The Bullet In My Mother’s Head

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The Bullet in My Mother’s Head

I first became worried about the bullet in my mother’s head two days after she died. I was afraid the bullet was going to explode.

In truth, it was bullet fragments, and they weren’t what ended my mother’s life. She was the rarest of cases: a woman who had survived her own murder. When the mortician handed me her death certificate, it read, “Age: 58. Cause of death: Cardiopulmonary failure”—as a result of her lung cancer. One room away, my mother’s body was being prepared for cremation. I imagined the fire incinerating her flesh, then tried to shake that thought. She was in her white nightgown, the one with lace, the one she always wore when she appeared in the kitchen at night, emerging from a dream, crinkles around her eyes, happily curious about where I’d been that day and what I’d seen.

I was sitting in a funeral home in San Pedro, California, surrounded by carpeted floors, inaudible footsteps, and clasped hands. And then—I couldn’t help it—I imagined her body ripped apart. Would the powder in the bullet explode in the flames? My body tried to jump up from the heavy green leather chair, but my mind stopped it—of course the ammunition was exhausted when the bullet was fired, twenty-eight years before. But even though I understood this intellectually, still I asked my question out loud: “Is the bullet going to explode?”

The Pleasure of the President: A Short Story

The President has a sensitive left rhomboid, which is a muscle between the spine and the shoulder. When he’s been awake too late, or fallen asleep in his chair, or gotten enraged while using his phone, or spent too long golfing, the muscle spasms and bunches into a long hard shotgun slug under the surface of his shoulder blade. Yuliya often begins there, applying the warmed oil in a long stroke along the length of his spine, pressing the heel of her hand into the rhomboid, hearing the President’s sharp intake of breath.

“Oh, you really know,” he sometimes says, “you know just where the problem is, don’t you? It’s incredible how you know that. You’re sort of a genius. I’ve met a lot of geniuses in my life, and I have a special sense for it. I know who’s gifted—I just have to look at them. You’re gifted.”

How to Buy a Watch for Less Than $15,000

If this is your first exposure to our price-bracketed buying guides that cover some of the world’s best wristwatches, then welcome! If you’re a returning reader, then we have some exciting news for you: Unlike our first guide to entry-level pieces that topped out at $1,500—or even our second guide that summited the $7,500 mountain—this edition will really see us cooking with gas. Why? Because for $15,000, the great majority of the watch world’s classics become available. (Okay, maybe not in solid gold, but definitely in stainless steel!)

What sort of watches are we talking about? The Rolex Submariner dive watch, for one, and ditto the Omega Seamaster. Speaking of Omega, the Speedmaster Moonwatch Professional can be yours, as can the famous Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso and even a hulking Pilot’s Watch from IWC. You can strap on a solid-gold Tank Louis Cartier for under $15K and even a Grand Seiko with an absolutely stunning dial and a movement crafted completely in-house. Truly, the options are incredible at this price. To make parsing them easier, we’ve divided this guide into different sections: Dress Watches, Dive Watches, Chronograph Watches, GMT/World Timer Watches, and Everyday Watches. We’ve also included some handy information that should make your shopping experience easier.

The Truth About the Martini

You’ve probably noticed that the martini is having a moment. This summer, The Washington Post reported that TikTok users anointed the combination of a martini, French fries, and a Caesar salad as the perfect meal. For once, at least, the TikTokers aren’t wrong. According to data from NielsenQ, the martini is the second-most popular cocktail in America, behind the margarita. All of this fascination has led to spinoffs: a couple years ago, everyone was drinking espresso martinis; now the porn star martini is experiencing a renaissance. But the popularity of the classic version has been surging for years. In 2016, Esquire’s Jeff Gordinier wrote about its sudden ascendance: “Eventually you come back to the martini. And like the martini itself, the return arrives with a shimmer of clarity.” Last December, we ranked the 50 best martinis in America. They mix the best one, we said, at the Chandelier Bar in New Orleans.

The 6 Best Sex Movies of 2024

Reports of the demise of sex in movies have been greatly exaggerated. Or maybe premature. While critics like The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday weren’t delusional for observing a downward trend in sex on the silver screen, the sex onscreen in the first half of this year is enough to prove that the multiplex is certainly no dead bedroom. So far, we’ve been treated to a lesbian romance as sweaty as the gym its characters meet in, a clothing-optional queer serial-killer yarn, role-play as sexual actualization, a stepmom-stepson tryst, and two boys who do not have sex but clearly love each other (and Zendaya) very much. From Love Lies Bleeding to The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, here are some of the highlights of sex in movies in 2024 so far.

A Shark Attack and a Terrorist Bombing: This Is a Love Story

There's a reason the man and woman sitting on the mangy couch hold hands. They've endured what you and I have not, and what they’ve endured has led them to question whether to live. You see it in their faces, in their bearing, in the shared glances before speaking, a weighted maturity that slumps their shoulders and draws into sharper contrast their youth: he with his shaggy reddish-brown hair and childlike freckles, she with her olive complexion and taut cheekbones and tattoos up and down her arms.

When a catastrophe happens, they say, you can choose to see it as random, as they each have. Randomness, though, is “a hard thing to come to terms with,” she says. A random life is a chaotic one, a meaningless one, ultimately a hopeless one. On the other hand, to view catastrophe as fated, which they have each done as well, is no better. “You ask, ‘Why me? What have I done to deserve this?’ ” the man says. A fated life is a guilt-stricken one, an angry one, ultimately a shameful one.