The Slow, But Powerful, Erosion of Flattery
Flattery flattens a person, robbing us of complexity and crippling our will and ability to exchange and understand truths—even the hard ones—we might gain from others.
By Ben Fulton
The Nuclear War Films We Refuse to See, but Must See
The War Game and Threads have no time for dramatic trifles of characters dealing with nuclear war from afar, or even the relative safety of a military bunker. Instead, both films plunge us deep into their dreaded, adrenaline-soaked horrors.
Why We Surrender to Logos
Should we not be grateful that companies care enough to hire skilled graphic designers educated in the ways of soft-selling via design and color, and not the bark of street hawkers?
How Dorm Rooms Chart the Dimensions of Maturity
(Photo by Marcus Loke via Unsplash)
People in their late teens and early twenties are prone to conversational silence around most adults, their parents included. But there is an easy way around this reticence if you want to get to know them better: Just peek into their…
The Death of Parties Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
Are we too afraid to admit that other people are just boring compared to the internet? Are we too timid to say that what we really want is a “party” redefined, reformulated, or done up some other way?
The Presidential Fitness Test Is Back to Shame Us All over Again? Great!
If any single contradiction defines us as Americans, it is that we are gluttons for the spectacle of team sports, but for the most part we starve ourselves of individual exercise.
Our nation’s high schools abound in football and basketball teams as social and civic…
The Knick Is the TV Show Medical Quacks Hope You Never Watch
‘The Knick’ is both an homage to physicians and medical researchers of the past, even those wildly wrong but well-meaning. Above all, it is a portent of what we stand to lose when we cannot, or refuse to, remember all that our modern medical establishment was built on a foundation of trial, error, and incredible suffering and loss of life.‘‘
Our American Assassins
The first anniversary of the July 13, 2024, attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump landed with all the grace of a brick hurled through a living room window.
Few of Trump’s critics dared to comment on it then, except to say that political violence in the…
How Budget Hotels Deliver Us into Liminal States
There is no use pretending you are someone special when, in fact, you are just another person passing through. So look hard at that tacky framed print on the wall. Heft your Gideon Bible. Scrape your bare feet over the wiry carpet. Turn on the TV screen lodged just two feet from the edge of your bed. Tune out, and join the thousands of invisible hands of everyone else before you who also felt alien, alone, or maybe even a little bit alive in that very same room.
Duluth, Minnesota, and the Liberation of Lo-fi Travel
When contemplating travel, we cannot help but think big: London, Paris, or—why not?—even flights to Australia and New Zealand lasting more than a whole day’s time. It is those magical interstices just within reach we tend to forget, the local gems just across the way that, once taken in, might blow our minds in ways so subtle we do not at first recognize them.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the Varieties of Rebellion
Was Randle Patrick McMurphy a fool to go up against Nurse Ratched? Was Nelson Mandela a fool to spend twenty-seven years in prison? Was Alexei Navalny a fool to taunt the Russian powers girding Vladimir Putin and suffer poisoning, prison, and death?
The Totality of Trees
We had no idea how much we would miss them in the wake of St. Louis’s May 16 tornado. At least, I did not.