“In America, the big get bigger and the small go out.” U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said so last fall. He was not presenting this as a problem, but I wonder. When just a handful of people show up at book club, the conversation goes deep; when everyone is there, it splits into five […]
It stole the air, trading sweet oxygen for something grassy and ragged, with hints of skunk and rot and Venetian sewage. And it was wafting from a cabinet in the kitchen, which doubled the horror. When repeated mentions of The Smell failed to rouse my husband, I returned to the kitchen with my face pressed […]
Martin Scorsese’s most recent film, The Irishman, is unusual in several ways: It is a Netflix Original (but had a one-month theatrical run). It is three-and-a-half hours long. And it (badly) CGIs the aging actors for flashback scenes. The film also could serve as bookend for Scorsese’s gangster-obsessed career. For all any of us know, […]
A few years ago, I wrote a longform feature about Pam Hupp, a blond middle-aged Midwesterner convicted of murdering a brain-damaged man in cold blood in an elaborate ruse to deflect suspicion from herself in the murder of her “best friend”—just before a suspicious fall that killed Pam’s mother. The story hit Buzzfeed and went […]
It is bleak, colorless January, the time so many of us breathe secret sighs of relief. It is over—at least until August, when the engines of commercial Christmas will rev with a high whine. For a time, though, we are freed from expectations and comparisons, checklists and chores. What is wrong with U.S. culture? Maslenitsa, […]
In the brief interval between our extended family’s stomach flu and my sudden craving for kimchee (the mouth waters in both cases), I spent one convalescent day on an improvised bed on the floor looking at Cabin Porn. The blog, which began in 2009, features photos of cabins, huts, retreat homes, abandoned and repurposed buildings, […]
When my bank asked for my favorite childhood book, I had to lie. Little Women seemed too obvious. I read it in the tub, under the bedcovers, on my lap at dinner. I read it aloud to the dog. I snuck it outside when my grandmother told me to stop reading and get some fresh […]
Hammacher Schlemmer speaks with all the confidence of a Madison Avenue account exec in the ’50s, just before things started to crack. Every product is the definitive, consummate iteration: The World’s Slimmest 3D Printing Pen. The Only Heated Beard Softener. The Best Gentleman’s Foil Shaver. The Lady’s Fatigue Relieving Sandals. The Superior Comfort Advanced […]
I have been thinking of Vladimir Nabokov, who makes a connection between vulgarity and morality in his essay “Philistines and Philistinism,” collected in his Lectures on Russian Literature. The essay is an indictment of consumerism and not thinking for yourself—bourgeois life in the Flaubertian sense. “A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of […]
In fall 2018, a mandarin duck landed in Central Park. New York went crazy. They named him Mandarin Patinkin, and The Cut pronounced him the city’s hottest bachelor. Entrepreneurs captured the duck’s forest green, indigo, royal purple, and orange coloration on T-shirts that sold faster than flatscreens on Black Friday. A dog came to the […]
