Still exists.

“Was I supposed to follow Hayley, pursuing her across the twenty-five-mile-per-hour zones to the hospital, where things would proceed pretty much exactly the same had I not followed her? Was I supposed to return to work, where, through no fault of my own, I would be perceived as cold and un-empathetic? Was I supposed to do a five-minute ‘breather’ as a way of understanding that in such moments our vision invariably clouds? Or was this a situation in which our first instinct is our best instinct and the clouding occurs in deliberation? Who was I to Hayley, really, but a chance shaking of the biological dice? Let her go.

“As these thoughts presented themselves, one after another, like a series of flashcards for learning nothing, I found myself passing a mock-Tudor house with a trim lawn, bordered with topiary. Beyond the house were horses, then 10 miles of sod farms. In middle school and then steadily through high school, I had been infatuated with a boy who lived in this house, a perfectly untouchable Joshua Michaleson. My love for him was not entirely unrequited: once, after finishing a chemistry-lab writeup we were partnered for, I was invited, albeit by his father, to stay for dinner. Joshua showed me the special freezer, for the quarter of a cow they had purchased, and there was also a greenhouse with geraniums and tomato plants. Next to the kitchen table, on a high shelf, was a red plate that I was told was part of a Quaker tradition; it read, ‘You Are Special Today,’ and one ate off it only on one’s birthday, or on some other very special occasion. I had loved Joshua before, but now I loved him with the intensity of someone who would have felt honored to be a piece of furniture in his realm. In my house, at that time, there were hundreds of goldfish that our mom had brought home in plastic bags, in one of her streaks of spending and what she called her ‘bouts of personality.’ Joshua was the eldest of five brothers; also at the table was a live-in nanny, a woman from Hungary, whose name I didn’t catch. She had corn-silk hair pulled up in one of those ponytails that lend a special shape to the head, a sort of volume which I’ve never succeeded in reproducing. I don’t know where the mom was. The nanny seemed at least one part tennis star. I felt, at that dinner, that I was sitting amid the most beautiful, intelligent family in the world.

“Joshua’s father drove me home. I asked him to drop me off at the house two doors down from my actual house. The porch light was not on at my house. Inside, my mother was sleeping. Outside, Hayley had gathered the plastic bags of goldfish from all the corners of the house and was finishing placing a stack of them on our front lawn, next to a sign that read, ‘Free! Please take!’ She was never a keeper of family secrets. Only I was. I never used to tell Hayley, or anyone, anything. But for some reason, I suppose because Hayley had an undeniable talent with the other gender, that evening I confessed to her that I was in love with Joshua Michaelson. She stood quietly next to the fish. Quiet was rare for Hayley. She knew the Michaelson family.

“Finally, she said, ‘You’re too good for him. Just remember that. He’s not rejecting you, you’re rejecting him.’

“It wasn’t true, I know, but something about my sister’s way of being—it was our household that was secretly the golden one. I was able to believe that. For a moment.”
—Rivka Galchen

“The night was sad. The center failed to hold. Did I blame the rioting kids? I did. Did I blame Trump? I did. This, Mr. Trump, I thought, is why we practice civility. This is why, before we say exactly what is on our minds, we run it past ourselves, to see if it makes sense, is true, is fair, has a flavor of kindness, and won’t hurt someone or make someone’s difficult life more difficult. Because there are, among us, in every political camp, limited, angry, violent, and/or damaged people, waiting for any excuse to throw off the tethers of restraint and get after it. After which it falls to the rest of us, right and left, to clean up the mess.”
—George Saunders

“In college, I was a budding Republican, an Ayn Rand acolyte. I voted for Reagan. I’d been a bad student in high school and now, in engineering school, felt (and was) academically outgunned, way behind the curve. In that state, I constructed a world view in which I was not behind the curve but ahead of it. I conjured up a set of hazy villains, who were, I can see now, externalized manifestations, imaginary versions of those who were leaving me behind; i.e., my better-prepared, more sophisticated fellow-students. They were, yes, smarter and sharper than I was (as indicated by the tests on which they were always creaming me), but I was … what was I? Uh, tougher, more resilient, more able to get down and dirty as needed. I distinctly remember the feeling of casting about for some world view in which my shortfall somehow constituted a hidden noble advantage.”
—George Saunders

“Dig below the surface, and you will find the demons crawling. You can see them in the looks that residents give you when they pass; sneering snobs glaring down their noses with entitlement; small-minded townies, bullying you with eyes that you recognize from the primary school lunchroom; the old people, 80 and above, wearing blank stares. You can hear it in their bothered tutting at the bus stop (especially if they ever hear a visitor mispronouncing the name of the town), the shots that constantly ring out from across the countryside as they set about murdering as many of the local pheasants as they can.

“As with any hell, the thing that really makes it so is that you can never leave. For one thing, poor public transportation makes leaving impossible in a practical, everyday sense — at least if you can’t drive. For another, the town thwarts any ambitions that stretch beyond its borders. From what I can tell, a young person from Alresford, forced to move back in with his parents after college, will typically find himself unable to get work that is not based in Alresford. As a result, it is full of people around my age, 27, stuck in dead-end jobs.

“And it is impossible to leave Alresford, because Alresford is not just a place: It is an ideology that infects your very soul. Let’s call it “Alresfordism.” It is an ideology of smallness, of contraction, of wanting to curl up in our own personal, financially secure hole and will everything amusing or interesting or exciting in the world away.”
—Tom Whyman