HEAD SHOT
By Christian Lorentzen
London Review of Books, May 24 2012
Like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the poor, the second shooter will always be with us.
This is an oft-updated list of pieces I have enjoyed reading, from past and present.
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Twitter: @magicmolly
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FANTASTIC VOYAGE
By Emily Nussbaum
New Yorker, May 2012
“Inspector Spacetime” is, of course, an affectionate tribute to “Doctor Who,” the long-running series that helped create our modern breed of Abeds and Dan Harmons—the sort of difficult obsessives who make original things and then get fired.
MY FATHER’S FASHION TIPS
By Tom Junod
GQ, July 2007
He tried to pass on to me knowledge that had the whiff of secrets, secrets at once intimate and arcane, such as the time he taught me how to clean my navel with witch hazel.
THE REAL AMERICAN PIE
By Cliff Doerksen
Chicago Reader, Dec 2009
Lastly, I took pains to stab multiple vents in the top crusts, having recently read a tragic 1872 news item about a three-year-old boy in Shakopee, Minnesota, who died of burns resulting from the explosion of an unvented mince pie his mother had just withdrawn from the oven.
ALL WE READ IS FREAKS
By William Bowers
The Oxford American, Jan/Feb 2003
It’s easy to despair over my students. Yet they can so often be full of stories and surprises. One of them craftily sent her twin to class in her place.
THE KING OF HUMAN ERROR
By Michael Lewis
Vanity Fair, Dec 2011
In effect, the psychologist kept trying to trick himself into doing things he didn’t want to do and failing to fall for the ruse.
UP FROM THE STREETS
By Alex Pappademas
GQ, June 2012
“He’s looking right over my head,” Schuman says, “and I remember thinking, I’m gonna make this fucking blog so he looks at me when I’m talking to him.”
LOVE IN THE TIME OF NO TIME
Serendipitous love as a romantic ideal is a paean to cities and their dislocations, the unlikely collisions that result from thousands of strangers with discrete histories overlapping briefly in time and space.
By Jennifer Egan
New York Times, Nov 2003
PARALLEL PLAY
By Tim Page
The New Yorker, August 2007
In the late nineteen-seventies, I saw a ragged, haunted man who spent urgent hours dodging the New York transit police to trace the dates and lineage of the Hapsburg nobility on the walls of subway stations.
AGAINST CHAIRS
By Colin McSwiggen
Jacobin, Spring 2012
Why does our culture demand that we spend most of every day sitting on objects that hurt us? What the hell happened?
