The night my father died, a police sergeant delivered the news in eight words. “Your father was killed in a plane crash.” I had been sound asleep in my midtown Manhattan apartment with my now husband, Ross, after a night out with friends just days before Christmas vacation, when my cell phone started buzzing. I reached for it in the dark. A voice I didn’t recognize said, “Jordi, this is Sergeant Thomas.” And then those eight words. I remember thinking, the way the mind grabs for something solid when the ground gives out, that eight words was not enough. Eight words could not possibly be the right container for what had just happened. Eight words was the number of words in a grocery list, a text message, a casual thought. Not the number of words required to end someone’s life. Not the number of words required to end mine.
I was 24 years old. I had an apartment near Central Park and a job as a celebrity gossip reporter, which meant I spent my days elbowing past other journalists on red carpets and my nights at clubs where my company picked up the tab. It was a life that looked, from the outside, like a dream. On December 22, 2010, that dream ended. My father, Dr. Michael Lippe, emergency-room physician, amateur pilot, the person I called when anything happened, was alone in his single-engine plane, flying to work in upstate New York when he encountered icy weather a few miles from the landing runway.
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Aaron Judge is one of those athletes your kids will tell their grandkids about. The Yankees right fielder stands among the greatest players of his generation and, at thirty-four, he’s already cemented himself in the franchise’s storied history. Last year he achieved a different kind of milestone—he became a dad for the first time. How did he reach this point in his career and life, and what hard-earned lessons has he learned along the way?
Every single day when I step out on the field to do warm-ups, I look around the stadium. You’re seeing families come in, fans that have been here for fifty years, season-ticket holders coming in—to watch you play a baseball game. It’s a blessing. I never take it for granted. I just try to put on a show for them.
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What most people think of when they think of Route 66 is old cars and kitsch. Perhaps that’s always how the past looks in the middle distance, when it’s too old to seem recent but too young to seem like capital-H History. But it’s uncharitable to America’s most well-known highway, whose pavement saved the lives of countless families, be they travelers or those small-town denizens whose fortunes were tied inextricably to the road, who ran service stations, diners, and shops. Those old cars were new once, and the kitsch, the stuff of real American lives.
The route turns 100 this year. Not only is it celebrating a birthday we all aspire to reach, but the sense of connection it fosters, in an age of loneliness, polarization, and economic uncertainty, is more important than ever. There’s also something deeper. Any road trip worth taking conjures something more, something like a sense of destiny. Nothing could be more appropriate right now, as our country celebrates its own monumental birthday.
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I own three sex dolls. And unlike the stereotype, I’m not a creepy single guy. I’ve spent virtually my entire adult life in some form of relationship, so I have had a great deal of sex but not a lot of partners.
When I first got married, I was very young, only 18 years old. We stayed together until I was 29. We had a very physical relationship, but I went through a lot during the marriage and came out with sexual baggage. Immediately after our separation, I began to experience erectile-dysfunction symptoms. I took testosterone replacement therapy, but it didn’t solve the problem. The real problem was that I had a bad relationship with sex. I used sexual activity for self-soothing and emotional regulation. I started going to a therapist for some of the issues that came out of that marriage, but my ED persisted.
I didn’t know how to resolve it. My current wife told me the problem could be that I’m stuck in my head during sex and I have extremely low bodily awareness. She said she had seen sex dolls on TikTok and suggested that a doll could help me. She thought that if I were able to have sexual encounters that feel real with an object incapable of judgment or pleasure, it would force me to really focus on myself and what feels good.
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Back in 1787, George Mason, a Virginia delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, had a serious problem with the proposed new plan of government. This whole “President of the United States” thing scared him right down to the buckles on his shoes. He wrote:
"The President of the United States has no Constitutional Council, a thing unknown in any safe and regular government. He will therefore be unsupported by proper information and advice, and will generally be directed by minions and favorites; or he will become a tool to the Senate—or a Council of State will grow out of the principal officers of the great departments; the worst and most dangerous of all ingredients for such a Council in a free country…"
The current moment seems to vindicate him completely. Nonetheless, there have been presidents who were more than up to the job.
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My father was a spy, a high-ranking member of the CIA, one of those idealistic men who came out of World War II determined to save the world from tyranny. Like so many of his colleagues, he ended up bitter at a world that mocked and frustrated and finally vilified him. His bitterness was the mystery of my childhood, turning me stubborn and defiant. Like most sons of unhappy fathers, I had a hole inside me cut to the shape of his sadness, a hole I tried to fill in all the usual ways and never did, because happiness would be too much of a betrayal. My miseries were a tribute to his own—a fucked-up gesture of fucked-up solidarity. So I was always leaving home and coming back and leaving again and coming back again, and often on these visits I would interview him, trying to bridge the gulf between us in the only way I knew. But whenever I pulled out my tape recorder, he would remind me that he had taken an oath of silence. That was always the first thing he said: "You know, son, I took an oath of silence."
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