Julie Beck

5 days ago | theatlantic.com | Julie Beck

Know thyself: Many have said this. Socrates—maybe you’ve heard of him? Though he seems to have gotten the phrase from the oracle at Apollo’s temple in Delphi, where it was chiseled into the stone facade. In the Tao-te Ching, Lao-tzu wrote, “If you understand others you are smart. If you understand yourself you are illuminated.” And Shakespeare had his own pithy aphorism, “To thine own self be true,” presupposing that thou knowest enough about thine own self to be true to it. Good advice, to a point.

2 weeks ago | theatlantic.com | Julie Beck

Imagine a child at home, crying. She is inconsolable, screaming for food. A neighbor tries to offer some bread; the door is blocked. A grocery store down the road has plenty of supplies; no one can get to it. The clock ticks down and the child starves, her baby fat melting to nothing. Multiply that possibility by thousands. In the Gaza Strip, Palestinian children are starving while food is sitting in trucks, just out of reach.

3 weeks ago | theatlantic.com | Julie Beck

You know that moment when a man who wants something thinks he sees an opportunity to charm an easy mark? A common version is specific to mothers, and it goes like this: A mom and her kid are out somewhere together, and they meet a guy. It doesn’t really matter who. He may be a service worker looking for tips, an acquaintance of the child looking to get in good with the mom, or a garden-variety slimeball. What matters is that he’s meeting this woman for the first time.

3 weeks ago | yahoo.com | Julie Beck

You know that moment when a man who wants something thinks he sees an opportunity to charm an easy mark? A common version is specific to mothers, and it goes like this: A mom and her kid are out somewhere together, and they meet a guy. It doesn’t really matter who. He may be a service worker looking for tips, an acquaintance of the child looking to get in good with the mom, or a garden-variety slimeball. What matters is that he’s meeting this woman for the first time.

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Julie Beck

Scarcely a week goes by that Katie’s 9- and 6-year-old daughters don’t wear a costume to their school in the Dallas suburbs. For the “Neon Party,” they wore white T-shirts and the school turned on black lights at lunchtime. For “Adjective Day,” when the kids had to wear something, anything, that they could describe with adjectives, Katie’s youngest put on a Little Mermaid outfit: scaly, wet, shiny, glittery, beautiful.