"'How much do you know about your father’s past, Mr. Kim?' the prosecutor asked." A man confesses to a crime he did not commit. Philosophical.

Recovered alcoholic is gifted a Ming vase. Measuring time. I recommended to Zeb. "Hello, my name is Thad | my listeners nod | and nod again | grasses in the wind | and I nod back, also grass, and I say, | I’m all right, right now. | This is our story. | We are all all right, | right now. | In this story, | green means stop."

Teens, isolated at sea during WW2, are still teens: mystical, shallow and aesthetic. Stylized a-la Wes Anderson.

A man is friends with a closeted gay man. His friend parties. Lives a life. Dies. Wonderfully written. I read this to Cindy.

Unserious relationships. Yet time, how you choose to spend your life, is never ultimately unserious. Takes place in Lagos.

"I had Googled 'gay tokyo bar dick japan' [...]". This story lead me to seek out other Bryan Washington stories.

"So either I shouldn’t believe I’d been humiliated and shouldn’t feel embarrassed but should be ashamed to be the daughter of a weak and stupid mother, or I should believe I’d been humiliated and should feel embarrassed and my mother should be ashamed to be the mother of a weak and stupid daughter.• None of this was speakable. It was barely thinkable."

Translated from Italian. References Hemingway's "Cat in the rain". Cats have tall tails. Cindy read this. And I think Zeb did as well.

Loved. As I do Sayrafiezadeh's other New Yorker stories. Mom read this as well as "Minimum Payment Due".

Loved. Lead me to read her novel "Acts of Service". More of her writing: https://granta.com/contributor/lillian-fishman/, https://thepointmag.com/author/lfishman/.

Loved this generous story about identity and (re)connection.

This isn't my favorite Galchen story I've read recently. But that would be saying a lot. Radio tagged bees. Radio tagged children. Doing research science -- living in 2025 -- in the shadow of the political.

Sentimental story about not being sentimental. Unnamed country. Unnamed war. Much is lost. Two brothers survive. They couldn't be closer. And they couldn't be farther apart. Yoon's father ran an orphanage in S Korea. So the war is the Korean War. The story is Yoon's exploration of his father's world. Yoon says that while writing his novel "Etna" a dog looks across a river and sees two brothers in a shantytown "[...] I kept thinking of who those people were on the riverbank, and that was how this story, and the brothers, came to me."

"Dictators like to move people around." Intergenerational fears. History repeats. Finding normal.

"What is your favorite conspiracy theory?" What a great question to ask at a party. Philosophical story about epistemology, shallowness, hollywood, science communication.