When pay-to-play becomes pay-to-win, the classic model of video games—paying for time or access to the game—turns into something much more insidious. In The Baffler, game designer Ian Bogost asks us to consider which extracts a higher social cost: the explicit violence of Grant Theft Auto, or the addiction and sly financial drain of Candy Crush? […]
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Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
Escape from Baghdad!: Saad Hossain’s New Satire of the Iraq War
In his debut, Saad Hossain brings a much-needed cynicism to our literature of the Iraq War. An absurdist protest novel in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Escape from Baghdad! relentlessly focuses the reader’s attention on the folly of war.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
Interview with a Torturer
Documentary filmmaker and Khmer Rouge survivor Rithy Panh spent hundreds of hours interviewing Duch, the commandant of the Cambodia “killing fields” and one of the most notorious torturers of the 20th century. This is his haunting memoir of those interviews.
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction
Glamorous Crossing: How Pan Am Airways Dominated International Travel in the 1930s
Starting with just a mail route, Juan Terry Trippe helped create a uniquely American luxury experience.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews
Taking the Slow Road: An Interview with Author Katherine Heiny
She published a short story in The New Yorker in 1992, then seemed to all but disappear. How author Katherine Heiny took her sweet time on the path toward publishing her new story collection.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Science, Chance, and Emotion with Real Cosima
Through her work on clone-thriller Orphan Black, science consultant Cosima Herter has helped open our eyes to the possibilities and perils of synthetic biology and the pursuit of genetic perfection.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Nora Ephron's Son Describes a Rare Glimpse of His Mother's Vulnerability
Last year, Jacob Bernstein wrote about his mother Nora Ephron’s last days for The New York Times Magazine. In the following excerpt, Bernstein writes about the moment he learned that his mother’s aggressive blood disorder had turned into leukemia and saw his mother in a rare state of vulnerability: When I arrived in her room, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How Much My Novel Cost Me
Writer Emily Gould on writing books, going into debt and navigating relationships. An excerpt from MFA VS NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction: It was more like the failure occurred in tiny increments over the course of two years, after which it was too late to develop a solid Plan B. I spent some […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Into the Pines
A man, deep in debt, hides in the woods of East Texas for several months, stealing from the residents of a small community: Few residents were willing to discuss the run of break-ins—the sheriff estimates at least 35 in all—that spanned most of 2013. Dyes Kountry Katfish, the last spot in town where locals might […]
Posted inNonfiction
The Rise and Fall of John DeLorean
“It was the end of the story of John DeLorean as part of the American Dream—how a humble kid from Detroit could rise to the very top.”
