The Electric Typewriter
Selected features, articles and essays from the world's best journalists and writers.by Tom Wolfe
Twenty years after The Bonfire of the Vanities, the author checks in on the new masters of the universe and finds them even coarser and ruder than their predecessors could have ever imagined being.
by Tom Wolfe
The space program, the greatest, grandest, most Promethean quest in the history of the world, died in infancy at 10:56 p.m. New York time on July 20, 1969, the moment the foot of Apollo 11’s Commander Armstrong touched the surface of the Moon.
by Tom Wolfe
Brain imaging was invented for medical diagnosis. But its far greater importance is that it may very well confirm, in ways too precise to be disputed, certain theories about “the mind,” “the self,” “the soul,” and “free will” that are already devoutly believed in by scholars in what is now the hottest field in the academic world, neuroscience.
by Tom Wolfe
Ten o’clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua aqua, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-cheek raspberry. Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock-car races, and that old mothering North Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields. Mother dog!
by Tom Wolfe (via Afflictor)
Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud and Einstein. What if he’s right?
by Tom Wolfe
Real buttonholes. That’s it! A man can take his thumb and forefinger and unbutton his sleeve at the wrist because this kind of suit has real buttonholes there. Tom, boy, it’s terrible. Once you know about it, you start seeing it. All the time!
by Tom Wolfe
On the face of it, there you had Grinnell Iowa, in 1948: a piece of mid-nineteenth century American history frozen solid in the middle of the twentieth. It was one of the last towns in America that people back east would have figured to become the starting point of a bolt into the future that would create the very substructure, the electronic grid, of life in the year 2000 and beyond.
by Tom Wolfe
The original 1972 masterpiece. (Part II unavailable online. Another great Wolfe article from 2008 describes the ‘New Yorker Affair’ and the early days of NY Magazine).
