Robin Nagle, New York’s Garbage Anthropologist
Obstacles faced by the modern sanitation worker: Fourteen thousand tons of household waste per day Constant reminders of their inherent mortality The stench Arthur, the cartoon aardvark
Sweatpants In Paradise
Nice Girls Who Like Stuff, Abercrombie and Fitch, One-Armed Pushups, California Adolescence, Weed, The Redemptive Quality of Sensory Exploration
Watching Shrek In Tehran
The Seen And The Unseen In Iranian Cinema
The Disappearance of Ford Beckman
How A Celebrated American Artist Was Forced To Trade His Multimillion-Dollar Collection For A Job Selling Donuts
The Believer on Errol Morris
In Pursuit of the Wild Cohiba
Two Semi-Intrepid Travelers Meditate (With The Help Of A Great Deal Of Puffing) On The Cuban Communist Roots Of An American Capitalist Icon.
Closing Time
The History Of America Is The History Of The Automobile Industry— Which Is Far Older And Stranger Than You Might Imagine.
Dancing About Architecture
A Meditation On Possibly Futile Artistic Pursuits
Interview with Heart’s Nancy Wilson
The lightning bolt came out of the heavens and struck Ann and me the first time we saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. My family was living on the marine base in Camp Pendleton, California, and we’d all gathered around the little black-and-white TV at our grandmother’s in La Jolla. Most people didn’t have color sets at home back then. There’d been so much anticipation and hype about the Beatles that it was a huge event, like the lunar landing: that was the moment Ann and I heard the call to become rock musicians. I was seven or eight at the time.