Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 445 of 501 · 20 per page

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  21 Jews in Palestine • Because of a different set of circumstances, Jews in Palestine experienced greater tensions with Gentiles, as well as greater and sharper divisions among themselves. • The dominant cultural and political forces of Greece and Rome were experienced as an “irresistible force” from the outside against the “immovable object” that had been post-Exilic Judaism in Palestine. o The reform of Judaism after the Exile had connected religious devotion to the Lord with specific social and political institutions: king, land, Torah as law of the land, and temple. Religious observance, then, was intimately connected to specific social institutions. o Thus, the pressure of Greek language, culture, and religion could be regarded as a fundamental threat, and Roman rule (abetted by taxation and military presence) could be regarded as oppressive. • The same tensions of assimilation and separation were, therefore, more fraught because they involved material realities rather than simply ideas. o Some Jews, especially those among the aristocrats, were comfortable with Hellenization and advocated a policy of accommodation. o Others, such as the Maccabees and their descendants, identified loyalty to Torah (and God) with Jewish possession of social and political institutions. To be a Jew meant having a Jewish king. To be a Jew meant having a safe and holy temple. To be a Jew meant having Torah as the law of the land, not simply something that is read in the synagogue. These Jews resisted “outsider” influence. o As philosophical schools, the “sects” described by the Jewish historian Josephus, represented distinct political and religious positions. For example, the Essenes and Zealots were militantly

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  Shoveling the walk will be a perfect way to begin tomorrow. It’ll loosen me up without making me real tired. I hope Dad hasn’t already shoveled. We watched a couple films of Shute and had a brief workout, in which I was absolutely unstoppable. Probably because everybody but me was still filled with Japanese food from Konigi’s. I tried wrestling without anything in my nose and it didn’t bleed a bit. Coach and I figured that maybe the nose stoppers have been irritating the inside of my nose and making it bleed rather than protecting it. I won’t use any tomorrow. Coach showed a film of Shute’s match last week against Palouse and then another of him at last year’s state tournament. Then he showed the first one again. Kuch and Otto and I thought Shute looked better in the film from last year. But Coach said not to count on it, because Shute was probably a lot more psyched for the state tournament than for a duel meet with Palouse. That’s probably true. The Palouse film didn’t show much, anyway. Shute pinned his man in the first round. “That guy is faster than a fart on an oilskin,” Balldozer said. I think the French have an inordinate concern with flatulence. Bowden and Smith couldn’t come today because their families were out of town for New Year’s dinner. I made sure to thank Coach and the guys again for last night and for coming on New Year’s to watch films and help me work out. Shute looks real, real good. He may be faster than I am but I don’t think he’s stronger or has any better balance or knows his moves any better. He’s aggressive all the time, but he doesn’t seem to like to spend much time on his feet. I’ve noticed it before and I saw it again today in the films. I noticed in the state tournament film that he went for the takedown just as soon as he could and always tried to reverse rather than escape. Maybe I’ll try to spend a lot of time on my feet with him. I hope he wins the coin toss. If he does, it means their first wrestler gets the choice of positions in the second round. Then in the next match our guy gets to choose. It’ll work out so I’ll have my choice, and that’s important. You always want to choose the top position in the second round so you can be on the bottom in the third and score yourself some points. All you can do from the top position is try to pin the guy, and against guys like Shute that’s just not done. I wish he weren’t shorter than I am and so goddamn good-looking. Why can’t he be cretinous, monosyllabic, or maybe look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame instead of an anatomy sketch by Michelangelo? It makes me feel like the bad guy. Down the street Cindy’s Mazda pulls up in front of the house. Willa leaps out into the fresh snow and disappears. Cindy hauls her out and shakes her off. Dad hasn’t shoveled yet. The little kid laughs like crazy and hollers for more. I fling her into the softest-looking mounds and hoist her back out until she begins to turn blue. It doesn’t take long. Then the three of us head in for New Year’s dinner. * * *

