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Sittin’ Pretty in Wham City
A week and a day after I saw Dan Deacon play his new DVD, Ultimate Reality, at Bard College, I saw him buying a camera at B&H in Manhattan. B&H is probably what the Nazis feared the planet would look like by now: an electronics store run and mostly staffed by Orthodox Jews, every item…
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Quit Yer Lollygaggin’
“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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Prose Poem
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.
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The 20 Most Popular People at Princeton
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…
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“There’s this rich guy, he wants to be famous”
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 may depend on the species of your spirit animal—mine, for instance, is the spider (or,…
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Experimental History
As _Avatar_ gradually accrued its second billion dollars in the last few weeks, coverage of the film itself (rather than its receipts) sank from complacent praise to idle speculation. Was the film racist? Well, accidentally. Is there going to be a sequel? Sources say! And how about that sex scene? The weirdest thread, perhaps, was…
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The Helmand
Bam. B-r-ck, b-r-ck. No one is dead. No one is here. This is a poem about my brother in Afghanistan.
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*Life Story* starring Jeff Goldblum
*Life Story* starring Jeff Goldblum The mystery has a name, Jeff Goldblum.
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1-800-GENOCIDE
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…
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Moon Shot
People change. People estrange. The wear and tear on the asbestos flange took my grandfather at seventy-five. My grandmother is alive, and turning eighty. The moon landing is forty. I am twenty. Ten, five. The moon is a Kennedy penny in a madras sky, and the man in the moon got a rocket through his…
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With Piano
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 that make you wonder. I played identity politics with God, and earned a nod. Activism:…