From Matt Graves: Here are six of his story picks on the topic of music producers, the often-overlooked architects of the music we hear and love. * * * 1. “The Song Machine: the Hitmakers Behind Rihanna,” by John Seabrook (The New Yorker, March 2012) In her ascent to the pop throne, Rihanna had some unlikely help: a […]
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On the Banks of the River Lex
[Fiction, sci-fi] Death walks the streets of New York and ponders the Big Questions: “Death liked to walk across bridges. For this reason he had claimed a home for himself relatively far from the center of town. This was in a big ugly gray stone of a building that had once been a factory, and […]
A Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes
The story of Sadakichi Hartmann, a Japan-born poet who had befriended everyone from Walt Whitman to Ezra Pound and John Barrymore—and who once attempted to stage the first-ever “perfume concert” in New York: “But no one had ever heard of a perfume concert. It was an invention so faddish the newspapers had inked themselves in […]
The Ghost in the Machine
(NSFW, not single-page) An in-depth profile of rap legend the D.O.C., who penned many of N.W.A.’s and Eazy-E’s early songs and became an on-again, off-again studio partner to Dr. Dre: “The shine finally started to trickle down. N.W.A’s first national tour opened in Nashville in the spring of 1989, with Doc doing eight minutes a […]
Sell Out: Part One
[Fiction] The first chapter of a serialized novella, about a pickle maker from the early 1900s who is transported to modern-day Brooklyn: “The science men come and explain. I have been preserved in brine a hundred years and have not aged one day. They describe to me the reason (how this chemical mixed with that […]
Fallen Dean’s Life, Contradictory to Its Grisly End
On the life and death of Cecilia Chang, a former dean at St. John’s University who was accused of using students as servants and stealing more than $1 million from the college. Chang was also accused of hiring a gunman to kill her husband in 1990: “Mr. Tsai was shot in front of a warehouse […]
After Sandy, A Great and Complex City Reveals Traumas New and Old
A writer joins her friend Ben Heemskerk, the owner of the Brooklyn bar The Castello Plan, as he organizes a group of community volunteers to help in the hardest hit areas post-Sandy: “On Monday the same thing started all over again. Our numbers were smaller, people were returning to work, and we’d lost our escorts, […]
The Human Centipede; Or, How to Move to New York
A depressed writer sends a letter to a popular advice columnist: “I couldn’t seem to go above the Twelfth Street location of my class, not to Central Park or the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the New York Public Library. I had no interest in going below Twelfth Street, either. I definitely couldn’t go to […]
Haunts
[Not single-page] The writer, from Brooklyn, explores the still rapidly changing borough—preparing for the arrival of the Nets and discovering his daughter is a hipster: “Didn’t like to disagree with Adam, whom I love. But these were my kids we were talking about, them and their friends. They weren’t the ones building high-rises in Williamsburg, […]
I, Nephi
A history of Mormonism and how it has evolved: “Yet how much do specifically Mormon beliefs matter to contemporary Mormons? Brooks’s story, give or take a Nephite or two, could unfold in any fundamentalist community that provides comfort and meaning if you’re prepared to park your critical intelligence in the lot outside the church door. […]
