THE BOOK
The 1898 children’s classic known in America as Bob, Son of Battle and in England as Owd Bob: The Grey Dog of Kenmuir, by Alfred Ollivant, was long…
Robinson: A Profile
The scene of the kitchen table is repeated throughout a book. Every morning and night, the three of them congregate around it. I am on a bus…
Life is full of surprises, and news of life is constantly changing. From major world events to the small joys of everyday life, news of life is an ever-evolving source…
Fable came into the world climbing. After a monthlong gestation, she emerged blind and furless, an embryonic jelly bean endowed with little more than grasping claws and an instinctual map…
Feeling down about the human condition? Consider the spiritual dilemmas of a school crossing guard, a documentary filmmaker, an artist who likes belts, and more. Constellation Prize, a podcast from…
1. FUTURE
A shot of the desert, long focus, a rectangle of sand wavering under a blue sky. An automobile of no recognizable model glides right to left across the…
Kulka
Nothing like reading a Holocaust memoir at the Jiffy Lube. Distant relatives gassed so I could be here waiting on another uniformed man with a checklist. Soon, he…
1.
It’s February in Las Vegas, and because I have managed to step on my glasses and break them, as I do at least once a year, I have gone…
I.
On the morning of September 21, 1968, Salvador Novo awoke in the elegant Mexico City neighborhood of Coyoacán to find his chauffeur scrubbing graffiti off the gray stone wall…
On a bright fall day in 1991, Chris Foster left his differential equations class at the University of California, Davis, bypassed students lounging on the quad, and headed toward the…
Using the alla prima (wet-into-wet) method, Jane Corrigan paints private worlds in a messy, almost sculptural way. Each painting contains many paintings—one of them being the viewer’s fluctuating sense of…
The women asked:
“What time is it?”
“Are we still in August?”
Others said:
“I’ve lost track of time since my son and I got locked up in here.”
“I…
Beating the bounds is a centuries-old tradition that has been practiced in many countries around the world. It’s a ritual in which villagers walk the boundaries of their community, often…
At this year’s Believer Festival, we cornered artists and activists at slot machines and on smoke breaks, asking them to riff on the meaning of the borders they’ve encountered in…
Christina Dimitriadis is a woman on a mission. She is passionate about helping people find their true purpose in life and is determined to help them take the necessary steps…
I. On Motorcycle Island
It’s 2 p.m. in Austin, Texas, mid-March: the thick of the SXSW Music Festival. The seven-block stretch of Sixth Street between I-35 and Congress Avenue—lined with…
Last December, a nineteen-year-old SoundCloud rapper from Atlanta named Lil Nas X released a new track called “Old Town Road.” He tagged the song not as hip-hop, as he had…
No one else is paying attention. The train approaches the station at Varenna Esino. It is a small, regional train, headed north from Milan, its passengers whiling away the boredom…
1.
Just before dawn on a late July morning, I stood next to a Mister Whippy ice cream truck with a throng of people looking out over a…
It’s been said you can’t go home again, the implication being that the home of our childhood vanishes as we age. It changes; we change. The particular feeling generated by…
Like comic books, video games hold a peculiar place in the public imagination. Closely associated with misguided youth, they’ve served as scapegoats for shortening attention spans, antisocial behavior, and violence.…
Throughout most of the 1990s my evenings were split between working at a nonprofit call center where I bummed money off strangers for good causes, and getting drunk and dancing…
Giant Residences
The term "McMansion" is used to describe a large residence that is built in a cookie-cutter style and is often seen as a status symbol.
These gargantuan homes are…
The crowd was growing. Hundreds had gathered across the road from the prison, bundled against the midwinter chill and warming themselves with a clever vendor’s coffee and doughnuts. Though dawn…
Finally, why else, dear child, would God make our life so hard yet so sweet on an island so beautiful yet so, so fragile? Think about it: The moral of…
I The Mobile Polling Station is Taken to the Residential Complex
In the early hours of Ukraine's Election Day, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at Kherson School No. 56, which…
I n the opening scene of L.A. Story (1991), weatherman Harris K. Telemacher—played by the film’s writer, Steve Martin—rides a stationary exercise bike in the middle of Echo Park, and…
In the distance to the north, we could see an ice floe, perhaps fifty feet long, hovering about thirty feet off the surface of the ocean. It rose up into…
The grenade had to go. It was October 2005, and Jesse Albrecht, an MFA student at the University of Iowa and a recent Iraq War veteran, had just finished…
In early 2012, Saul Melman came across an ad for an outdoor sculpture contest in Evansville, Indiana, a city about which he knew nothing. Artists were invited to propose a…
