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“Podcasts intensify our saturation while pretending to relieve it. It’s like a voluntary authoritarian state, except instead of state-funded sitcoms, we have Marc Maron. But what would we do without it? Die, probably. Be murdered. Become a true-crime podcast. Don’t forget us when we’re gone; please rate us on iTunes.”

“An American who leaves for war never leaves America. The war that is America, rather, comes to the American. The war is the society and the society is the war, and one who sees that war sees America.”

When pain and rage play out on — and are twisted by — Twitter.

1970 is an inauspicious year for a young heterosexual feminist to launch an ambitious career of promiscuity.

Honoring Peter Mayer, founder of Overlook Press, one of “the stars of book publishing,” a person who trusted young staffers to take risks and break free of big publishing’s conventions as they learned the ropes, and who yelled a lot.

Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk — they look a lot like the villains they fight. When did superheroes switch from working for justice to running a protection racket?

While the familiar shopping mall formula is suffering in the US, malls in Latin America are booming, since online shopping hasn’t overtaken traditional commerce. Unfortunately, malls’ chic, air conditioned offerings have profound consequences in Mexico City, where street vendors, city parks and plazas have always had a central role in the fabric of life, and the informal economy employed more people than multinational chains.

“Halls of fame and records and medals and posters belong to fans. Athletes do not mythologize the body in this way. What they do is navigate decay.”

In Brooklyn, historically black Bedford-Stuyvesant has been experiencing rapid gentrification: “As a new order has emerged, the ghosts of the previous one are everywhere, but their echoes are getting smaller, snuffed out by the tides.”

“Hockey has no reason for being. Rather, hockey’s one of those things that give reason to being.”