Envy Apartment

Seventy years ago this month, my grandfather fled India to join millions of refugees in a new country to be known as Pakistan. He survived the ordeal across the still-unmarked border, but he lost family and friends in the killings, expulsions and unimaginable acts of vengeance that accompanied the making of India and Pakistan. These episodes still haunt the subcontinent. My grandfather died four decades later at his home in Lahore. He never returned to his village 20 miles away in what became a different country. I thought often about his journey as I packed up two years of life in Delhi in preparation for my own, very different, Indian departure. My partner’s job had brought us there, and we returned to Washington this month. But despite the privilege of my U.S. passport, I lived in Delhi with the painful echoes of my grandfather’s partition. For almost two years, I lived as a Pakistani-born Muslim in Narendra Modi ’s Hindu- nationalist India . I knew that the experience would be dis...

get elephant's newsletter Part 1 of a 3 part series inspired by Pema Chodron and her book , When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times Part 1: The Fall Apart Heart “Funny how a heart shatters all at once, seems like it should make a sound” – The Weepies. The broken heart is an eternally human story ; it’s a rare bird who makes it through life unscathed. Even though I am, admittedly, somewhat of a relationship oddball, this story is about an unremarkable heartbreak: just an ordinary broken heart that also happened to change my life. I’ve had no shortage of test flights. Over the years, I’ve created every kind of relationship entertainment; uncommon fondness, major infatuation, distracting lust, or try-to-force-the-too-big-foot-into-the-too-small-shoe kind of relationships; one after another – a seemingly endless cycle of optimistic trial, and all-too-familiar error, all the while wondering if this is what the fuss is all about. I’ve noticed my pinched laugh when bum...

One day in August, 2016, the financier Carl Icahn made an urgent phone call to the Environmental Protection Agency . Icahn is one of the richest men on Wall Street, and he has thrived, in no small measure, because of a capacity to intimidate. A Texas- based oil refiner in which he had a major stake was losing money because of an obscure environmental rule that Icahn regarded as unduly onerous. Icahn is a voluble critic of any government regulation that constrains his companies. So he wanted to speak with the person in charge of enforcing the policy: a senior official at the E.P.A. named Janet McCabe . Icahn works from a suite of offices, atop the General Motors Building , in midtown, that are decorated in the oak-and-leather fashion of a tycoon’s lair in a nineteen-eighties film. During that decade, Icahn made his reputation as one of the original corporate raiders , pioneering the art of the hostile takeover and establishing himself as a human juggernaut—a pugnacious deal machine ...