What started as a short fling to ride out a global pandemic became something more. Being confined together for months can test a couple, but the experience deepened our bond. I fell in love. I can’t speak for my desk chair from the office—well, maybe I can, since chairs don’t talk—but I feel like I know its heart.
Chair-a-la is the pet name I’ve been using. Sometimes Chair-Chair. Or Chairy-boo (but only in private). Chair-a-la hasn’t reciprocated, but that’s O.K. Call me superficial, but I’ll take three-hundred-and-sixty-degree arms, adjustable lumbar support, variable seat height and depth, and soil-resistant leather over a lot of empty talk. Words don’t fully convey how reassuring and delicious it feels to be truly held by an inanimate object.
This story is from the March 25, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the March 25, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.