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Borman radioed Houston. He was supposed to be sleeping but, in the excitement of the flight, couldn’t make it happen. “We have one request. CDR would like to get clearance to take a Seconal.” Borman had asked whether he (CDR was shorthand for Commander) could take a sleeping pill. He detested the idea of relying on medication, but it was almost impossible to shut down one’s brain in the middle of mankind’s first trip to the Moon. Borman figured that a single Seconal, a barbiturate often prescribed for sleep, wouldn’t be harmful under the circumstances. CapCom Mattingly checked with NASA’s doctors, who okayed it, and Borman made his way back down to the sleeping area in the navigation bay. His crewmates were working and talking above him, but it was the best refuge possible in a craft just thirteen feet by eleven feet and filled with equipment. After much discussion, Lunney and Kraft came to a decision on the matter of the SPS engine. Each of them thought through the theory offered by the man from North American and ultimately judged it to be correct, and they were willing to bet the rest of the flight on it. After consulting with other controllers, who concurred, the men decided to continue with Apollo 8’s flight plan just as it had been written. The next time the SPS engine fired would be when the spacecraft slipped behind the Moon. At that moment, the crew’s lives would depend on its functioning properly. As midnight approached in Houston, all three of the astronauts’ wives, too, struggled to sleep. It had been a long and exhausting first day, but Susan and Valerie remained attached to their squawk boxes as they lay in bed, each trying to pick out a hint of how her husband was feeling by the tone of his voice. Staying overnight in Florida, Marilyn Lovell had no squawk box; instead, she listened to the sound of the waves by her beachside cottage, wondering whether Jim could see that same stretch of ocean from space. A few hours after test-firing the SPS engine, Houston got good news. The test burn hadn’t fouled Apollo 8’s trajectory, as some had feared. In fact, tracking analysis showed that if the spacecraft made no further changes and was simply allowed to coast, it would slingshot around the Moon at an altitude of just 80 miles above the lunar surface, then return to Earth, just as the trajectory specialists had designed. For the first time in a long while, Mission Control grew quiet. It was past midnight and the spacecraft was coasting. And Borman was supposed to be sleeping.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  He felt nauseated almost immediately. That hadn’t been a problem during his Gemini flights, but the Apollo spacecraft was much larger and gave him more opportunity to turn his head and move around—a likely cause of his queasy feeling. He warned his crewmates—don’t turn your heads when you first leave your seats—then steadied himself and allowed it to pass.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Lovell had caught his on something, and it had inflated with carbon dioxide. The vest had earned its nickname—Mae West—after the buxom Hollywood starlet. Even as Borman and Anders smiled, everyone knew they had a problem. Inflated, the Mae West took up space in a cabin where every square inch counted. Deflating it, however, would release levels of carbon dioxide that might be too much for the environmental control system to remove, and that might prove harmful to the crew. Borman wasn’t angry at Lovell, just irritated, and he’d have been irritated at himself if he’d done it. The challenge now was to figure out a solution. Anders hit on one a few seconds later—an answer of old-school simplicity. When the crew got a chance, they would deflate the vest through the urine dump, the same valve through which they got rid of liquid bodily waste. For now, they simply tied it down and got on with their work.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Like electricity moving through a circuit board, Anders made turns and changed directions with precision. Sometimes he looked like a giant strand of spaghetti being slurped through the cabin, yet he managed never to bang into anything or catch any of his coveralls’ pocket pouches on equipment. When he stopped moving, he put objects into twirling, spinning, tumbling motion—a penlight, his camera, even the chewing gum in his mouth all came to life in a floating symphony that Anders conducted. Soon he got into the act himself, doing a somersault, then another. As he got ready for a third, he thought, Whoa. What’s that hairy feeling coming up in my throat? And he knew—if he flipped again, he would vomit. Slowly he floated back to his seat, strapped himself in, and stared at the instrument panel, trying to orient himself in a world that had suddenly lost its up and down.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  As the van made its way to the pad around 4:30 A .M ., a NASA official drove Marilyn Lovell and her four children to a sand dune about three miles from the launch site, the closest NASA allowed observers to be for lift-off. The family were alone when they arrived, except for the coffee and doughnuts NASA had waiting for them. It was still dark. Marilyn pulled a pack of Pall Malls from her purse. Often, she and Susan Borman met in the mornings for a cup of coffee and a smoke, but Marilyn was solo today, so she shook a cigarette loose and lit up by herself. In Houston, the Borman and Anders families began to wake and get ready for a day glued to their televisions.

