Too Foreign
...is lived only to the extent that it is told. Where any encounter with something new has the power to momentarily upset by showing us that we do not know...
Helen Gurley Brown, 1922-2012
...the company higher-ups joined us at the elevator, and she turned to the newcomer, cupped her hair in one frail hand, and actually addressed her as pussycat. Our moment of...
The Two Standards of Beauty
...in order to most do it for them. These two realms are mistakenly conflated, but they do have a good bit of overlap. Both tend to value youth, slimness, and...
Naked Criticism
...in the intervals between shot and countershot, between sleeping and waking. Commerce snakes its way into each dream-mind’s working—snakes in, loops round fragments of sensation and assembles them as sense....
Some covert wonder
...but totally unidentifiable piles huddled close for warmth. "Babe? You coming?" She took the pot of flame and dropped it into the half-full sink. And if she had stayed she...
Permanent Display
...a status many people aspire to, or if they do, feel they can successfully maintain. Beyond the legal concerns—like the necessity of concealing your identity in order to pull off...
More Could Have Happened With That Subplot
...happen with father jack. thank you, yes i will let you know if other questions come up you mean this as title? Totally, that was a bit snarky but also...
The Real Beach Lives of Miami
...in Fort Lauderdale or Key West or Cancun or any of the other places American college students throng in mid-March in order to get debauched. If she had, perhaps she...
M and A
...gestures downwards) will start (he gestures upwards). He plays with the gesture a little until it turns into a little bit of a dance. He watches his arm happily. Gets...
Alone Again Or
...the review incorrectly implied it hadn't been published previously in America) , it must be uncanny to encounter her younger self in brand-new packaging. The self-conscious despair that haunts Heti's...
“What William Faulkner implies, Erskine Caldwell records”
...a comrade of his previous debaucheries.” The racist, like the reformed sinner, creates “a pornography of his former life…In order to insure that he will not slip back into the...
An assortment
...have different hair-care requirements. There's a bit more specificity in the article than the headline, although it isn't clear why these various hair textures must be assembled in one column....
Sunday Reading
...started a new book, Pomegranate Soup. I wrote it in 6 weeks flat—I just constantly wrote, and ate!" "A rabbit can travel quite comfortably in a car, but you will...
The Art Kettle
...is: “To keep us all in good order.” Hence the title of this book—The Art Kettle—for its thesis is that, just as the “kettling” techniques increasingly being employed by the...
Portrait of the Artist as a Rookie Cop
...like, collect their thoughts, talk to their loved ones, be people. Shed their police persona and relax a little bit.' It is a place forbidden to civilians. The intensity of...
Girl Talk
...confidants, it’s slanted toward men, due to a combination of serial monogamy, the fortune to have remained friendly with a handful of men I used to date, and an incidental...