One to Remember
Plus: friendship breakups, Edmund White, and 81 years since D-Day
Timeless stories from our 175-year archive handpicked to add context to the news of the day.
Wishful Thinking
In our June issue, Amanda Chicago Lewis reports on the aspirations and failures of the United Nations. “A row of national flags loomed over First Avenue, alongside the omniscient and omnipresent surveillance cameras,” writes Lewis. “Silver medallions affixed to the fencing displayed the U.N. emblem, which is meant to represent peace but looked to me like a world map in a crosshairs.”
Ten years ago, Rebecca Solnit reported from the twenty-first session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—also known as COP21, or the Paris climate summit. “It was amazing and often also boring,” Solnit writes. “The statements were largely positive, predictable, vague, and repetitious. Of course, world leaders have to be graded on a curve.”
Edmund White (1940-2025)
[May 1987]
“There is a strong urge to record one's own past—one's own life—before it vanishes. I suppose everyone both believes and chooses to ignore that each detail of his behavior is inscribed in the arbitrariness of history.”
Read “The Artist and AIDS”
[January 2020]
On the fiction of Juan Carlos Onetti.
Read “Existential Noir”
[December 2020]
A poem from a manuscript in progress: “I never doubted you’d return. You’re a man of your word / And this is your kingdom.”
Read “Penelope Waits for Odysseus”
81 Years Ago Today: Remembering D-Day
[August 1944]
“History is so undramatic when you live it. It seemed to us, on this aircraft carrier known as the United Kingdom, less exciting and sensational.”
Read “Invasion Diary” by Vernon Bartlett
[June 2014]
A selection from a memoir written in 1944 by Marcelle Hamel-Hateau, a schoolteacher in the Norman village of Neuville-au-Plain, included in D-Day Through French Eyes, by Mary Louise Roberts, published by the University of Chicago Press.
Read “Army of Shadows”
[August 1951]
“An expert billiard player tries to make each carom in such a way as to set up the balls for the next shot. Our victory over Germany in World War II seems to have been a billiard by an amateur—brilliant after its own fashion but productive of nothing but trouble for the next play.”
Read “Was D-Day a Mistake?” by Gordon Harrison
Friend or Foe?
[August 1990]
“Lucy was her best friend at camp. Lois had other friends in the winter, when there was school and itchy woolen clothing and darkness in the afternoons, but Lucy was her summer friend.”
Read “Death by Landscape” by Margaret Atwood
[January 2021]
“I had set my intention to help my friend, to hold her hand and go with her while she went to peer over the cliff, the cliff that, coincidentally, I fell off.”
Read “These Precious Days” by Ann Patchett
[April 2021]
“I have a friend who has never read a single word I have written. I love being with her.”
Read “Friends with Benefits” by Mary Ruefle