• From The Wrestler: A Life of Passion and the Pursuit of Greatness (2016)

  I hated wrestling them. It was always a mental struggle trying to prepare for each match. My mind would get carried away and the nerves wouldn’t cease from turning my stomach until the whistle blew and it was time to wrestle. A few times I defeated them decisively, enough for me to think that their confidence would dwindle. But it didn’t. Our next match they would come at me as hard as ever. They were dangerous, and they knew it. Quite frankly, I wanted to get rid of them.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  When you talk about expectations, none were higher than those surrounding Thomas Keller's much-anticipated Vegas version of Bouchon. The knives were out for the chef whom many consider the best and most respected in the world. That a chef of his unquestioned caliber and integrity—whose French Laundry seemed the very antithesis of everything Vegas stands for—would open a restaurant in the bizarro faux-Renaissance Venetian hotel/casino/resort seemed to many an abdication of greatness, even a betrayal of principles. Plenty of food nerds wanted to see him fail—preferred, from the safety of their desktop computers, to see him fail—as a punishment for daring to bring good food to what they see as The Worst Place on Earth. Keller, by this school of thought, should be punished for thinking that gamblers and vacationers from middle America and the South, in their ugly shorts and their socks with sandals, might recognize and appreciate sophisticated, properly cooked French food. To them, it was pearls before swine, a "sellout," an insult to the proprietary instincts of the metropolitan dining "elite." Ruhlman had made a good case, on a foodie Web site, that this was pure snobbery. Why shouldn't the masses have access to fine food? he argued. Why shouldn't they be invited to the same table we—New Yorkers and San Franciscans and world travelers—see as almost a birthright? Isn't that a great chef's ultimate responsibility, to change things for the better? To seduce, coerce, and induce people to eat better, try new things, experience joy, even enlightenment? I thought Ruhlman had made an unusually cogent case. In fact, it was this plaintive argument that had won me over, convinced me to put aside my own fear and loathing and come to Vegas myself. Was he right?

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  Smith and I look at each other. “Come on, you Dougie!” Randy yells. “Put it on ’im! Gobble, gobble, gobble one time!” Doug looks sheepishly to the bench where Coach Ratta and the assistant coach, Tom Morgan, sit with the JVs. Morgan laughs and speaks into the tape recorder. L.C. has visions of a quick pin. He begins to ride Doug high, looking to sneak a half nelson on him and drive him to his back. Doug feels the guy’s weight shifting and lets him have the half nelson. Almost. The light of five pinning points shines in his eyes as L.C. starts to drive Doug over. Doug clamps down hard on the guy’s feeble half nelson, rolls to his back, then right over again. Our bleachers erupt in a chant of “Pin, pin, pin!” and the light in L.C.’s eyes turns to panic. He flops and strains and tries to bridge, but Doug has his shoulders controlled now with a half nelson of his own. Slap! The ref slaps the mat, and it’s all over. Our side cheers, the L.C. side sighs, and Doug bounces up and waits for the ref to raise his hand. There it is: balance again. The most important quality a wrestler has. More important than strength, speed, smarts—even more important than endurance. You feel the guy’s weight. You feel where he’s going, what his body’s going to do. Then you take advantage. You use his strength, his speed, his smarts, even his endurance, against him. I’m not terribly excited about the other JV matches, so I go sit with Kuch and Sausage. Kuch is trying to bolster Sausage’s confidence. Mash did a little psych job on him at the weigh-in. Mash knew he couldn’t make weight with his warm-up suit on, but he tried anyway. The ref read off 104.5. You could just see Sausage thinking, “He’s not gonna make weight! I won’t be killed!” Mash took off his warm-ups. In his tights and top he weighed 103.25. Sausage closed his eyes, undoubtedly calculating the weight of an L.C. wrestling uniform. Mash stripped to his jock. Sausage peeked around the ref and read the results for himself: 102.75. He turned a white shade of pale. Mash stood off by himself and put his stuff back on. With no larger person next to him to put his small stature in perspective, Mash looks like he could go about nine-feet-three and 690 pounds. Sausage shouldn’t have looked, but he did. “You gotta go after him, Sausage,” Kuch says. “You’ve got nothing to lose. Go out there fierce and proud and there’s no way you’ll come back ashamed. No matter how bad ya get beat.” Sausage is hunched up in a corner. He hangs his head between his legs and breathes heavily through his mouth. Balldozer comes over, pats him on the knee, and says, “Shit to the thirteenth power, Sausage,” which is a French way of saying good luck. Coach comes through the door smiling.