
The Art of Splitting Up
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Just as the institution of marriage has evolved, so has the institution of divorce. In a review of Haley Mlotek's new divorce memoir, the writer Rachel Vorona Cote traces the introduction of 'no fault ' divorce—a split without the designation of blame. California was the first state to legalize such divorces, in 1969; New York, in 2010, was the last.
Sometimes, splitting up involves placing or sharing blame. Other times, it's more simply about making a new choice for where you want life to take you—but simplicity doesn't mean ease. Today's reading list rounds up Atlantic stories on saying goodbye.
On Splitting Up
By Lori Gottlieb
How I Demolished My Life
By Honor Jones
The High Cost of Divorce
By Olga Khazan
Still Curious?
Other Diversions
The fantasy of a nonprofit dating app
Want to change your personality? Have a baby.
The ultimate antidote to toxic behavior online
P.S.
Each week, I ask readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Sarah C. from Northville, New York, shared this photo, taken by her husband, of the 'peaceful, vibrant colors of fall on our beach, located on the Great Sacandaga Lake.'
I'll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks. If you'd like to share, reply to this email with a photo and a short description so we can share your wonder with fellow readers in a future edition of this newsletter or on our website. Please include your name (initials are okay), age, and location. By doing so, you agree that The Atlantic has permission to publish your photo and publicly attribute the response to you, including your first name and last initial, age, and/or location that you share with your submission.

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Atlantic
2 days ago
- Atlantic
The Master of the White-Knuckle Narrative
William Langewiesche, whose extraordinary body of white-knuckle narrative reporting from all parts of the globe appeared in these pages over a period of decades, died earlier this week at the age of 70. He had been living with a debilitating cancer for several years but continued to plan new projects and to write. His straightforward optimism and ambition, in the face of long odds, are what brought him to The Atlantic in the first place. In the spring of 1991, he sent to our offices a two-part, 20,000-word account of his experiences in the Sahara—a blend of natural history, travelogue, black humor, and adventure story, rendered in deceptively simple prose that possessed an irresistible force. The envelope from Langewiesche arrived out of the blue, along with a cover letter reading 'Enclosed are two pieces on Algeria.' Within a few months, that submission, virtually unchanged, became an Atlantic cover story, 'The World in Its Extreme.' Over the next 15 years, Langewiesche contributed a score of major articles to The Atlantic: On Pakistan's development of atomic weapons. On tensions along the U.S.-Mexico border. On a catastrophic ferry sinking in the Baltic. On the anything-goes legal regime governing ships on the high seas. One particular specialty was flying. His father, Wolfgang, had been a legendary pilot—he was the author of the classic book Stick and Rudder —and Langewiesche flew small planes professionally (air taxis, air ambulances, cargo planes) while in college at Stanford and afterward, supporting himself while he began writing for aviation magazines. For many years, he supplemented his income by teaching pilots how to fly in the worst possible weather, taking off with one of his students only when the radar had lit up with danger. One of Langewiesche's gifts was the ability to translate technical minutiae into a gripping yarn. He could recount the arcane details of how an airplane makes a turn in a way that evoked the raptures of dance. His description of the job of air traffic controller may have encouraged many readers to start taking the train. Langewiesche investigated aviation disasters of every kind, whether the nosedive of Valujet 592 or the incineration of the space shuttle Columbia. He won a National Magazine Award for one of his aviation investigations—into the crash of EgyptAir 990—during an extraordinary run that saw him named as a finalist for the award virtually every year for a decade. He would win another National Magazine Award for his reconstruction of a massacre at the hands of American forces in Haditha, Iraq. Langewiesche's access to the world of expertise—engineers, historians, nuclear scientists, forensic investigators, other pilots—ran deep, but he was no armchair analyst or globe-spinning litterateur. After 9/11, he spent six months among the workers at Ground Zero to report on the grim, complex task of finding remains and removing debris, on most days venturing deep into the smoldering pile. (His three sequential Atlantic cover stories on the subject in 2002 became the book American Ground.) Langewiesche made many trips to Iraq for the magazine, covering all aspects of the war and producing a cover story about the surreal, hothouse American world inside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone. For his much later cover story about the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370—the magazine's most-read article in 2019—he traveled along the rim of the Indian Ocean, stopping wherever he heard that fragments of wreckage had washed ashore. Fluent in French, he embedded with the French Foreign Legion on a mission to Guyana. A single day on such an assignment would exhaust most people. He was with them for a month. Langewiesche had no taste for manufactured drama. Real drama, he believed, could be found almost anywhere, in any story, if you looked deeply and patiently enough. Similarly, there was nothing overwrought about his prose. His sentences relied on ordinary words, but for all that possessed a pure and crystalline character that turned reading into compulsion. He rarely injected the first person into what he wrote, but the reader was treated to a seemingly omniscient perspective from right behind his eyes. And that perspective was earned. To ask Langewiesche how he knew a particular fact or how he knew what someone thought—the kind of thing fact-checkers and editors ask all the time—was to embark on an explanatory excursion that underscored how hard he worked for every morsel of insight. A certain cast of mind characterizes Langewiesche's work for The Atlantic as well as for Vanity Fair and The New York Times Magazine. He was skeptical about most political and social institutions, not because they weren't needed but because they were fragile and self-serving. But he was not skeptical about knowledge and expertise, nor about the capacity of ordinary people to transcend circumstances and institutions with humanity and ingenuity. Those people peer out from between the lines of everything he wrote.


