Prehistoric Arrangements

Dan Brooks

There is a surplus of children in this world; ask any orphan. They will probably frame the issue as a shortage of parents, and they might be onto something. One Thursday afternoon last fall, I escaped to a bar to read a book about hunter-gatherers, and a man my age struck up a conversation about whether, all things considered, we might have been better off under prehistoric arrangements. “No child...

No Returns | On Family Functions and Dysfunctions

Dan Brooks, Elisa Gonzalez, Gaby Del Valle, Karim Kazemi, Lydia Kiesling, Nancy Ko, Nawal Arjini, Noelle Bodick, P.E. Moskowitz, Paul McAdory, S.C. Cornell

In December, The New Yorker asked, “How Did Polyamory Become So Popular?” in a piece that tracked the rise of the open relationship, from the obscure “province of utopian free-love communities” to its status as a mainstay of “Park Slope marriages and prestige television.” In January, New York magazine took on the same topic in a cover story, which explored the “increasingly mainstream world of ethical non-monogamy” and included “a...