The Electric Typewriter
Great articles and essays by the world's best journalists and writers.by Walter Kirn
I am an American consumer, and the battle to catch the corner of my eye is growing more desperate by the hour. Desperate and counterproductive, it now seems clear….
by Walter Kirn
It was interesting to me - after having done some reading about the frenzied activity of the multitasking brain - how late in the process my prefrontal cortex changed its focus from the phone to the steel fence post sliding spear-like across my hood…
by Walter Kirn
Percentile is destiny in America. Your fate deicded by a test that measures … what, exactly? Just “aptitude.” Aptitude for showing aptitude, mainly. Nobody told us it wouldn’t be enough.
by Walter Kirn
The senior year of public high school is less a climactic academic experience than an occasion for oafish goofing off, chronic truancy, random bullying, sloppy dancing in rented formalwear and interludes of moody, wan philosophizing about the looming bummer of adulthood.
by Walter Kirn
Christian bands rock like Americans play soccer: skillfully but somehow not convincingly. Or maybe it’s the power of suggestion that makes the stuff seem counterfeit to me.
by Walter Kirn
A body in motion tends to stay in motion. And though these guys are always swearing, like shell-shocked combatants in a Hemingway novel, that they see themselves settling down in a couple of years (it’s always “a couple,” for some reason, never “a few”; two is the magic number of denial), and though they’re constantly singing the praises of home-cooked meals and familiar mattresses, they also report that the when they’ve tried to stop, tried to demobilize, it hasn’t worked. The blare of distant trumpets calls them back.
