Before social media, Charles Darwin relied on a global network of colleagues who corresponded with him. Before AI, he used photos to study facial expressions around the world. Before Buzzfeed, he created quizzes about what emotion was pictured. Before Fitbit, he walked daily and counted his steps by dragging a flint […]
Who could resist a book called Monk on the Run? With chapters titled “Monk on the Lam” and “Monk in the Slam”? The Buddhists were not best pleased to learn that the eager student who had kept their discipline for five years came to hide from the feds. As character witnesses in his […]
“Automatic flushing toilets, which use sensors to detect when a person has finished using the toilet and flush automatically, are designed to improve hygiene and convenience by eliminating the need for manual flushing.” That, at least, was the plan. But if you walk into a public restroom, fifty-fifty odds say you will […]
“I will be your tour guide through hell,” Joe West likes to promise. Joe Schwartz is his real name, and he works at the St. Louis Public Library, has for nineteen years, started as a custodian after a series of jobs filled with sweat, risk, and male camaraderie. Hell is not […]
Of all Joan Didion’s brilliant lines, one has been co-opted to open hundreds of essays by lesser writers—and here we go again: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” We do tell ourselves stories in order to live. And we live in conflict. Stories only work when there is conflict—that is the […]
I did not go to my 20 Year High School Reunion. The obvious reason is I was out of town that weekend, which made it easier to avoid being part of the minority of single, childless graduates there at the event—still a blasphemous predicament that clashes with the Midwest’s conventional norms. […]
The people heading toward Arrowhead Stadium in the late afternoon of July 7th are not decked out in the red and gold garb of the local, prolifically successful football team, the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs. Nor are they dressed in the merchandise of an opposition team; our only enemies are the […]
I never knew there was a real Stanley Kowalski. I never needed there to be a real Stanley Kowalski. Marlon Brando’s primal yell in Streetcar Named Desire—“STEL-LA!!!”—epitomized far too many men already. Home from the latest war, these men are no longer sure they are men. They have been shot up, cut up, […]
The little cartoon drawings, photographs, and spinal-column diagrams strike a nerve. They show people slumping and slouching like I do, standing with their shoulders hunched forward and their necks out like a turtle’s. The body was made to stand and sit erect, “stacked” as the physical therapists say, one vertebra over another so […]
Not even five feet tall, Dorothy Parker had a whispery finishing-school voice, walked in a cloud of perfume, and said “fuck” a lot. Also other four-letter words, delivered deadpan. Her wit flashed you, left you stunned and tickled. But the humor came out of tragedy, insecurity, a sharp appraisal of human nature, and […]