My mother has a younger sister, who I will call my aunt, because she is, and who has been, for as long as I have known her, what the wider family politely refers to as "the eccentric one.
I have been to Tokyo five times in the last decade. I keep going back, partly because the food is the best in the world by almost any metric I can apply to…
Kobe Bryant said, somewhere in the last few years of his life, that the biggest mistake we make is thinking we have time.
I want to write about a small habit I have come to associate, over the last decade or so, with a particular kind of intelligence that the wider culture does not, on the available evidence, fully recognize as intelligence.
I want to write about a small internal shift I have, in the last few years, started noticing in myself, and that I am not yet sure I trust enough to fully describe, but that I think is worth setting down before I lose track of how it actually arrived.
I want to write about a small piece of internal arithmetic that I have, in the last few years, started running about arguments, and that has, in some real way, changed how I conduct most of the disagreements in my adult life.
My father, in the years since he turned about sixty-five, has become a different man than the one who raised me.
My sister and I have been, for about fifteen years now, in a particular kind of estrangement that neither of us, at any point, made any visible decision to enter.
I noticed something last week, on a Sunday afternoon in Bangkok, that I have not been able to put down since.
I want to write about something slightly embarrassing, partly because it is true, and partly because the path out of the belief was, in my case, a particular piece of evidence that I have not, in the years since, ever heard a conspiracy debunker bring up.
I have lived, in adult life, in London, in Sydney, in New York, in Manila, and now in Bangkok.
I want to write about something I have been turning over for the better part of a decade, and that I have not, until now, found a way to articulate clearly enough to put down on paper.
My father has a particular way of being in a room with another person that I have, in the last few years, started to recognize as a kind of fluency the contemporary world no longer has the conditions to teach.
There is a particular kind of grief that some adults arrive at in their forties or fifties, and that almost no one outside of a therapy room is given language for.
I want to write about a particular kind of meal, and a particular kind of person who has, over time, come to prefer it.
My father turned seventy last month, and I have written about him before, in another article, where I tried to describe how much of his late-life contentment seems to come from the long list of things he stopped needing somewhere in his fifties.
