. We watched families at restaurants sitting in silence, glued to their phones, barely taking their eyes off the screens between bites. We saw children paw at their parents, desperate to interact, only to be handed an iPad to keep quiet. We didn’t want to live like that. We vowed to be present with one another, at home and in public. We wanted our child to watch us paying attention to each other and…
Calvin Lowe and his son, Tyler. Calvin Lowe hide caption toggle caption Calvin Lowe Calvin Lowe and his son, Tyler. Calvin Lowe This story is part of the My Unsung Hero series, from the Hidden Brain team. It features stories of people whose kindness left a lasting impression on someone else. In 2006, Calvin Lowe was facing his idea of a nightmare. His four-year-old son Tyler needed to have a serious dental surgery. On the day of the operation, he and his wife brought Tyler to Children’s Hospital Colorado in Denver. “As we sat in the waiting room, waiting for…
What is the opposite of poetry? What slows the spark and puts sludge in the veins? What deadens the language? What rears up before you with livid and stupefying power—in the middle of the night, in the middle of the day—to make you feel like you’ll never write a good line again?Stuff.Not physical stuff, but mental stuff. You know: things you should have taken care of. The unanswered email. The unpaid bill. The unvisited dentist. The undischarged obligation. The unfinished job. The terrible ballast of adulthood.“In the last two days I have written thirty-two letters … The trouble is, I…
Dylan Longton really knows how to flip an egg. A 33-year-old line cook at an unassuming diner just outside Albany, New York, Longton can make an omelet do a backflip and land it smoothly right back into its pan cradle. And people love him for it. Not just people in Albany, or people in New York. People all around the world, sometimes more than a thousand at once, tune in on TikTok to watch Longton flip eggs, and reheat bacon and homefries on the grill.Longton has been doing this a long time—the egg-flipping, that is. He has worked at the…
In May 2022, an air-traffic controller in Florida received a frantic call. The pilot of a single-engine Cessna 208 had collapsed, leaving the sole passenger—with no experience at all flying a plane—to fend for himself in the cockpit. Remarkably, the controller was able to direct the passenger to take the controls, reach an airport, and safely land.The story went viral for several days, perhaps in part because we can all imagine ourselves in that nightmare come true. Could we figure out what to do? Would we live to tell the tale? In the past, I would have asked myself those…
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Jennifer Senior, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. She has written for The Atlantic about one family’s search for meaning in the aftermath of 9/11, the singular heartbreak of adult friendships, and…
after Riding Over the Brooklyn Bridge, by Robert Wood Lynn I dissolved into unemployment and I cherished the worst of it. Dollar Pizza’s nails in my stomach and the long mountains of Pennsylvania’s rain in my midnight’s future: New York was over. Or at least invisible to my desire, which was not, it turns out, a reliable strategy for survival. Even when I turned my body into an envy others could inhabit long enough for the city to feel small, I was just waiting for the silence to resume. One night the smell of fresh-poured asphalt cooling in the acid…
Earlier this year, I moved from San Francisco to New York with my dogs, kids, and husband. My family rented an apartment. And once we figured out that we liked it here and wanted to stay, we looked to buy a place.For roughly 11 minutes, before realizing that literally any other activity would be a better use of our time. Brooklyn has 1.1 million housing units. Just a dozen of them seemed to fit our requirements and were sitting on the market. All of the options were too expensive. And that was before factoring in the obscene cost of a…