August 2009 Archives
-
Gallery
Expectations of Adolescence
The two girls in Blake Fitch’s photo series are easy to relate to: Their friendship and emotions transmit quickly through the pictures, but with added illumination, as though the images brought out inner reserves of self-possession.
-
The Coffee Table
The Beautiful Anarchist
Personally, the realization that much of what is hailed as fashion is actually fecal matter came as I noticed that recent sunglasses design (always a bellwether accessory) made people's visages...
-
Current Reads
Novel Regime
To say the dreary miasma of orthodox socialism was additionally burdened with the psychotic tyranny of Josef "Man of Steel" Stalin cannot adequately represent the terrors and horrors of the...
-
Back in the Day
What a Year It Was!
Former Boston Globe and Pulitzer Prize-winning scribe Fred Kaplan (who also writes for Slate) can be forgiven for the hyperbolic claim of the subtitle in 1959: The Year Everything Changed (Wiley),...
-
Little Magazines
Persistently Unusual Subjects
With The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays From Tin House edited by Lee Montgomery, literary magazine Tin House culls (with a few original exceptions) its Summer Writers Workshop and offers up 17...
-
The Non-Expert
How to Become a Playwright
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. This week we attempt to help a young thespian realize his misinformed dreams.
-
Interview
Will Pearson
Given the title of “El Presidente” at mental_floss, Will Pearson developed and published the magazine’s first issue with Mangesh Hattikudur while they were both still students at Duke...
-
Announcements
What Is Your Superpower?
Maybe it's fitting all the luggage into the trunk of the car, or picking the right time in the movie to go to the bathroom, or knowing when fruit is...
-
Bookbag
From the Backs of the Racks
The mantle of unacknowledgement falls on many shoulders beyond the poetic brotherhood (and sisterhood): librarians, primary school teachers, booksellers, and so forth. The many small (this description apparently refers to...
-
The Coffee Table
It’ll Last Longer
Photography has changed dramatically in the past 20 years--beyond the mutations caused by digital technology. In the '80s, advertising led by fashion and lifestyle products began to look for a...
-
Personal Essays
A Taste for Flesh
America has a problem with death; zombies have a problem with life. The difference, explained by more than 60 zombie movies.
-
Gallery
Animals Twice Dead
Richard Barnes’s photographs are dislocating, off-putting adult hocus-pocus—portraits of animals in various states of preservation and transit, removed many degrees from anything remotely wild.
-
Spoofs & Satire
Not Everyone “Got” It
In the early days of The Muppet Show, the famous bonhomie between celebrities and their Muppet co-stars wasn’t there yet. Here are the encounters that didn’t make a rainbow connection.
-
Letters From Berlin
Bohemian Eulogy
Anarchy is dying in Berlin, and Tina Turner swung the axe. Beginning a new series, our man in Germany reports from a park full of arsonists, punks, and frotteurs.
-
Bookbag
Graphic
It was not too long ago (that's in historical time, not 24/7 time) that comics, along with blue jeans and rock and roll, were somehow considered--by anxious parents and the usual...
-
Current Reads
Brain and Bones
Shamefully, I must confess that while full of springtime ambition and whatever else is in that season that spurs us to grasp beyond our reach, I had intended to assemble...
-
Interview
Frank Portman
Frank Portman was once better known as Dr. Frank, frontman of the seminal Bay Area punk band The Mr. T Experience. Now he’s building a reputation as an author....
-
The Novice
How to Play Magic: The Gathering
Those who can’t do, learn. In this installment of our series in which the clueless apprentice with the experts, we learn lands, creatures, and spells from Magic great Jon Finkel.
-
Gallery
The Matsue Rule
Taiji Matsue’s photographs of landscapes appear to be paintings for the sheer scale of content—geometric lines of cities and curves of mountains so elegant they could only be fake, except that they’re real.
-
Back Matter
The Duh Vinci Code
As usual, it is the best of times and the worst of times, which is as good a time as any to spin a tale of two novels. Ron Carlson,...
-
Current Reads
Taking Woodstock
OK, unlike everyone else in my generation, I was not at Woodstock. (Then and now, not exactly my idea of fun.) But as this week marks the 40th anniversary of...
-
Of Recent Note
When the Lights Went Out
At 4:15 p.m. on Aug. 14, 2003, tens of millions of people across the Northeast and Midwest U.S. and Ontario were suddenly without power. Our staff and readers tell us what happened next.
-
The Spider and the Fly
Prune Versus Plum
Of the free games included with Windows, none is more treacherous than Spider Solitaire. In the latest installment, the apprentice loses faith while the master eats breakfast.
-
Personal Essays
The Surrogate Life
Being unemployed, and bearing colossal amounts of debt, can drive you to rash measures. Discovering the difficulty of renting out one’s womb.
-
Genre Genre Genre
The Simple Art
Californian Richard Lange (Dead Boys) has written a taut, sure-footed walk on L.A.'s wild side with This Wicked World (Little, Brown)--certainly not of the city of angels...
-
Current Reads
It’s Gastronomical
Meryl Streep's uncanny film portrayal of Julia Child in Julie & Julia (based on Julie Powell's Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen and Child's My Life in France) has now...
-
Bookbag
Under-Appreciated Novels
Before you are deluged with the press release parroting of what I hope are well-meaning literary journalists rushing to present you with the lists of forthcoming books for the fall...
-
Back Matter
The Oracular Vidal
Though well represented in print, most recently with Jay Parini's edit of The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal, the oracular Vidal seems glaringly overlooked by the buzzing, blooming noise/newsmakers...
-
Gallery
Men at Their Most Masculine
Chad States photographs his subjects in the poses and settings they find most masculine, making portraits of masculinity that broaden our ideas of what it means to be a man today.
-
Announcements
Where Were You on August 14, 2003?
Six years ago this Friday, a major power grid failed and a stripe of Northeastern North America was plunged into darkness. For a special anniversary Of Recent Note we want...
-
Of Recent Note
It’s a Conspiracy
With the anniversary of the “moon landing” and the continued clamors of the birthers, conspiracy theories are in the news again. Here are our favorite shadowy plots.
-
Spoofs & Satire
The Savior of Newspaperdom
Unless the newspaper honchos invent some brilliant ideas, the broadsheet is dead. A last-ditch brainstorm.
-
Interview
CAConrad
In his new book, poet and self-described “vegetarian sin eater” CAConrad develops a theosophy based on the music and celebrity of Elvis Presley. Using prose poems, found art, and snippets...
-
Gallery
Sheena Is a Taqwacore
In 2007, a Muslim punk band boarded a green bus and traveled across the country to play shows. Along for the ride was photographer Kim Badawi.
-
Personal Essays
Gimme Shelter
Everyone knows a relative who dabbles in conspiracy theories. For one writer, seeing her brother be targeted by a global cabal—and develop schizophrenia—was all too real.
-
Back Matter
Rekindled
Given the current overheated media climate, it would be normal to call Nicholson Baker's very thoughtful piece on the Kindle a takedown or bashing--which would be a disservice to journalism ...