“I Was No Longer Afraid to Die. I Was Now Afraid Not to Die.”

Possibly the best living American essayist and probably the most influential, Didion has always maintained that she doesn’t know what she’s thinking until she writes it down. Yet over the past decade, she’s been writing down more about her own life than ever before. If you want to know about her upbringing, readWhere I Was From, about the delusions of her California pioneer ancestors. If you want to know how she feels about the sudden 2003 death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, you can readThe Year of Magical Thinking,her stark but openhearted account of emotional dislocation. And if you want to know how she feels about the drawn-out death of her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, two years later at the age of 39, you can order her new memoir, Blue Nights, on Amazon.

Published: Oct 16, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,198 words)

Peyton’s Place

For the last several years, the big ticket in town has been the teen melodrama One Tree Hill, which was on the WB and is now on the CW Network. Don’t let the off brands fool you, though; a surprising number of people watch it, maybe even you, for all I know. It’s one of the worst TV shows ever made, and I seriously do not mean that as an insult. It’s bad in the way that Mexican TV is bad, superstylized bad. Good bad. Indeed, there are times when the particular campiness of its badness, although I can sense its presence, is in fact beyond me, beyond my frequency, like that beep you play on the Internet that only kids can hear. Too many of my camp-receptor cells have died. Possibly One Tree Hill is a work of genius. Certainly it is about to go nine seasons, strongly suggesting that the mother of its creator, Mark Schwahn, did not give birth to any idiots, or if she did those people are Schwahn’s siblings. The One Tree character who supposedly lived in our house was Peyton, played by one of the stars, Hilarie Burton, a striking bone-thin blonde. Think coppery curls. I’d seen her on MTV right at the moment when I was first feeling too old to watch MTV. Superfriendly when we met her, superfriendly always.

Source: GQ
Published: Oct 17, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,692 words)

After the Rapture

And so six o’clock dawned on the South Pacific.

And there was nothing.

Reached on his doorstep the following morning, Camping was, he said, “flabbergasted.” He was visibly shaken. “It has been a really tough weekend,” he acknowledged. He said he was “looking for answers.” And so in the hours that followed he pulled the drapes, doing all he could do, which was diving back into the Bible, reading, calculating, praying, reading, calculating, praying.

Author: Dan P. Lee
Published: Oct 16, 2011
Length: 21 minutes (5,481 words)

Changing Times

Profile of new New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson. “Abramson put her purse down on a white Formica desk that she occupies in the middle of the third-floor newsroom. Someone had left her a sealed envelope with ‘Congratulations’ written on the front. It contained a cover note from a female editor at the paper along with a laminated letter passed down from that editor’s father. The letter was from a nine-year-old girl named Alexandra Early, who wrote that she got mad when she watched television: ‘That’s because I’m a girl and there aren’t enough girl superheroes on TV.’ The cover note to Abramson said, ‘Wherever Alexandra Early ended up, I hope that she heard about your new job.'”

Source: New Yorker
Published: Oct 17, 2011
Length: 43 minutes (10,777 words)

Passion

[Fiction] When Grace goes looking for the Traverses’ summer house, in the Ottawa Valley, it has been many years since she was in that part of the country. And, of course, things have changed. Highway 7 now avoids towns that it used to go right through, and it goes straight in places where, as she remembers, there used to be curves. This part of the Canadian Shield has many small lakes, which most maps have no room to identify. Even when she locates Sabot Lake, or thinks she has, there seem to be too many roads leading into it from the county road, and then, when she chooses one, too many paved roads crossing it, all with names that she does not recall. In fact, there were no street names when she was here, more than forty years ago. There was no pavement, either—just one dirt road running toward the lake, then another running rather haphazardly along the lake’s edge.

Source: New Yorker
Published: Mar 22, 2004
Length: 46 minutes (11,526 words)

Destroy All Monsters

What may remain obscure, even now, is why people would choose to play D&D, all night, night after night, for years.[4] Why intelligent human beings would find the actions of imaginary fighters, thieves, dwarves, elves, etc., as they move through a space that exists only notionally, and consists more often than not of dimly lit corridors, ruined halls, and big, damp caves, more compelling than books or movies or television, or sleep, or social acceptance, or sex. In short, what’s so great about Dungeons & Dragons?

Source: The Believer
Published: Sep 1, 2006
Length: 52 minutes (13,186 words)

Inside Obama’s War Room

The president answered these arguments himself. According to one participant’s summary, Obama said: Look, the question of who rules Libya is probably not a vital interest to the United States. The atrocities threatened don’t compare to atrocities in other parts of the world, I hear that. But there’s a big “but” here. First of all, acting would be the right thing to do, because we have an opportunity to prevent a massacre, and we’ve been asked to do it by the people of Libya, their Arab neighbors and the United Nations. And second, the president said, failing to intervene would be a “psychological pendulum, in terms of the Arab Spring, in favor of repression.” He concluded: “Just signing on to a no-fly zone so that we have political cover isn’t going to cut it. That’s not how America leads.” Nor, he added, is it the “image of America I believe in.”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Oct 27, 2011
Length: 29 minutes (7,431 words)

Peerless

[Fiction] I had my corner. Right across the street, beside the subway stairs. Where the office men come up early with their crisp hats and their stiff collars, with their shoes dusty and scraped from the crowds. That’s where I met them every morning with my rags and brushes. Pesterton Polish, el el see. Second generation enterprise, family shingle—the brush kit was my dad’s and he bought it from an older Clovis for three dollars fifty the day after my grandfather fell. My dad shined for ten years, taught me to do the same, then died on his way home one night with the kit in his hand. His heart, Doctor Fessenden said.

Published: Jun 6, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,192 words)

What Happened To Mitrice Richardson?

A recent college graduate, she was jailed briefly for trying to skip out on her dinner tab in Malibu, then freed in the middle of the night in a neighborhood far from home. She had no car, no ride, no phone, and no money. When she disappeared, it raised a flurry of questions about how the sheriff’s department handled her case. The discovery of her body a year later only raised more.

Published: Sep 1, 2011
Length: 39 minutes (9,832 words)

$100 to Win on Miami Ghost in the 2nd at Saratoga.

Growing up in Hot Springs put horseracing in my blood. My grandparents landed there as carnies following the horserace circuit. My father grew up in the barns of the backstretch working as a groom and a hotwalker. He started taking me to the track as a child, teaching me to read the Daily Racing Form at the age of nine. Many years ago my father came to visit my wife and me in New York and he only wanted to go one place, to see the fabled Saratoga Race Course. We took him for Travers weekend, the highlight of the four-week race meet, and he was bowled over by the town and the track. “Why couldn’t Hot Springs do this,” he wondered. “This place is awesome. This is what Hot Springs should be like.”

Author: David Hill
Source: McSweeney’s
Published: Oct 12, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,104 words)