New York Times
3 days ago
- New York Times
William Langewiesche, the ‘Steve McQueen of Journalism,' Dies at 70
William Langewiesche, a magazine writer and author who forged complex narratives with precision-tooled prose that shed fresh light on national security, the occupation of Iraq and, especially, aviation disasters — he was a professional pilot — died on Sunday in East Lyme, Conn. He was 70. Cullen Murphy, his longtime editor at The Atlantic and Vanity Fair, confirmed the death, at the home of a friend, saying the cause was prostate cancer. Mr. Langewiesche (pronounced long-gah-vee-shuh) was one of the most prominent long-form nonfiction writers of recent decades. He was an international correspondent for Vanity Fair, a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine and a national correspondent for The Atlantic. For 10 years running, from 1999 to 2008, his pieces were finalists for the National Magazine Award, and he won it twice: in 2007 for 'Rules of Engagement,' about the killing of 24 unarmed civilians by U.S. Marines in 2005 in Haditha, Iraq; and in 2002 for 'The Crash of EgyptAir 990,' about a flight that went down in the Atlantic Ocean in 1999 with the loss of all 217 people aboard. He chose to write often about calamitous events, piecing together a meticulous explanation for what went wrong while portraying the human subjects under his microscope with sympathy. 'At his best there's a sort of cinematic omniscience in the way he writes,' Mr. Murphy said in an interview. 'And so you feel almost as he feels, with your face pressed up against the window watching something unfold, often very rapidly, and often wishing that things would unfold very differently but knowing there's nothing that can be done.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Yahoo
The one item that helped save a father and son from their doomed boat
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - Two boaters were rescued Thursday after their vessel began taking on water 34 miles off the coast of the mid-Atlantic, and the U.S. Coast Guard said the use of their Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB) may have made the difference. According to the agency, a father-and-son duo were aboard the 57-foot sport fishing vessel named "Turn Me Loose" when the boat began taking on water off the coast of Virginia Beach. The boaters' EPIRB transmitted their exact position to first responders, who were able to arrive at the site less than an hour after receiving the first distress call. Upon arrival, rescue crews said they found 30-year-old Jeffrey Hudson and 60-year-old Robert Hudson adrift in an emergency life raft. Both men were successfully transported to the USCGC Calhoun, where they underwent medical evaluations before being taken to shore. Us Coast Guard Unveils First Polar Icebreaker In More Than 25 Years Following their arrival in Virginia Beach, the two men were reunited with relieved family members. Coast Guard leadership praised the quick response, which involved at least half a dozen boats and aviation units from around the region. "This successful rescue highlights the importance of preparedness and the effectiveness of coordinated efforts between multiple agencies and assets," Daniel Butierries, a chief warrant officer with the U.S. Coast Guard, said in a statement. "The quick response and the mariners' preparedness significantly contributed to the rescue." The agency highlighted the use of the EPIRB and other lifesaving equipment, which all marine vessels should have while venturing offshore. The Coast Guard did not say what caused the vessel to start taking on water or if weather played a role. World's Largest Iceberg On Possible Collision Course With Island In South Atlantic Ocean The boat remains partially submerged more than 30 miles offshore, which could be hazardous to unalert mariners. The Coast Guard said it is broadcasting alerts to boaters in the area in an effort to help them stay clear of the debris and prevent a collision. It remains unclear if the boat's owner will attempt a salvage operation or if the vessel will simply sink to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean before such an effort article source: The one item that helped save a father and son from their doomed boat