Fearful fun-seeker: “We can’t go to a dive bar. What if somebody asks me to arm wrestle?”
Sympathetic friend: “That will probably happen.”
Fearful fun-seeker: “Fine. Let me get a pump in.”
Overheard while making evening plans
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New Year, New Me / I Was Cutting My Fingernails and Eavesdropping
An essay and a poem grappling with spirituality and the self in the wake of the new year
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Sorry About the Air Conditioners Being Off: Townes Van Zandt, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Aesthetic Signatures of Heat
A Nass writer sweats through readings of some outlaw country tunes and a splatter horror classic
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Fruit Flies
The end product is a picture with many suns that capture the real in infinitely many instances. Yet it represents nothing of reality.
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Of Friendship, Sex, and Bacon
How to conceal, expose, and generally deal with the high stakes of early February
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The Brain Behind the Brush: Uncovering Mary Blair’s Animation Legacy
Your favorite Disney animations were the product of invisibilized women’s labor.
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High Rise: Full Design
In the final issue of volume 47, the Nass pays a visit to President Clinton’s stomping grounds, cries with Joyce Carol Oates, and does or does not do drugs in the Bay Area.
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Did a Top Science Journal Publish a Creationist Paper?
Dumb logic and intelligent design in a recent Nature article.
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July
“By the eighth day words had begun to fail me. I thought in silent images. It was hot. We ate greedily, excessively, grilled meat on the bone, whole fish smiling up from the table, savory noodles prepared in cold sesame sauce with fresh cucumber. I sat around for hours after lunch feeling uncomfortably full.”
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True and False: Bay Area
A drug deal that wasn’t. A minister on mushrooms. Which is real, and which is fake?
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“Fact-Heavy and Exceedingly Vapid”: A Visit to the Bill Clinton Presidential Library
A shrine to Slick Willie and his presidential T-rex.
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Inevitable Acts: Ruminations on The Lady with the Pet Dog
Through Joyce Carol Oates, a Nass writer ponders the inexorable force of love.