Writing — Eve Fairbanks

Journalism & essays from Eve Fairbanks

“It’s quite possible that, in the event of a loss in November, Trump exits the White House on schedule and simultaneously insists on Twitter and on TV that he didn’t lose.”

Washington Post

“Being a woman in America can feel like riding a defective bicycle.”

Medium

“You are the author of your destiny, our American parables tell us.”

Medium

“Justice Mukheli, a 35-year-old South African photographer and filmmaker, remembers the first time he thought to himself that he—the son of a truck driver—could make art. “

Sole.digital

“It felt amazing to him that, a year after the Covid-19 epidemic started in America, he still didn’t know if he’d been part of the experience or not.”

Medium

“In my freshman year of high school, my new best friend convinced the whole grade she had a fatal degenerative lung disease and that her parents beat her. Turned out the disease was made up, and she came to school early to sneak into the theater greenroom to apply costume-makeup bruises to her neck. These were horrible things to lie about. But at the time, I didn’t even question why she would: It obviously lent her a heroism far above the rest of us boringly comfortable suburban youngsters, an air of the overcomer, who is the aristocrat of our time.”

Buzzfeed News

“The man was old and rumpled, no tie over his blue-and-white striped shirt. His eyes squinted; his hair looked like it was slicked back with kitchen grease. He ascended the podium in the United Nations General Assembly hall clutching a sheaf of papers. Before him sat the diplomatic orthodoxy, sleek in Amal Alamuddin hairdos and Savile Row suits.”

New Republic

“Over the course of the next day, I exchanged nearly a dozen messages with the—married, I would learn—man on the journalists’ listserv. He was unusually witty and well-read, as well as an experienced reporter. We bantered about politics, policy, our taste in music, and a topic that fascinated me at that time, love in old novels.”

New Republic

“When I moved to South Africa nine years ago, one of the first things some locals told me was to be careful using GPS. The country had rules of navigation, they told me, but ones more complicated and intuitive than a computer could manage. You could drive through this neighborhood, but not at night. You could drive through that one, but roll up your windows, especially if you are white. It was often white South Africans who talked about the GPS, but many black South Africans agreed.”

Huffington Post

“You need to see my friend’s gun,” Mophethe Thebe said in a gas station parking lot in Soweto, the famous swath of townships southwest of Johannesburg.”

Foreign Policy

“I have been at that door so many times. The one you walk through into his apartment, or let him through into yours, and something shifts. It’s as quick as the click when the optometrist slides a new lens into the eye-test machine: a clear, almost weightless little sliver of a thing, but with the power to make the world resolve into clarity – or blur out, leaving you nauseous and unbalanced. Once, it was the door to the celebrated journalist’s apartment that I stumbled through, aged 21.”

The Guardian

Her arcing between her poles — her homebody and her pilgrim, her quiet and her abundant, her dark and her light — is perpetual.

Washington Post

“When I hear people say we are forged in solitude, or that we can even “find ourselves,” I suspect this is wishful thinking, born out of the fear we inevitably feel when we realize we are raw clay sculpted by hands we cannot fully control.”

Washington Post

“Once upon a time, in the Pony Expresso cafe in Seattle, a man and a woman began to experience the long-mysterious but increasingly scientifically investigated thing we call “love.” “

Huffington Post

“To the extent we do ponder friendship, we often think about it in economic terms. We say we “invest in” our friendships. We speak of “friendship maintenance” like the way we maintain a car. I had a therapist once who judged the quality of my friends with a single question: “Do they answer your WhatsApps immediately?” It was a proxy for care in our age, which is overcome with anxiety about isolation.”

Literary Hub

“I wonder if we’re tiring of #MeToo. I wonder if we’ll just reach a limit to how many of our idols we can bear to see lose their crowns.”

New Republic

“America started with a religious narrative—the city on a hill—and once you conceive of it, still, as a society grasping for religion, you see it everywhere. The free-floating moral rage, which affixes itself to targets like libtards or MAGA bigots. The conviction, in the way we now talk about the climate or the loss of our “values,” that the world will inevitably be ruined because of our sins. Things like Goop and the gluten-free movement are basically straight-up religions, promising spiritual renewal and healing from all sickness, only with a jade yoni egg as the Eucharist.”

HuffPost

“The idea that free speech is the virtue from which democracy’s other benefits spring would have taken the American founders aback. They understood laws that shut down newspapers to be illiberal, but not insults or nasty arguments within institutions over ideas.”

Washington Post

“I felt I had been put at the head of a train carrying the people formerly and newly precious to me—my partner, his colleagues, my friends, the plumber—whose brakes might have failed.”

New Republic

“Down in Bir Nabala, off the Ramot ridge, the weather changed. There were far fewer trees; the heat rose and made beads of sweat pop out on our faces and the backs of our necks. Dust swirled around the Qalandia checkpoint, a huge bottleneck of beat-up cars and sagging trucks that divides East Jerusalem from Ramallah. “

The Guardian

“Halperin wrote about Washington like it was an intriguing game, the kind that masked aristocrats played to entertain themselves at 19th-century parties: Everyone was both pawn and player, engaged in a set of arcane maneuvers to win an empty jackpot that ultimately meant nothing of true importance.“

Buzzfeed News