March 2011
36 posts
6 tags
Online Poker’s Big Winner →
By JAY CASPIAN KANG
Daniel (jungleman12) Cates, a 21-year-old self-made multimillionaire, lapsed economics/computer-science major and one-day Bubble Trouble champion of the world, was mildly annoyed. A reputedly solid player under the gun had just bet, and Cates needed to figure out if he was bluffing. Cates consulted the stat readout and deduced that the kid’s erratic betting over the past 200...
8 tags
Escape From the Holy Shtetl →
Gitty Grunwald fled the pious world of her mother to return to the secular city of her grandparents.
by Mark Jacobson
Gitty is trying to “be normal.” Mostly she’s been looking for a job, which is difficult since, like most KJ dropouts, she has no GED and few skills. She’s checked the lower-Manhattan restaurants, hoping to catch on as a waitress, but has no experience. “Even in the diner they...
6 tags
The Great Marijuana Hoax →
by Alan Ginsberg
yadda yadda yadda. Thank god it’s not the sixties anymore.
IN SOUND good health I smoked legal ganja (as marijuana is termed in India, where it is traditionally used in preference to alcohol), bought from government tax shops in Calcutta, in a circle of devotees, yogis, and hymn-singing pious Shaivite worshipers in the burning ground at Nimtallah Ghat in Calcutta, where...
7 tags
A Murder Foretold →
Unravelling the ultimate political conspiracy.
by David Grann
As Marjorie drove onto the street, with her father at her side, the car with the assassin raced up behind them, followed by the driver on the motorcycle. (The hit men were obeying a new law banning two people from travelling on a motorcycle—a law that was supposed to curb assassinations, since so many were carried out by hit men...
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Honoured →
by Malcolm Bradbury
The first approach came unexpectedly and rather like a secret. The letter, in an official windowed envelope of no apparent distinction, had been sent on by my literary agent almost accidentally. 75 years ago, when he received something similar, Joseph Conrad mistook it for an income tax demand, and nearly threw it away. And it was a secret: an official letter from the Prime...
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Consider The Lobster →
David Foster Wallace on the Maine Lobster Festival
The Main Eating Tent’s suppers come in Styrofoam trays, and the soft drinks are iceless and flat, and the coffee is convenience-store coffee in yet more Styrofoam, and the utensils are plastic (there are none of the special long skinny forks for pushing out the tail meat, though a few savvy diners bring their own). Nor do they give you near...
3 tags
Sexy Beast →
The Mysteries of The Giant Pacific Octopus
by Brendan Kiley
Giant Pacific octopuses are, well, giant—the largest ever found, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, was 600 pounds and 31 feet from tentacle to tentacle—and they’re disproportionately strong, all muscle and protein. While trying to escape, a 40-pound octopus at the Seattle Aquarium once pushed a 60-pound weight from the...
5 tags
Confounding Fathers: The Tea-Party's Cold War... →
by Sean Wilentz
Old gold.
A few months ago, the cable-television and radio host Glenn Beck began his Fox News show with one of his favorite props: a pipe clenched between his teeth. “I’ve got my pipe,” he told his audience, his speech slightly muddled by the stem, “because we’re going to speak about schoolish kind of things.” The theme of the day was “Restoring History,” and Beck, looking...
6 tags
On Utopia →
by Paul La Farge
More than a few years ago now, when I was living in San Francisco, I happened to walk by the office of a dot-com, a competitor in the online-pet-supply business, that had gone bust. It was midnight when I passed its brilliantly lit atrium, void of humans and furniture, except for a single desk where a night watchman sat looking dejectedly at the street. A huge white banner hung...
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Population, Seven Billion →
by Robert Kunzig
Historians now estimate that in Leeuwenhoek’s day there were only half a billion or so humans on Earth. After rising very slowly for millennia, the number was just starting to take off. A century and a half later, when another scientist reported the discovery of human egg cells, the world’s population had doubled to more than a billion. A century after that, around 1930, it had...
3 tags
Colours / Black →
by Paul La Farge
A little while back, when I was working on one of my many doomed projects, I went into a cave. Not just a little cave, either, but an enormous emptiness in the ground, the trace of a watercourse that gnawed its way across half the state of Kentucky a few thousand years ago. We—this was my friend Wayne and I—went a long way in, then we sat down and turned off our lights. The...
4 tags
DESTROY ALL MONSTERS →
by Paul LaFarge
A JOURNEY DEEP INTO THE CAVERN OF DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, A UTOPIAN, PROFOUNDLY DORKY AND INFLUENTIAL GAME THAT, LACKING CLEAR WINNERS OR AN END, MAY NOT BE A GAME AT ALL
We are far enough into the cave now that I can tell you that I have mixed feelings about Dungeons & Dragons. I played fantasy role-playing games more or less incessantly from 1978, when my father brought...
