There has been a change in my life that is massive and boring, miraculous and quotidian. After decades of failing, flailing, and frustration, I am on medication and in therapy for ADHD. My brain is finally beginning to work properly, and the biggest breakthrough is the smallest: now I rinse the last dish. Perhaps you think of ADHD as a racing mind, a restless energy, a propensity to focus a little bit on a lot of things, but for me, the symptoms were all in the sink. I'd always been good at starting to do the dishes. I'd come in hot every time, then get 85% of the way through and burn out. My mind would flash to any of the other dozen tasks I'd left 85% done, and I'd rush off to finish one of those. A dirty dish and a fork left to be tended to at a later time, when I was 85% into something else. There was always a little bit of laundry left unfolded, a bill or two left unpaid, a to-do list almost all crossed off. That's what my ADHD looked like in adulthood: small piles of good intentions strewn around the house. |
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| Breaking News at the End of the Earth |
Until the end of April, Lipuma was the editor of The Antarctic Sun, the biggest and longest-running paper on the globe's least-populated continent. When we first speak, over Zoom in January, she is seated in a conference room that looks like every other conference room. Except this one's nestled in a peninsula jutting from an island at the edge of Antarctica, on McMurdo, which comprises 146 buildings and around a thousand summer residents—and is by far the largest settlement on the continent. Though she occasionally works with a freelance network of scientists and others living on the ice, Lipuma writes the bulk of the stories herself. She works on two or three each month, mostly covering the same beat, per the Sun's mandate: the scientific research being conducted there. She has covered one study on the unprejudiced sexual behavior of Adélie penguins, and another on their tendency to become stone-stealing kleptomaniacs while building nests. She took a helicopter to the McMurdo Dry Valleys, the largest mostly ice-free region on the continent. Bone-dry thanks to extremely low humidity, rocked by hurricane-force winds that can reach 200 miles per hour, and surrounded by high mountains blocking the inflow of the nearby East Antarctic Ice Sheet, the landscape looks downright Martian. Extreme remoteness presents unique challenges to newsgathering. |
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Mark Hamill's Long Strange Trip |
Mark Hamill profiles often end, and sometimes even begin, with the interviewer confessing that Mark Hamill is their childhood hero. So the 71-year-old has developed all manners of methods, workarounds, niceties, dodges, ducks, and rolls to prevent journalists from Luke-Skywalkering him so hard that he can't even murmur, in the privacy of his own skull, the title of whatever he's promoting. But I'm not here to learn what it's like to spend time with Luke Skywalker. I'm here to go inside the comedic mutation of a man who just entered his eighth decade of life. To understand the muse that led him, after starring as one of the most famous fictional characters ever—a feat he followed with a legendary, 100-plus credit voice acting career—to an entirely new, chaotic era of creativity. |
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15 Books to Read After Succession Ends |
In its four seasons on air, Succession has cemented its place as one of the TV greats. The HBO series, which follows aging billionaire media titan Logan Roy and his four children as they vie for a place in their hard-to-please father's Waystar Royco empire, has become a powerful meditation on family dynasties. Although ostensibly a drama about control and money, the show has also built a reputation for its comedic elements. The series feeds easily into the current trend of "eat the rich" programming while still providing alluring characters that draw viewers in, week after week. But all good things must come to an end. Succession is currently airing its final season, with a series finale just around the corner. Fortunately, to help soothe the loss of TV's most complicated family, there are a variety of books that grapple with similar themes of affluence and its generational impact. Whether you're looking for a cautionary tale on the pitfalls of wealth or you're interested in learning about the inner works of real family dynasties, this list has something for everyone. |
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The 2024 Republican Ticket from the Crypt |
It's now almost five decades since the Republican party was first bedeviled by its own Undead: an Undead appetite for cruelty in public policy; an Undead attraction to the political use of fear and cultural bogeymen; and an Undead proclivity for causing the same damage, over and over again—running up crippling deficits, following the culture wars to inevitable extremes, and harboring a misbegotten devotion to Dear Leader, whether to Ronald Reagan and his magical supply-side America, or to George W. Bush and his crusade to turn every Middle Eastern despotism into Rhode Island at the point of an RPG, or (finally and most destructively) to Donald J. Trump, who lied worse than Reagan and had lousier foreign policy than Bush. The Undead followed with them all. And as the putative Republican presidential candidates begin to emerge—Nikki Haley announced formally in February, Ron DeSantis spent months announcing informally, and Tim Scott and Asa Hutchinson announced that they're pondering whether to announce at all—it has become obvious that they must contend with a powerful new faction of the Undead: the specter of the previous president of the United States. |
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Tony Soprano Brings the Ultimate Cookout Style and You Should, Too |
The sun's out, you've made your collections, and you took care of that thing for our friend in Brooklyn. OK, maybe it's just that the sun's out and your buddy's got the charcoal in the grill and it's time to get fitted for the occasion. While you may not relentlessly cheat on your wife and commit wanton acts of violence while desperately grasping onto some shred of humanity in a doomed attempt to avoid an all-expenses-paid trip to Hell, you could still take a cue from Tony Soprano. Because nobody does Cookout Chic quite like The Skip. The man who runs North Jersey is known for his bathrobes, and his crew members are mostly known for their sweatsuits. But in a gift from the cyclical fashion gods, the shirts Tony rocked at nearly all times—including when he was working the grill—are firmly back in the frame here in 2023. |
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