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  My family engaged in a flurry of activity to transform my life from that of a doctor to that of a patient. We set up an account with a mail-order pharmacy, ordered a bed rail, and bought an ergonomic mattress to help alleviate the searing back pain. Our financial plan, which a few days before had banked on my income increasing sixfold in the next year, now looked precarious, and a variety of new financial instruments seemed necessary to protect Lucy. My father declared that these modifications were capitulations to the disease: I was going to beat this thing, I would somehow be cured. How often had I heard a patient’s family member make similar declarations? I never knew what to say to them then, and I didn’t know what to say to my father now. What was the alternate story? — Two days later, Lucy and I met Emma in the clinic. My parents hovered in the waiting room. The medical assistant took my vitals. Emma and her nurse practitioner were remarkably punctual, and Emma pulled up a chair in front of me, to talk face-to-face, eye-to-eye. “Hello again,” she said. “This is Alexis, my right hand.” She gestured to the NP, who sat at the computer taking notes. “I know there’s a lot to discuss, but first: How are you doing?” “Okay, all things considered,” I said. “Enjoying my ‘vacation,’ I guess. How are you?” “Oh, I’m okay.” She paused—patients don’t typically ask how their doctors are doing, but Emma was also a colleague. “I’m running the inpatient service this week, so you know how that is.” She smiled. Lucy and I did know. Outpatient specialists rotated on the inpatient service periodically, adding several hours of work in an already jam-packed day. After more pleasantries, we settled into a comfortable discussion on the state of lung cancer research. There were two paths forward, she said. The traditional method was chemotherapy, which generically targeted rapidly dividing cells—primarily cancer cells but also cells in your bone marrow, hair follicles, intestines, and so forth. Emma reviewed the data and options, lecturing as if to another doctor—but again with the exception of any mention of Kaplan-Meier survival curves. Newer therapies had been developed, however, targeting specific molecular defects in the cancer itself. I had heard rumors of such efforts—it had long been a holy grail in cancer work—and was surprised to learn how much progress had been made. These treatments, it seemed, had led to long-term survival in “some” patients.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Marcus couldn’t say no. “So can you give me a loan?” The crowd laughed at this, and Dr. Marcus barely needed to explain that Nico gave the money straight to his sister, that it was another year before the permanent tooth grew in. Yale looked now for Terrence. It took a minute, but there he was, sitting halfway up the stairs, too surrounded for Yale to chat with him yet. Instead, Yale took one of the mini quiches off a passing tray and slipped it to him through the balusters. “You look stuck!” Yale said, and Terrence put the quiche in his mouth, held his hand out again, said, “Keep ’em coming!” Fiona had wanted to trick her parents, to exchange Nico’s ashes with fireplace ones and give the real ones to Terrence. It was hard to tell if she was serious. But Terrence wasn’t getting any ashes, and he wasn’t getting anything else either, besides Nico’s cat, which he’d taken when Nico first went into the hospital. The family had made it clear that when they began dismantling Nico’s apartment tomorrow, Terrence would be excluded. Nico had left no will. His illness had been sudden, immediately debilitating—first a few days of what had seemed like just shingles, but then, a month later, moon-high fevers and dementia. Terrence had been an eighth-grade math teacher until this summer, when Nico needed him around the clock and Terrence learned he was infected himself. And how would Terrence get through the fall, the winter, with no Nico, no job? It wasn’t just a financial question. He loved teaching, loved those kids. Terrence had some of the vague early symptoms, some weight loss, but nothing serious yet, not enough to go on disability. He’d taken the test after Nico got sick—whether out of solidarity or just to know , Yale wasn’t sure. It wasn’t as if there were some magic pill. Yale and Charlie had, just on principle, been among the first to get tested that spring. Charlie’s paper had been advocating for testing, education, safe sex, and Charlie felt he had to put his money where his mouth was. But on top of that, Yale had just wanted to get it over with. Not knowing, he figured, was bad for his health in and of itself. The clinics weren’t giving the test yet, but Dr. Vincent was. Yale and Charlie opened a bottle of champagne when they got the good results. It was a somber toast; they didn’t even finish the bottle. Julian was back at Yale’s ear, saying, “Get yourself a refill before the slide show starts.” “There’s a slide show?” “It’s Richard .” At the bar Yale found Fiona talking to someone he didn’t know, a straight-looking guy with a jaw. Twisting her blonde curls around her finger. She was drinking too fast, because that was an empty glass in her hand. And she’d gotten it since she gave Yale her half-drink, and Fiona weighed maybe a hundred pounds.