Five longreads on the culture and creativity that games have spawned.
Peter Rubin
Posted inEditor's Pick
What Iowa Is Losing as My Hometown Newspaper Crumbles
“Readers noticed the paper’s sloppiness first—how there seemed to be twice as many typos as before, and how sometimes the articles would end mid-sentence instead of continuing after the jump. The newspaper’s remaining reporters are overworked; there are local stories they’d like to tell but don’t have the bandwidth to cover. The Hawk Eye’s current […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
At Heritage, Pokémon Cards Are the New Bitcoin
“At an auction in January, a card from the game’s first edition, which depicted the golden dragon Charizard and was graded in perfect 10.0 condition, sold for $300,000. The most expensive cards from the ‘Unlimited’ edition wouldn’t fetch quite that much, but a lucky buyer could still find himself with a card that would buy […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Did I Want Tony Stark—or Want to Be Him?
“When I think about the time before I ever uttered the words ‘I am a lesbian,’ I don’t think about a closet. I think about a costume trunk.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
An Interview with Chuck Palahniuk
“At exactly 1:05pm, the Prius was outside my Airbnb, as was Chuck, in a pressed white shirt and pastel turquoise shorts. He treated me to a tuna sandwich at a nearby bakery. We then drove back and sat down for three hours of conversation in the secluded bamboo-walled yard, which happened to be right next […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
It’s Triller Night, Marv!: Trump’s 9/11 MMA Fever Dream
“What do I care for seeing these legends (insofar as MMA even has “legends”), in a sport not their own, at ages that seem criminally old? It’s sadder than any strung-out rocker strumming bloated and hoarse-throated to a braying audience. You can’t, in good conscience, want these men to play their hits again.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Meet the Fearless Women of the Lone Star Mower Racing Association
“Sammie Neel, 62, has seen plenty of crashes, bruises, and burns in her twelve years of racing. She once raced around a track at a monster truck show in the tiny town of Leona, where she flipped and wound up pinned beneath her mower, which she nicknamed ‘Love Mowtion No 9.’”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Sid Meier and the Meaning of “Civilization”
“Like many talented programmers at the time, he preferred to disappear into a fugue of coding and return with a gleaming piece of software.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Ebooks Are an Abomination
“Agreeing that books are a thing you read is easy enough. But what it means to read, what the experience of reading requires and entails, and what makes it pleasurable or not, is not so easy to pin down.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Revolt of the Delivery Workers
“For Cesar and many other delivery workers, the thefts broke something loose. Some started protesting and lobbying, partnering with nonprofits and city officials to propose legislation. Cesar and the Deliveryboys took another tack, forming a civil guard reminiscent of the one that patrolled San Juan Puerto Montaña, the small, mostly Indigenous Me’phaa village where they […]