Columns
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Every Person In New York
Woman at Taco Bell on 14th Street. Man Sleeping on a bench in Madison Square Park, May 30, 2010. He is wearing 3-D Movie Theatre Glasses. Lewis Lapham. Three people out of the current 8,008,278 people of New York City.…
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The Paris Review Goes Southern
It’s “Terry Southern Month” at The Paris Review Daily—the quarterly’s online “culture gazette,” the goal of which is to stay in touch with The Paris Review’s audience between print issues. Today, read an interview with Terry Southern from Issue 138.…
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bodies at rest
Sarah Fran Wisby responds to San Francisco’s Sit/Lie proposition criminalizing homelessness. ** I come not to bury the sponsors of the proposed Sit/Lie aka Civil Sidewalks ordinance, but to praise them, and to call attention to a potential side benefit…
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Kyle Kinane’s I’m Dead and It’s All My Fault #34
Well, I took too many Xanax, so then I took a bunch of Adderall to right the ship, you know? Might have over-corrected though. I feel like barfing and passing out, but this is the most intense relaxation I’ve ever…
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Summer Picks From Michael Chabon, Susan Orlean, Jennifer Egan, and More
A new article over at Mother Jones gives us summer nonfiction picks from some of the biggest writers working today. Susan Orlean recommends The Looming Tower, Jennifer Egan selects The Image, and Michael Chabon has this to say about The…
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The Deep Dark Shades of BP’s Gulf Oil Spill
The oil-drenched marine life preparing to testify on Barry Blitt’s June 7 New Yorker cover did not make me smile in the slightest. (I doubt humor, even the dark kind, was Blitt’s core intent.) It’s an effectively painful riff on…
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Morning Coffee
Photosynthesis car is a pretty neat idea, you know? Competitive ferret-legging. Mike Wirth has your daily dose of infographics. On Milan’s new circular metro line (true story: I got in a big argument with a dude on the street today…
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The Living Dead
David Foster Wallace speaks to us from beyond the grave in David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself—but should we be listening?
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Haaretz Lets Novelists Write News, Flotilla Or No Flotilla
Last year at about this time, the Israeli paper Haaretz let a bunch of literary writers report the news to celebrate Israel’s book week. Well, they’re doing it again, but this time, there’s a flotilla involved. Authors include Margaret Atwood,…
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The Trouble With Academia
“I think a lot of literary academics look sort of wistfully out of their office windows and wish their career hadn’t led them so far away from the wider public conversation about books and culture; they publish in dryasdust peer-reviewed…
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Jonathan Lethem and David Gates Talk Facebook, Internet, The Future
“I have no idea how to handle this new mode of living (I guess “living” is the word) in fiction. I probably spend more time e-mailing and reading online than I do having non-virtual human contact—and I bet I’m not…