Last summer, with the momentousness of a gender-reveal party and the exuberance of a ticker-tape parade, the United States Army announced its first combat-ready bra to the world. They called it the Army Tactical Brassiere (a.k.a. the A.T.B.). Conceived four years ago, the garment is still being tinkered with, but one day it will be a wardrobe staple for all women in the Army. David Accetta, the chief public-affairs officer for the research division developing the undergarment, the DEVCOM Soldier Center (“DEVCOM” stands for U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command), told Army Times that, if the brassiere is officially approved by the Army Uniform Board, “we would see that as a win for female soldiers.” Ashley Cushon, the project engineer of the team working on the item, assured me that it would “reduce the cognitive burden on the wearer.” And a military Web site reported that the A.T.B. would improve “overall soldier performance and lethality.” Gadzooks! Yes, it’s flame-resistant, but what else can it do? Shoot bullets? Hypnotize the enemy? Turn its wearer invisible?
I decided that I needed to try on The Bra. Full disclosure: there is no undergarment in the world that would gird my loins enough to prepare me for combat. I shy away from quarrels; I am afraid of bear spray. Clothes and gear, however, are another story, and, surprisingly, we owe many of the things that we wear and use every day to the military: beanies, cargo pants, T-shirts, trenchcoats, and aviator glasses—and can we agree that sanitary napkins count as gear? Duct tape, Cheetos, and Silly Putty all have military origins.
History demonstrates that many of the greatest breakthroughs in math involve making connections between seemingly disparate branches of the subject. These bridges allow mathematicians, like the two of us, to transport problems from one branch to another and gain access to new tools, techniques and insights.
As Amber Escudero-Kontostathis lay in bed, it felt like someone was taking a razor-thin scalpel and delicately slicing into her legs.
The 28-year-old fundraiser eased into her fuzzy black-and-white slippers to get ready for a doctor’s appointment, and with each step, her feet felt like giant blisters threatening to pop under pressure.
“Sometimes, the slightest thing will set them off,” she said, gingerly tapping her foot.
The exact allure of late-night cooking is difficult to adequately describe, but I think for me — at the core of it all — is this feeling that it is somehow more indulgent than cooking in the daylight.
Not all nighttime cooking is glamorous, of course. Ask anyone who has worked in a restaurant kitchen or had to pull together dinner after getting off a second-shift job; but often, one's reasons for getting out the olive oil and frizzling garlic at 2 a.m. are a little more compelling. Perhaps someone is coming in from somewhere interesting. Or they stayed in with someone interesting.
Helen Ellis has built a literary career around charming humor, if charming is a euphemism for polite TMI. She presents as a sweet southern lady, but, bless your heart, she also talks about sex, kink, and all the things genteel housewives might find taboo. Her latest collection, Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge, doesn’t stray far from this formula, with the addition of more recent events like the global pandemic.
“I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual,” Virginia Woolf wrote on 17 February 1922, when she had just turned 40. Her diary is full of pain: deaths, losses, illness, grief, depression, anguish, fear. But on every page life breaks in, with astonishing energy, relish and glee. The diary is an unmatchable record of her times, a gallery of vividly observed individuals, an intimate and courageousself-examination, a revelation of a writer’s creative processes, a tender, watchful nature journal, and a meditation on life, love, marriage, friendship, solitude, society, time and mortality. It’s one of the greatest diaries ever written, and it’s excellent to see it back in print.
The first traffic jam in U.S. history, Jackson Lears tells us, occurred in February 1913. The cause? A crush of New Yorkers jostling for seats at a lecture (in French, no less) by the celebrity philosopher Henri Bergson. His topic was the élan vital, the notion of a dynamic life force, a “current sent through matter” that “transcends finality” and animates the world. It is Lears’s topic, too: the play of what he calls “animal spirits” across several centuries of American thought. The phrase captures a recurring desire to meld the material and the ethereal, body and soul, self and universe against powerful countercurrents in religious, scientific and commercial culture.
The “pursuit of vitality” will strike few as an obvious framework for U.S. history. But it is the perfect quarry for Lears, who has spent his distinguished academic career excavating the spiritual and psychic substrate of American modernity. His prior forays into the “weightlessness” of bourgeois reality, the salvific promise of the marketplace, the allure of the lucky strike and the drive for national regeneration converge in this wide-ranging account of precisely how, when and why Americans contemplated an animated world.