The Shame Game
The year was 2006, and Damon Young had just met a woman on MySpace. Their back-and-forth was witty, flirty and easy. They went on a first date at Barnes & Noble, where they browsed books and continued...
20 Jul 202220min
A Mother's Secret
Ayad Akhtar’s parents met in Pakistan in the early ’60s, when they were both medical students and “ridiculously attractive” — or so their friends say. Despite having a love marriage (against the wishe...
13 Jul 202217min
‘Do It, I Dare You.’
In his early 20s, Kevin Renn moved to New York City with dreams of making it as a playwright. When money got tight, he decided to fall back on a familiar option: babysitting.“The question, though, was...
6 Jul 202216min
Left to Be Found
Yvonne Liu knew from a young age that she was adopted, but she didn’t know the details. All she knew was that she had been left by her birth mother in a busy stairwell in Hong Kong. It wasn’t until sh...
29 Jun 202217min
Only With Distance
Nora Johnson had been making weekly visits to older man after he suffered a mild stroke. But he wasn’t just any older man. “We had the worst marriage in the history of human relations,” Nora wrote in ...
22 Jun 202219min
A Younger Man
Heather von Rohr had moved to Los Angeles with aspirations: to make it as a screenwriter and to fall in love, marry and have a child. In need of a day job, she took an entry-level position at the rese...
15 Jun 202219min
Marriage Classes at Guantánamo
Mansoor Adayfi was only 19 when he arrived at the prison camp at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Growing up in a tiny village in the mountains of Yemen, “I didn’t know much about the world,” h...
8 Jun 202217min
Season Premiere: One Man's Trash
When Mike Rucker and his partner, John, moved in together, they purchased a sofa they affectionately named Miss Bee. “I didn’t just feel grown up buying this sofa, I felt sophisticated,” Mike wrote in...
1 Jun 202221min
