They listened to the radio until there was nothing more to do. Philip went into the house and retrieved a container of Kraft vanilla pudding, which he’d mixed with all the drugs he could find in the house—Valium, Klonopin, Percocet, and so on. He opened the passenger-side door and knelt beside Becky. He held a […]
Harry Leslie Smith, ‘World’s Oldest Rebel,’ Is Dead at 95
He called himself “the world’s oldest rebel.” And when he railed against the system, he came across as the voice of experience, even as he deftly managed the young media environments of Twitter and podcasts. Harry Leslie Smith made himself from nothing. He survived the Great Depression in abject poverty. He fought the Nazis in […]
Old Age Is a Ceremony of Losses
Before Donald Hall died this June, the 89-year-old American poet laureate let a filmmaker into his home in bucolic New Hampshire. Paul Szynol’s Quiet Hours, premiering on The Atlantic today, observes Hall—whose prolific body of work is preoccupied with death, loss, and memory—in his senescence. Much like Hall’s poetry, the film has a meditative quality. Its long, slow takes “underscore the […]
This Old Man: Life in the nineties
Check me out. The top two knuckles of my left hand look as if I’d been worked over by the K.G.B. No, it’s more as if I’d been a catcher for the Hall of Fame pitcher Candy Cummings, the inventor of the curveball, who retired from the game in 1877. To put this another way, if […]