April 17, 2025 First Person The Marriage Dividend By Laurie Stone New York, November 9, 1965. Courtesy of AP Photo/Robert Goldberg. Something has changed since Richard and I got married in December. I’m not sure what. Have you ever looked in the mirror and noticed you are able to cock one eyebrow higher than ever before? I’m happier. I didn’t imagine I would feel this way when I went downstairs to his studio and said, “I think we should get married.” He looked up from his book and said, “Okay.” Was he bemused, half smiling? I can’t remember. It’s been three and a half months since we met with a judge in the courthouse in Hudson, where we live, and he pronounced us “married people.” Afterward, Richard and I had happy hour drinks on Warren Street with a friend. For the first few weeks, we imagined the marriage dividend was we wouldn’t get on each other’s nerves as much as before. This has proved untrue. Read More
April 15, 2025 First Person The Ghost of Reem Island By Mo Ogrodnik All images courtesy of the author. For the past decade, the “Ghost of Reem Island,” as she was referred to in the press, has haunted me. On December 1, 2014, Ala’a al-Hashemi, a Yemeni-born Emirati woman, murdered a Hungarian American schoolteacher in a public restroom in Abu Dhabi. The media cited the incident as a “lone act of terror.” I too was an American teaching in Abu Dhabi and, by a bizarre coincidence, had been spending an inordinate amount of time in public restrooms, photographing female bathroom attendants for a creative research project. More than ten years after the murder, I still find myself sifting through the little that was left behind—the government search-and-arrest video that went viral, news articles chronicling the political landscape of the time, and my own photographs of bathrooms and their attendants. Read More
April 9, 2025 First Person The End of Roadside Attractions By Jane Stern The UFO Welcome Center in Bowman, North Carolina, which was destroyed by a fire. Photograph courtesy of Jane Stern. I was fortunate to have traveled America’s blue highways in the golden age of roadside attractions. The year I fell in love with roadside attractions was 1971, when my husband, Michael, and I (newly married and fresh out of college) crisscrossed America, hunting for small-town cafés, diners, and BBQs, compiling a book that would be called Roadfood. Back then, to review these unheralded mom-and-pop cafés was strange. Foodies (a term that had yet to be popularized) were interested only in eating at gourmet bastions in big cities or abroad. These Continental restaurants were expensive; they served French or northern Italian food and had waiters wielding big pepper mills. It did not take us long to realize we liked eating and traveling more than we liked what we’d studied, so as card-carrying contrarians with a car and a few bucks in our pockets, we decided that simple American food needed a champion. We spent the next three years on the road, scouting out these places. We drove two hundred miles a day and ate (on average) ten meals a day. When we weren’t driving or eating, our attention was drawn to weird things by the side of the road. Read More
April 2, 2025 First Person Father and Mother By Constance Debré PHOTOGRAPH BY KALPESH LATHIGRA. The setting: sixties Paris, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, full of rich men’s sons, and their daughters, too. On my mother’s side there were four sisters, just as on my father’s side four brothers, the same madness on each side of the family, because families are always mad. She was the youngest, born in a château. When they met she was living in a large apartment on the rue Bonaparte, with the sister closest in age, the one who’s going to die of alcohol and pills. Overdose or suicide, hard to tell in these cases. The building belonged to her family, to their family, to my family, in the entrance hall there was a marble bust of an ancestral baron and they had cousins on every floor. Her own father, my grandfather, died when she was fourteen, he was also an MP, a government minister even, but he had been dead for a long time. Her mother, my grandmother, lived in the southwest with her dogs, and came to Paris from time to time to see what was happening. There were arguments, tears, scenes. Everyone in that family was violent. Aristocracy makes you crazy. Not because of the inbreeding, but because of faith. Faith that it is possible to be noble. In that family they raised children like they raised horses, to be beautiful. Being beautiful meant lots of different things. The rest was of no importance. Read More
March 26, 2025 First Person Tracings By Sarah Aziza At center, the author with her father and her grandmother. Photograph courtesy of Sarah Aziza. Occasionally, when we were small, our father spoke to us of geography. Daddy is from a place called Palestine, he said, in a lesson captured by my mother on the family’s camcorder. In the footage, my father sits in a small rocking chair, brown eyes intent, a little shy. My younger brother and sister are absorbed by the array of blocks on the floor, but I am close to my father’s feet, my fluffy blond head thrown back, mouth pink and agape. He holds up a globe, his fingers sliding toward a sliver of brown and green. He tilts it toward me to reveal cramped lettering: Israel/Palestine. Read More
March 13, 2025 First Person Self-Assessment By Devon Brody Alan Fears, A PATTERN OF BEHAVIOUR, 2017, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 40″ x 40″. From I’m OK, You’re OK, a portfolio in issue no. 229. Around this time last year, the USB hookup in my car stopped working. I started to listen to the radio more and began to buy CDs again, something I hadn’t done much since I was a teenager. Greg Mendez played a concert in Nashville, and before he went on, I bought two from his merch table: his self-titled album from 2023, and Live at Purgatory, from 2022. I put them in my car. I try not to skip songs on either one. But I am happy when I hear him introduce the sixth track on Live at Purgatory, “Bike.” It’s a short song. Mendez sings the lyrics only once. This is what I hear, which is different from what I see on Genius but is the same as in a handwritten lyric card I can partially see in a picture on Bandcamp: I wanna ride your brother’s bike I wanna stab his friends sometimes I wanna tell a million lies I wanna steal your partner’s heart I wanna turn your pain to art I wanna cry in your mother’s arms I wanna wear your daddy’s jeans I wanna drink the way he did I wanna smoke menthol cigarettes and I wanna fight I wanna fuck on ecstasy I wanna love, but what’s that mean? I wanna go back on EBT Read More