September 2011
33 posts
8 tags
Morocco's Extraordinary Donkeys →
By Susan Orlean
The donkey I couldn’t forget was coming around a corner in the city of Fez, Morocco, with six color televisions strapped to his back.
10 tags
Long Day's Journey →
by Elizabeth Gilbert
The way another woman might, on a first date, suddenly picture herself having a baby with the guy across the table, what I pictured was this: me and him, eating a duck’s liver together in a ditch.
8 tags
The Last Wailer →
by John Jeremiah Sullivan
Even the name is legend. Bunny Wailer. He grew up in the same house as Bob Marley, and together with Peter Tosh, they created not just The Wailers but a new template for sound.
7 tags
The Far Eastern Conference →
by Wells Tower (via Molly Young)
Exiled from the NBA, vilified by the press, and ridiculed for a serious of questionable YouTube videos, Stephon Marbury is seeking redemption -and vast riches- in basketball-mad China.
3 tags
Love on Campus →
by William Deresiewicz (via Molly Young)
Why we should understand, and even encourage, a certain sort of erotic intensity between student and professor.
10 tags
The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer →
by Julian Dibbell
At his workstation in a small, fluorescent-lighted office space in Nanjing, China, Li Qiwen sat shirtless and chain-smoking, gazing purposefully at the online computer game in front of him.
4 tags
Living With Geese →
by Paul Theroux
Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
4 tags
I See a Little Silhouetto of a Man →
by Ian Frazier
Getting a name or a phrase or a few bars of music stuck in my head has become one of the minor banes of my existence.
6 tags
Driving Mr Abert →
by Michael Paterniti
Driving across America with Einstein’s brain.
4 tags
Lester Bangs' Basement →
by Bill Wyman (via katiecar)
The Complete British Invasion … Singer Songwriters from Dylan to Oberst … punk and post-punk - you get the idea. Soon, we’ll all have Lester Bangs’ basement in our pockets.
3 tags
Mind Control & the Internet →
by Sue Halpern (via katiecar)
There are something like five hundred companies that are able to track every move you make on the Internet, mining the raw material of the Web and selling it to marketers.
5 tags
The Masterpiece that Killed Orwell →
by Robert McCrum (via katiecar)
The circumstances surrounding the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four make a haunting narrative that helps to explain the bleakness of Orwell’s dystopia.
6 tags
How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook →
by Cory Doctorow
By making it easy for you to be found by people you’d rather avoid, Facebook and other social networks are destined to self-destruct.
4 tags
The (Chinese) Gangs of New York →
by Mark Jacobson (via frontofbook)
Midnight in Chinatown, everyone seems nervous. The old waiters look both ways before going into the gambling joint on Pell Street. Ladies bleary from a 10-hour day sewing in a sweatshop are hurrying home and restaurants are closing early…
4 tags
The $2,000 an-Hour Woman →
by Mark Jacobson (via frontofbook)
Jason Itzler prepared to get down on his knees and propose. However, as he slid from his grade-school-style red plastic seat, the harsh voice of a female Corrections officer broke the mood.
4 tags
The Ticking Is the Bomb →
by Nick Flynn
Inspired in part by the Abu Ghraib detainees, several of whom he met, the author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City writes a painfully beautiful memoir of torture.
6 tags
California or Bust →
by Amy Wallace
The perfectly rounded breass is to L.A. what big hair is to Dallas. Whether saline or silicone, ta-tas put the la-la in Los Angeles.
5 tags
What Defines a Meme? →
by James Gleick
Most of the biosphere cannot see the infosphere; it is invisible, a parallel universe humming with ghostly inhabitants. But they are not ghosts to us - not anymore. We humans, alone among the earth’s organic creatures, live in both worlds at once.
4 tags
The Last American Man →
by Elizabeth Gilbert
Eustace Conway is not like any man you know. He’s got perfect vision, perfect balance, perfect reflexes and travels thorugh life with perfect equanimity. He is smart and fearless and believes he can do anything he sets his mind to - like saving America.
4 tags
The Force That Drives the Flower →
by Annie Dillard
What is it about fecundity that so appalls? Is it that with nature’s bounty goes a crushing waste that threatens our own cheap lives?
4 tags
My Mom Couldn't Cook →
by Tom Junod
My mother was not just a mom. She was a dame. She was a broad. She went through her entire life as a Harlowesque platinum blonde, and I never knew the real color of her hair.
4 tags
Phoning It In →
by Stanley Bing
Landry called for maybe the fourth time that day. Landry is a good operator. She gives a big fig about everything, even stuff that isn’t worth a fig. She gave me this long and involved story about a huge slight that was inflicted on her operation by some other entity someplace, and I was looking out the window and thinking, whoa, look at that BMW Z8.
8 tags
The Man Who Wouldn't Die →
by Michael Paterniti
Olympic hero Rulon Gardner has fallen off trucks, tumbled off tractors, and gotten stuck in a baler. He has been impaled on an arrow, broken his neck, and gashed his knee clean to the bone. He has survived several catastrophic high-speed accidents, endured a frostbitten night in subzero temperatures, and most recently, swam away (barely) from a plane crash in Lake Powell.
4 tags
American Communion →
by David Kamp
Johnny Cash thought his recording career was over. Then he met legendary producer Rick Rubin. But their partnership was about much more than music.
7 tags
Escaping a Grizzly End →
by Ned Zeman
Kept his distance. Growled when need be. But they couldn’t take a hint. Wouldn’t get the fuck out of the way. And now it was cold and rainy, and he was too old and tired for this shit. He expressed his displeasure by ripping them to pieces and tearing off their heads.
7 tags
Green Gold →
by Jack Turner
Absinthe’s popularity peaked in the final decades of the century, it came to be seen not merely as a drink but as a way of life, the elixir, the elixir of bohemia.
4 tags
This is the Life →
by Annie Dillard
You enjoy work and will love your grandchildren, and somewhere in there you die.
4 tags
Maxed out →
by Evan Wright
Max Hardcore and other XXX pornographers awakened something dark in me. Or perhaps it was already there.
5 tags
Why Yoga Can Be So Irritating →
by Sarah Miller
You wrote an entire book about yoga and meditation and you never mentioned, ‘oh, by the way, sometimes you will want to punch these people in the face’?
4 tags
Cyber-Neologoliferation →
by James Gleick
When I got to John Simpson and his band of lexicographers in Oxford earlier this fall, they were working on the P’s. Pletzel, plish, pod person, point-and-shoot, polyamorous…
5 tags
Snooze or Lose →
by Po Bronson
Overstimulated, overscheduled kids are getting at least an hour’s less sleep than they need, a deficiency that, new research reveals, has the power to set their cognitive abilities back years.
6 tags
Invasion of the Home Snatchers →
by Matt Taibbi
How foreclosure courts are helping big banks screw over homeowners.
5 tags
House →
by Tracy Kidder
The story of a young couple on a tight budget, and architecht determined to excel, and four carpernters devoted more to craftsmanship than to profit.
