The Electric Typewriter
Great articles and essays by the world's best journalists and writers.
by Tom Junod
As our financial system entered free fall last September and the people who ran Wall Street struggled to avert a complete economic collapse, an epic battle for power and, above all, cash was being waged between Barclays and JPMorgan Chase.
by Tom Junod
An old office building at Fifty-third and Madison is home, for now, to the last old men who ply the ancient trade.
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.
by Tom Junod
There are billions of humans on earth, and trillions upon trillions of ants - an estimated 1.6 million for every human being. If the earth were a scale, and all the humans were placed on one side and all the ants on the other, it would not budge. Ants have answered the ever-expanding human biomass with an ever-expanding biomass of their own, so that the planet is poised, teetering between its two most successful civilizations - each of which is social, aggressive, expansionist, and well suited for war.
by Tom Junod
For most of us, it started with a shirt. A nice shirt, certainly, but it was what the shirt represented — prestige and prosperity and the promise of the good life — that so many people were trying to buy. Not everynone bought it, though — not at first, anyway.
by Tom Junod
No other American institution is balanced so uneasily between dream and nightmare. This story is about two friends — why one made it through and one did not, and how you can help your children survive “the best years of their lives.”
by Tom Junod
What’s it like to be kidnapped and held for ransom, not as a political prisoner but as an economic one? What’s it like to live in the Ecuadoran jungle for 141 days? What’s it like not to sleep, to be bound in chains, to have your body invaded by living things, to waste away to the point of death? This is what it’s like.
by Tom Junod
First it was Lubriderm, what my father rubbed briskly between his palms and extended in glistening offering. “How about a bit of the Lube?” he’d say when I walked into his bathroom. I was, like, 8 years old, or something, so I had no choice but to put my face in his shiny hands. Then, for a long time, it was Nivea. “How would you like a little…Nivea?” he’d ask, with his brown hands singing. Now it was baby oil.