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  That book, by Upper East Sider and Vassar graduate Sue Kaufman, follows New York City mother of two Bettina Balser in the throes of a nervous breakdown. Balser, thirty-six, is a Smith College–educated former artist who can quote Baudelaire and Proust, but whose life now revolves around shopping, decorating, cooking, and throwing parties. It’s all at the behest of her husband, Jonathan, a former activist turned nouveau riche social climber who demands that his wife head up their home life to his exacting standards. With no outlet to express her anger, Balser—who shakes uncontrollably when Jonathan issues his unreasonable orders—takes to drinking, smoking too much, and writing in a secret journal. She also starts having an affair with a piggish playwright named George Prager. He isn’t very nice, but the pair share an explosive sexual connection. Prager is dominant in bed, and Balser finds that she likes it. For a while, that uncomfortable truth scares her. But then she begins to understand that what she’s acting out with her lover is just another angle on her relationship with Jonathan. “Why should I be disturbed by the sado-masochistic aspects of that relationship, when I have another one going?” Balser writes in her diary. “Why not face the truth: it’s an enormous relief to have that sort of thing out in the open and act it out, instead of having to deal with it in a disguised form, all veiled and gussied up with domestic overlay as it is with Jonathan and me.” Although Balser can’t stand who her husband has become, she understands she’s trapped—after all, he controls the money. At one point, her period is late and she believes Prager has gotten her pregnant. Her options, or lack thereof, flash before her. “Without a cent of my own, without a checking account, the only other way [ beyond asking Prager for cash] I could have paid for an abortion would have been to try and get the money secretly from my father, and even I shied away from all the filthy implications of that,” she realizes. Luckily, her period shows up and she doesn’t have to debase herself. But even that relief doesn’t solve the problem of the larger social constructs that frame her marriage, in which she has to be the “submissive woman,” the “obedient wife” to the “forceful dominant male” breadwinner. Blume nods to Diary of a Mad Housewife in Wifey , when Sandy’s sophisticated best friend, Lisbeth—who lives on the Upper West Side and who is experimenting with an open marriage—slips her a copy. Sandy wonders if she should be offended: “Did Lisbeth think she was a mad housewife too? Was that why she’d given her the book?” The novel doesn’t come up again until Sandy’s husband, Norman, mentions it during a fight, when Sandy is trying to express why their relationship leaves her unsatisfied. “Have you been reading that book again?” Norman snipes.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  Then the pandemic happened. The broad increase in mental health issues and psychological pain has only steepened during COVID-19; in 2020, the CDC shared that the percentage of Americans reporting symptoms of anxiety disorder has increased roughly threefold compared with the same period in 2019, with a rise in anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation highest among adults aged eighteen to twenty-four.9 In a cruel turn of events, many of the medications prescribed to treat these conditions make arousal and orgasm extremely difficult. In tackling the central nervous system, SSRIs can affect other neurotransmitters and hormones involved in sex, including testosterone and dopamine. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had intercourse with a man for what feels like thirty hours, only for him to tell me at hour thirty and one minute that he’s on Lexapro so he can’t come but is having a blast. Usually, I’m the one flaunting the sexual side effects of medication. I’ve been on Prozac and other meds for major depression for almost half of my life. These drugs have made orgasming with a partner even more difficult for me, a chronically fatigued depressive who is insecure about approximately five major body parts. While I know orgasm cannot and should not be the arbiter of good sex—and that the pressure to orgasm adds undue anxiety—I have found it difficult to unlearn the outsized importance that’s been placed on it by society. Also, orgasming feels good! It is okay to want to orgasm during sex. On a neurobiological level, anhedonia blocks our natural biochemical responses to activities that are wired to give us joy, like exercise, social relationships, and sex. It prevents us from fully letting go into excitement, playfulness, and curiosity—basically everything that makes sex enjoyable and satisfying. Anhedonia is not the sole culprit for the Bad Sex Problem, but it steepens the biochemical barrier to entry (ayyy). If we’re already more likely to have difficulty feeling pleasure, we stand less of a chance against the other forces conspiring to ensure sex is a drag or worse, a slog. Not to be all “society!!” but social forces have further complicated our relationships to the pleasure we are already struggling to feel. So, yes, society!! CULPRIT 2: SEX EDUCATIONWe have more information at our disposal than in any other era of human history. While in line at the supermarket, I can search “is my labia wrong” and peruse 4.1 million results. One problem with this bounty of information, though, is the deluge of unvetted garbage.