A Crowded Dinner Table

Nawal Arjini

I’m the recipient of a blessing that might sound like a curse. I live with my mother — in fact, I live under her, in a house stacked with my grandfather, my boyfriend, and, as of a year ago, my son. My fear that this arrangement would be constraining lifted entirely when he was born: my mother takes care of him for a good part of most workdays and weekend...

Help Each Other Up the Hill

Lydia Kiesling

American economists are arguing about whether the economy is good or bad: if the numbers look good, but the people feel bad, who is correct? Family policies are one place where the numbers are undeniably bad — unaffordable childcare, horrible gun and traffic violence, intensifying mental health crises. But since the birth rate is also bad, it’s bad form to focus on these bummers, from a demographer’s perspective, lest we...

How to Freeze Your Eggs

Nancy Ko

Step One: Acknowledge some difficult facts. You are a young woman. Like most everyone else around you, you might want kids — just not right now. Yet it is right now — in your twenties and early thirties — that your eggs are most viable. As a fetus, you had six million of them. By birth, this number diminished to one or two million; by puberty, to four hundred thousand....

A Different, Messier World

P.E. Moskowitz

The United States is a lonely country. The pandemic didn’t help, but it wasn’t the cause: the amount of time Americans spend talking and socializing with one another has been declining for at least two decades, about an hour and a half less per week in 2019 than in 2003. We’re having less sex than ever — the percent of 18-to 29-year-olds who reported having had none at all in...

Capacity to Deform

Paul McAdory

As a proud member of the Chase Sapphire Preferred family, I receive, in addition to statements detailing my credit card debt, emails imploring me to “Earn cash back from doing what you love,” e.g., subscribing to Fubo or purchasing wine from the Wall Street Journal. These companies and I form an affinity network based on generous interest rates; we strengthen our bonds through 1.5-percent-back deals. You might call us “chosen...

Back-Lasch

Noelle Bodick

To the jaded feminist of our day, family life can look like a losing proposition. Not for us the sentimentalizing of romance novels, pandering to the quaint longings of a bygone girlhood. If Jane Austen’s set could take a code of hypergamy as second nature, women today are instead taught — by writers, artists, theorists, brands — to want something very different: solitary selfhood, exalted friendships, and a romantic life...

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...

Gender, Troubled | Judith Butler’s Culture War Misfire

Brock Colyar

In 2017, a group of right-wing activists gathered in São Paulo, Brazil, carrying a life-sized dummy with Judith Butler’s face on it. Butler identifies as nonbinary, uses they/them pronouns, and is usually photographed wearing a well-tailored blazer, but the protestors dressed the puppet in blue jeans, a witch’s hat, and a black t-shirt over which they had attached a lacy, pink brassiere. Eventually, the mob set fire to its creation,...

Stumped | Why Write (or Read) a Campaign Book?

Mark Chiusano

When Donald Trump summoned Chris Christie to the White House in 2018 to offer him a job as chief of staff, Trump’s most pressing question had to do not with background checks or political alignment, but with Christie’s new book, Let Me Finish. More specifically, Trump wanted to know: was it critical of him? “The book is honest about you,” Christie said, adding that the book disparaged people close to...

Third Room | Fiction

Julian Robles

In November my landlord and her family left the city to celebrate the abrupt cessation of her husband’s paralysis. They planned to visit Durango, where she had grown up, and Quintana Roo, where their daughter’s godfather lived. The family was feeling hopeful. All of us were. Before leaving, the landlord had halved my rent and given me a spare key to the private terraza on the building’s top floor. I...