American - Author | 1977 -
When I was growing up, many of my relatives had never seen a black person before. Today, hundreds, maybe thousands of Africans live in Istanbul's old city alone. It's hard to imagine their lives in their human totality.
Elif Batuman
LiveTodayAloneCityGrowing Up
My parents were educated in the Turkish system and went straight from high school to medical school; my mom, who had skipped a grade, was dissecting corpses at age seventeen. Growing up in America, I think I envied my parents' education. By comparison, everything I did in school seemed so sort of low-stakes and infantilizing.
EducationAgeMedicalSchoolParents
Why is there an end of the year? Because the calendar imposes numerical order on time. There is a natural fitness in the celebration of the New Year, a holiday of numbers imposed on things, with lists, as well as with Advent calendars and songs like 'The Twelve Days of Christmas.'
TimeFitnessEndYearHolidayNew
Listing and counting have a spooky, magical power, and the holiday season is a spooky, magical time.
PowerTimeHolidayMagicalCounting
Every time a meteor comes close to the earth, we all think about the end of the world - but our internal soundtrack doesn't turn off. We're also thinking about pizza or passing a slow tractor or making a turn, and for a magical instant, our lives seem to be in conversation with the stars.
StarsTimePizzaWorldThinkingEnd
I have always known my mother as an agnostic, less certain than my father that the universe hadn't been created by some great intelligence. But she would get even more annoyed than my father did when she thought that people were invoking God to do their jobs for them - for example, when she saw a bus with a sticker saying 'Allah Protect Us.'
FatherMotherGodGreatIntelligence
One of the most painful parts of a breakup is having the feeling that your life is a story, and then the other person leaves and takes the story with them. And you're left there without it. You're left in this version of life that's basically a succession of events and interactions that don't seem to be going anywhere.
LifeStoryLife Is AYouPerson
Many books have changed my life, but only one has the word 'life-changing' in the title: Marie Kondo's 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.'
LifeMy LifeMagicBooksChanged
Read enough about the dung beetle, and a picture of its character emerges: patient, optimistic, uncomplaining.
CharacterPictureEnoughPatient
Most Americans have probably heard the song 'Santa Claus Is Coming to Town' about a billion times in the supermarket alone.
AloneSongComingSantaMostTown
The first modern novel was already a product, even an expression, of negative criticism: 'Don Quixote' contains a quite explicit critique of the chivalric romance and its insufficiency to account for the way real life feels when you get up in the morning in 17th-century Spain.
LifeMorningNegativeCriticismYou
I've developed this love of trashy Russian literature. There's a women's detective series that I was obsessed with for a while, written by Aleksandra Marinina, the former chief of police.
LoveWomenPoliceLiteratureChief
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