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  The ubiquity of internet porn in itself means parents no longer have the luxury of squeamishness; we can no longer afford to not talk honestly to our children (especially our boys) about sex. The potential risk to them and to their partners is just too great. Nor do I think it’s enough to dismiss porn as “not realistic” or “an adult fantasy”—that begs questions of what, exactly, is unrealistic about it and why its fantasies so frequently eroticize male aggression and female submission. Instead, as I said earlier, remind your son that curiosity about sex as well as masturbation are absolutely natural, but that porn’s perspective is limited and distorted, especially for someone without much (or any) real-life context. The bodies and behaviors depicted are not typical; much of its activity would not, in truth, be pleasurable, especially for women (the ones in the videos are paid to pretend to enjoy what’s happening and, by the way, most are left broke and unemployed within a few months). Porn can create false expectations; lower guys’ satisfaction in sex and with their partners; hijack teens’ sexual imaginations; eroticize gender inequality and racism. Lately, when speaking to groups of parents, mothers have asked me if I can recommend “good” porn they can offer their sons. Although you can find a variety of alternative content behind paywalls, I personally think curating your boy’s porn is over the line. However, it wouldn’t hurt to reiterate Emily Nagoski’s take earlier in this book—the idea of masturbating in a variety of contexts, using a variety of stimuli to avoid conditioning your sexual response to porn—along with engaging in those overarching discussions about female objectification in the media and ensuring there are progressive sex-ed resources readily available in the home. In a world of fake news, media literacy, including deconstructing pornography, has value beyond sex and relationships: it is a matter of personal agency, preserving our ability to think, act, and live on our own terms. If They Have That Solid Relationship, Consider the Sleepover

• From Escape (2007)

  We only lived in Salt Lake City for a year, but it was a happy one. Mother took us to the zoo and to the park, where we’d play on the swings and slides. My father’s business was successful and expanding. But he decided we needed to move back to Colorado City, Arizona—a tiny, nondescript FLDS enclave about 350 miles south of Salt Lake City and a stone’s throw from Hildale, Utah, where I was born. The reason we went back was that he didn’t want my sister Linda attending a regular public school. Even though she would technically be going to a public school in Colorado City, most of the teachers there were FLDS and very conservative. In theory, at least, religion is not to be taught in public schools, but in fact it was an integral part of the curriculum there. When we returned to Colorado City, my father put an addition onto our house. There was more space to live in, but life became more claustrophobic. Mother changed. When we got up in the morning, she would still be sleeping. My father was on the road a lot now, so she was home alone. When we tried to wake her up, she’d tell us to go back to bed. She’d finally surface midmorning and come into the kitchen to make us breakfast and talk about how much she wanted to die. While she made us hot cornmeal cereal, toast, or pancakes she’d complain about having nothing to live for and how she’d rather be dead. Those were the good mornings. The really awful mornings were the ones when she’d talk about how she was going to kill herself that day. I remember how terrified I felt wondering what would happen to us if my mother killed herself. Who’d take care of us? Father was gone nearly all the time. One morning I asked my mother, “Mama, if a mother dies, what will happen to her children? Who will take care of them?” I don’t think Mother noticed my urgency. She had no idea of the impact her words had been having on me. I think she felt my question arose from a general curiosity about dying. Mother was very matter-of-fact in responding to me: “Oh, the children will be all right. The priesthood will give their father a new wife. The new wife will take care of them.” By this time I was about six. I looked at her and said, “Mama, I think that Dad better hurry up and get a new wife.”

