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Stephen Fife-Adams in In the Third Place

Jul 6

July 5, 2024

When he sat on the couch in the evenings, typing on his laptop, he faced the portion of the den that served as something of a shrine to early 21st Century liberal optimism. On one wall was an original Shepard Fairey CHANGE poster from Obama’s 2008 campaign. (He’d worn his Obama HOPE t-shirt on the 4th of…

Stephen Fife-Adams in In the Third Place

Jul 3

July 3, 2024

A great benefit he got from reading history was the awareness that what people took for granted in the world was largely the result of accidents, choices, and habits. Certainly some aspects of human culture were rooted in the core characteristics of the species (a hair-challenged, bipedal…

Stephen Fife-Adams in In the Third Place

Jul 7

July 7, 2024

Before he went to visit his daughter, he spent some time at the Phoenix Art Museum. The featured special exhibit was a history of Barbie that had clearly been conceived in tandem with the Greta Gerwig movie from the previous year. It was fairly decent in its collection of historical dolls and clothes and…

Stephen Fife-Adams in In the Third Place

Jul 1

July 1, 2024

How did a nation slip by slow degrees into dictatorship? The answer to that question was becoming clearer by the day. It happened the…

Stephen Fife-Adams in In the Third Place

Jun 29

June 28, 2024

So now he was 54. An age with neither cultural nor personal significance for him, no gravity of associations apart from the fact that he was now double the age his parents were when he was born. He’d felt it when he’d turned 27. That had been a legit capital-A Age. Twenty-seven, for him, was fraught…

Stephen Fife-Adams in In the Third Place

Jul 2

July 2, 2024

While eating dinner and talking with his wife about looming political catastrophes that evening, he’d been struck with a strong feeling of cognitive dissonance that he was still mulling over hours later. They’d been sitting on the patio outside the deli where they’d gotten their food, with what was…

Stephen Fife-Adams in In the Third Place

Jul 6

July 6, 2024

That afternoon, he’d flown to Arizona to visit his daughter. Outside, at 10pm, it was still 99 degrees after having reached a high of 113. At home in Oregon, the temperature had hit the high 90s. He’d seen a headline that said Palm Springs had hit 124.

Stephen Fife-Adams in In the Third Place

Jun 30

June 30, 2024

When he was in his mid-thirties, he’d enrolled in a masters program in history. It was history, he’d decided, that he wanted to write, and he wanted to know how it was really done. The professor in one of his classes mentioned that one of her favorite books of all time was No Place of Grace by T. J…

Stephen Fife-Adams in In the Third Place

Jun 29

June 29, 2024

He hadn’t put much thought into the name of the new project, “In the Third Place”, but the next morning, when he went back to read over what he’d written in full expectation that he would find it embarrassing and shove the whole thing into the cyber garbage bin, he found that the title resonated with…

Stephen Fife-Adams in In the Third Place

Jul 4

July 4, 2024

“I stayed at home on the Fourth of July, and I pulled the shades so I didn’t have to see the sky.”

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In the Third Place

Fragments and figments about being alive in an overwhelming time

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