The Sunday Read: ‘The Vanishing Family: Life in the Shadow of a Cruel Genetic Mutation’
6 August 2023 - 46 minsWhen Barb’s father all but left, her mother turned inward, sitting quietly in front of the television, always smoking, often with a cocktail. Something had overtaken her, though it wasn’t clear what.
Six years later, Barb was 20 and in college when someone else in the family needed help. Her sister Christy was the second-born, 24 years older than Barb and the star of the family in many ways. But where once Christy was capable and professionally ambitious and socially conscious, now, at 44, she was alone, her clothes unkempt and ripped, her hair unwashed, her marriage over.
Depression was the first suspected diagnosis, then schizophrenia, though neither seemed quite right. Christy wasn’t sa...
Series Episodes
The Housing Market Has New Rules. Realtors Are Evading Them.
Last year, a historic legal settlement resulted in sweeping rule changes that were supposed to lower the price of buying and selling a home across the country. But those changes would cost real-estate agents money, and so those agents, it turns out, have found ways around the new rules. Debra Kamin, who reports on real estate, explains how they did it.
30 mins
29 April Finished
Americans to Trump: You’ve Gone Too Far
explicitWarning: This episode contains strong language. One question that has hung over the first 100 days of President Trump’s second term: Is his aggressive approach to everything from deportations to tariffs what most Americans want — or has he simply gone too far? In a major new nationwide poll, voters tell The New York Times exactly how they feel about Trump’s agenda. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, explains the results.
29 mins
28 April Finished
The Sunday Read: ‘The Strange, Post-Partisan Popularity of the Unabomber’
Online, there is a name for the experience of finding sympathy with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber: Tedpilling. To be Tedpilled means to read Paragraph 1 of Kaczynski’s manifesto, its assertion that the mad dash of technological advancement since the Industrial Revolution has “made life unfulfilling,” “led to widespread psychological suffering” and “inflicted severe damage on the natural world,” and think, Well, sure. Since Kaczynski’s death by suicide in a federal prison in North Carolina nearly two years ago, the taboo surrounding the figure has been weakening. This is especially true on the right, where pessimism and paranoia about technology — largely the province of the left not long ago — have spread on the heels of the coronavirus pandemic and efforts to police speech on social media platforms.
19 mins
27 April Finished
'The Interview': Isabel Allende Understands How Fear Changes a Society
The beloved author left Chile at a time of great turmoil and has longed for the nation of her youth ever since.
40 mins
26 April Finished
Children’s Books Go Before the Supreme Court
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard a case that could hand parents with religious objections a lot more control over what their kids learn in the classroom. Adam Liptak, who covers the Supreme Court, explains how a case about children’s picture books with titles like “Pride Puppy” and “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” has broad implications for schools across the country.
34 mins
25 April Finished
What an Iowa Farmer Fears About the Trade War
In the increasingly bitter trade war between the United States and China, perhaps nobody has more at stake than America’s soybean farmers, whose crop has become the country’s single biggest export to China. Michael Barbaro speaks to an Iowa farmer who helped build that $13 billion market, and asks her what President Trump’s sky-high tariffs mean for her and for tens of thousands of other American farmers.
29 mins
24 April Finished
