Close your eyes. Are they closed? No, good point, I guess you’ll need to keep them open to read the Powerpoint. Okay, close them when you can, and otherwise close your inner eye, or eyes. The number of inner eyes … Read More
by Conor Gannon on
*Bright Star* starring John Keats
John Keats rests his head as angular
as two racially white blades of hay.
by Conor Gannon on
This past Sunday, three of the Nassau Weekly’s best-trained sabermetricians compiled data from Princeton Facebook in order to rank the graduating class of seniors in an objective and accurate manner according to a single metric: notoriety. This was not hard. No computer programs were required, although they might have helped. All the team had to do was log in to facebook.princeton.edu, run an Advanced Search for the class of 2009, and copy one piece of information from each of the 1,198 profiles: Profile Views.
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“Morphing Double N______.” That was the link I clicked on, the link at which I knew that researching this article, on lolcats of all things (a joke so quirky-yet-plain that it netted coverage in Time), was going to lead me all the way down, through every level of adolescent offensiveness into the final stage.
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It’s the little things you remember when you die. The children. The moments. Your face after achieving multiple simultaneous orgasms. The orgasms. The presidential campaigns, the incipient volcano underlying the western half of the continental U.S. It’s the little things … Read More
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The audience for Samantha Power last Friday appeared to be the usual crowd for talks at Princeton: half students interested in the subject matter at hand, and half older townies getting a taste of culture. “War Crimes and Genocide Today: What Can One Person Do?” was hosted by the Woodrow Wilson School, and it showed in the composition of the crowd. The students had a confused, sympathetic mixture of careerism and noblesse oblige; one, after asking what she should do to prepare for her trip to Bosnia this summer (that’s right, she’s going to Bosnia, folks! Sniper fire!), was happily offered a card from the wife of a UN official. The older ones, on the other hand, had the weary, insecure but comfortable look of those inhabiting the many, multiplying rings of power just outside the one that matters. “What can one person do,” of course, is heard by all of these people as “What can I do?”—a question that, in its necessity and its limitations, cuts to the heart of what is both brilliant and unfortunate about Samantha Power.
by Conor Gannon on
Editor’s Note: What follows is composed from features published in The New Yorker between September and December 2010. No alterations beyond rearrangement were made to the texts, excepting those that ensured gender, tense and number agreement.
by Conor Gannon on
Mouth taking the form
around like the moistening apple core
which deforms peculiarly
in the way of these things,
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*Life Story* starring Jeff Goldblum
The mystery has a name, Jeff Goldblum.
by Conor Gannon on
When browsing classic disco blogs—always maintained by sweaty, foreign men, a tendency I have learned from the pictures of themselves they publish inexplicably—one can only judge the quality of the records by their album covers. There are no band biographies, no album reviews, no other photographs: it is a cultural archive without history or salesmanship. Determining quality with so little information is a delicate but logical process, the mechanics of which can only be explained by example.
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The case for Anne Carson’s _Nox_ might begin with its box (that’s not binding): grey with white binding (that’s not binding) and a single silver sliver, in which stands a boy diver on grass maybe forty summers ago, wearing superhero … Read More
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“This snowfall is my final fantasy. Once America the woman was coming on my dick, her flag pin a pinhole to a world without strife. But then—” he sneezes. “Let me begin again. Terrorism. The weeping willow lowers her hair … Read More
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