An entomologist reflects on fly-hunting, an outhouse of distinguished provenance, and the narcissism of collectors.
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A Dead Superhero Is a Marvelous Corpse
A theory of superhero suffering and death.
Postwar New York: The Supreme Metropolis of the Present
Forty labor strikes on one day, French existentialists on the loose, and a 50-foot G.I. blowing enormous puffs of REAL smoke.
The Art of Escape
What do we gain from giving inmates access to video games?
The Biblical Rheology of Deep-Dish Pizza
A visit to Illinois—home to snow, slaughterhouse romance, and a fraught geology masquerading as pizza—courtesy of Matthew Gavin Frank’s brilliant new book.
The Cost of Telling Your Truth, Publicly
Jillian Lauren on the challenges of holding nothing back as a writer—about her time in a harem, her life as a sex worker, and the fallout from her family’s response to her memoirs.
The Pursuit of Writing and the Problem of Entitlement
Entitlement operates at a more basic and often unconscious level. It’s a kind of defensive snobbery, a delusion that the world and its constituent parts—whether a product or a piece of art or a loved one—exist to please you. This is why I often find it disheartening to eavesdrop on people at the annual Association […]
Paradise Lost: ‘I Did Not Die. I Did Not Go to Heaven’
Alex Malarkey was paralyzed from the neck down in a car accident when he was six years old. The young boy claimed to have visited heaven, seen his stillborn sister and talked with Jesus. Years later, he began to recant the story touted in his bestselling book, but no one would listen–until now. Michelle Dean reports at The Guardian.
By the Reflection of What Is
On the aesthetics, performance, and “majestic wrath” of Frederick Douglass, the most-photographed American of the nineteenth century.