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  I bounce away and dance a little and stand straight. His hand whips out again, but I duck, drop to one knee, and sweep his leg, hoisting it high as I move behind him. I trip the other leg and he goes down. I get the two points and our crowd cheers. Because he’s tall, I work on controlling his crotch. Most of his strength is in his legs, so I ride him low, my arm locked back around his hips and through his crotch rather than around his waist, my leg hooked through his at the knee. Romaine is really a tough guy. I never liked playing against him in football and I’d run away from him in a street fight. But for a wrestler he has poor balance. You ride his hips tight and you know right where he’s going. He doesn’t try much except to get back to his feet. I ride him out to the whistle. Romaine chooses top. I get down on my hands and knees in the referee’s position and Romaine gets down beside me and grabs hold. The ref checks our position and my nose begins to bleed. Just a couple drops at first. But it’s a steady stream by the time he moves back and sticks his whistle in his mouth. He calls time and motions to our bench. Tommy Reilly, our manager, runs out with the wet towel to wipe the blood off the mat. I pass him on my way to the bench to meet Coach. “I didn’t even get hit,” I say apologetically. Coach wipes my nose and mouth. “Better go all out this round, Louden,” he says as he stuffs the little gauze stoppers in. I nod. I can taste the blood. I breathe through my mouth and the blood bubbles. I swallow it. “Come on, you Swain, take him now!” yells Otto. I sit out at the whistle. Romaine can’t stay with me and I escape for a point. I go right after him. He reaches to lock up and I drag his arm. I take him to his knees and get control for two points. The ref calls time. Romaine’s back is covered with my blood. I pass Tommy again walking to the bench. I get one more time-out before I’m disqualified. “Have to do it pretty soon, son,” Coach says. He lays me down on my back and presses both thumbs along the bridge of my nose between my eyes. Things go a little black. He stuffs my nose full of stoppers and pats me on the back. I drive hard at the whistle, but Romaine stays steady on his hands and knees. I go for the half nelson and he counters by going to his feet. I lift him up with an arm through the crotch and bring him back to the mat hard. Too hard. The ref blows his whistle and gives Romaine a penalty point. The L.C.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  That summer, in part because he thought his weight was hurting his chances with girls, he lost forty pounds by restricting his daily food intake to a granola bar, a few pretzels, and a couple handfuls of nuts. He also began following YouTube fitness sensations such as Aziz Shavershian, a skinny-kid video gamer–turned-bodybuilder who has only become more popular since his death from heart failure at age twenty-two, amid rumors of anabolic steroid abuse; Vegan Gains, who once posted footage of his eighty-two-year-old grandfather mid–heart attack to illustrate the perils of eating meat; and Frank Yang, who claimed to have put on over thirty pounds of chiseled muscle in just three weeks without the help of pharmaceuticals. Fitness gurus are to boys what beauty and “thinspo” vloggers can be to girls: a source of entertainment, motivation, and, potentially, self-harm. For a while, Mason was obsessed with how-tos on creating six-pack abs (which in actuality are only achieved through dangerous loss of body fat). He also went through a phase of watching freak-show videos about synthol, an oil that, when injected into the biceps or calves, creates the illusion of impossibly enormous muscles. Sometimes he followed recommendations that went beyond the gym: when a favorite vlogger enthused about the mind-expanding benefits of psilocybin, Mason tracked down mushrooms from a dark net site that he described as “like Amazon, but for drugs.” Turning to the internet for purported expert advice, guidance, and information is second nature to millennials, so I was surprised when, midway through our conversation, Mason pulled out a purple flip phone. He’d met a guy at the Lollapalooza music festival the previous summer who had made the switch; the boy claimed chucking the smartphone kept him more present in real life, less dependent on technology. “He made the point that for our age group, whenever there’s a moment of silence people take out their phone to avoid awkwardness. And he wanted to embrace that awkwardness because life’s an awkward endeavor.” The idea intrigued Mason; plus, he’d been reading a lot about how smartphones and social media were linked to anxiety and depression among today’s teens. He’d had a brush with those himself, during his first semester of college. His then-girlfriend was three hundred miles away at another school, but they were in near-perpetual contact via text and Snapchat. They also kept track of each other through a location-sharing app. So when his girlfriend didn’t return his texts late at night, Mason could see precisely how often she was at the dorm of the guy with whom he suspected she was hooking up. “I was checking compulsively,” he said. “It’s so enticing. You know it’s bad for you. You know it’s going to be negative. But you can’t stop doing it. So . . .” He waggled his flip phone. “Also,” he added, almost as an aside, “it keeps me from watching porn.” Porn World Versus Real World

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  At his home, Anders shared the news with his wife, Valerie. Even as he spoke she thought This is a big and scary change, but she also had been steeling herself to danger since she was a little girl (her father had been a motorcycle-riding California Highway Patrolman), and she believed beating the Soviets to be a worthy goal. Bill had always been straight with Valerie, and it would do no good to sugarcoat things now. He laid out his thinking on the risks. He thought there was a one-third chance of a successful mission, a one-third chance of a failed mission that managed to make it back home, and a one-third chance the crew wouldn’t return at all. He hated to worry her, but he knew if she sensed he was bullshitting, she just would have worried more. Valerie trusted that these odds were accurate, though they were not numbers any young mother of five liked to hear. She thought about other military wives, some of whom had husbands missing in action, and she remembered that her husband, like most astronauts, would be fighting in Vietnam—eagerly—if he weren’t training to fly to the Moon. She kissed Bill and told him she believed in NASA, in the mission, and in him.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  urban renewal—yet somehow the solution was to stow them away in a most nonurban sort of accommodation. From Appalachia to the Big Apple, then, those without economic security and with the least political clout were seen as the most likely candidates for the trailer park. 40 Cheap land, a plot of concrete and mud, and a junkyard trailer—the updated squatter’s hovel—became the measure of white trash identity. By the 1960s, class was deeply imprinted onto most residential landscapes through zoning, housing, and school funding. As rural southerners relocated to metropolitan areas in search of work, a new kind of class tribalism emerged. Poor whites fought for a shrinking territory, and class conflict was played out in residential spaces. Which brings us to Hazel Bryan and the crystalization of the modern media circus. 41 • • • Nineteen fifty-seven was a crucial year of social experiment and consciousness- raising. Little Rock, Arkansas, grabbed national and international attention when Governor Orval Faubus thwarted the racial desegregation of Central High School. On September 4, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford attempted to enter the school building, but was blocked by the Arkansas National Guard. Outside the classroom building, reporters had gathered. Will Counts of the Arkansas Democrat and Johnny Jenkins of the Arkansas Gazette set the tone for how the day would be remembered. Their almost identical photographs of the lone student’s stoic walk ahead of an angry crowd seemed to capture the way class and race were defined in the confrontation. Each of the photojournalists focused his lens on Eckford and the unnamed white girl behind her who was yelling insults, her face distorted. Eckford looked calm, was dressed modestly, and appeared earnest. Her white adversary wore a dress that was too tight, and as she propelled herself forward, menacingly, mouth agape, she projected the crude callousness of the recognized white trash type. That contrast was precisely what the photographers intended to record. 42 The mysterious girl in the photo was one Hazel Bryan. A year later, at the age of sixteen, she would drop out of high school, marry, and go to live in a trailer. But it is what she was at fifteen that matters: the face of white trash. Ignorant. Unrepentant. Congenitally cruel. Only capable of replicating the pathetic life into which she was born.