The Road To Recovery →
by Amy Ozols
The best and most obvious way to avoid a hangover is not to drink at all, but I think we can all agree that this is not an option. Let’s move on.
When you wake up feeling unpleasant after a night of revelry, the most important thing to remember is that God is punishing you for having fun. In order to cure your hangover, you must therefore attend church as quickly as possible....
4 tags
The Origami Lab →
by Susan Orlean
At the time, Lang was in his thirties. He had been doing origami — that is, shaping sheets of paper into figures, using no cutting and no glue — for twenty-five years and designing his own models for twenty. He has always considered himself very much a bug person, but his earliest designs were not insects; in the nineteen-seventies, he invented an origami Jimmy...
4 tags
Notes on Charlie Sheen and the End of Empire →
by Bret Easton Ellis
It’s thrilling watching someone call out the solemnity of the celebrity interview, and Charlie Sheen is loudly calling it out as the sham it is. He’s raw now, and lucid and intense and the most fascinating person wandering through the culture. (No, it’s not Colin Firth or David Fincher or Bruno Mars or super-Empire Tiger Woods, guys.) We’re not used to these kinds of...
7 tags
Exceptionalism, Faith and Freedom: Palin’s America →
by Stanley Fish
Here much-lauded post-structuralist scholar, Stanley Fish, writes a tidy review of Sarah Palin’s book, America by Heart : Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag. (Note on Stanley Fish: when I was at university, academics talked about SF in near-reverential terms, but, always went on to qualify this by saying ‘of course, he’s reaaaaaaally into MONEY’....
6 tags
The View From Mrs Thompson's →
David Foster Wallace on 9/11
The Yellow Pages have nothing under Flag. There’s actual interior tension: Nobody walks by or stops their car and says, “Hey, your house doesn’t have a flag,” but it gets easier and easier to imagine people thinking it. None of the grocery stores in town turn out to stock any flags. The novelty shop downtown has nothing but Halloween stuff. Only a few businesses are...
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Doomed Love at The Taco Stand →
by Hunter S. Thompson
I have always hated astrologers, and I like to have sport with them. They are harmless quacks in the main, but some of them get ambitious and turn predatory, especially in Hollywood. In Venice Beach I ran into a man who claimed to be Johnny Depp’s astrologer. “I consult with him constantly,” he told me. “We are never far away. I have many famous...
3 tags
R. Kelly →
by Will Oldham
More on the prince of slow-jam.
R. Kelly doesn’t need to throw on a tuxedo and dig into a McRib sandwich—like he did at the photo shoot that accompanies this story—to demonstrate that he is a complicated guy. In fact, the 44-year-old Kelly is the walking, talking embodiment of complicated: Complicated because, as a singer, songwriter, and producer, he has worked with everyone...
6 tags
The secret mainstream: Contemplating the mirages... →
by Tom Bissell,
What, indeed, would future historians make of our civilization if the frustrating, beautiful, always mesmerizingly strange films of Werner Herzog were their primary cinematic witnesses? Would they be seen as damage inspections of a civilization at horrifying odds with nature and itself? as documents so fiercely visionary they often come within millimeters of insanity? Would...
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Mary Karr: The Art of Memoir →
From The Paris Review
INTERVIEWER
What was the subject matter of your early poetry, if it wasn’t your life?
KARR
What most young women write about: wanting to get laid, not having gotten laid, having gotten laid badly. Wanting someone to leave, not wanting him to leave, then he finally leaves. But characters other than me. Or I’d write unbelievably pretentious shit—some world-weary gambler...
4 tags
AVN's Response to DFWs Big Red Son
Note: this will only be of interest to people who’ve read DFW’s porn-industry take-down Big Red Son.
Also note: we’re well-aware that way too much DFW-related stuff has been posted lately. Will stop… Soon… Probably.
In its September, 1998 issue, the mainstream movie magazine Premiere ran a twelve-page article on our little awards show (Neither Adult Nor...
6 tags
U N B O U N D: R. Kelly →
by Sasha Frere Jones
Blast from the past…
Kelly seems to have no superego; he is willing to say anything that occurs to him, no matter how strange he sounds or how self-incriminating it might seem. Many people facing serious criminal charges related to sexual conduct would not include a song called “Sex Planet” on their CD, or, if they did, would probably omit the line about a “trip to...
5 tags
Trip to the Fair →
Wherein our reporter gorges himself on corndogs, gapes at terrifying rides, acquaints himself with the odor of pigs; exchanges unpleasantries with tattooed carnies, and admires the loveliness of cows…
by David Foster Wallace
We’re about 100 yards shy of the Poultry Building when I break down. I’ve been a rock about the prospect of poultry all day, but now my nerve goes. I...
4 tags
Confessions of a Juggler →
by Tina Fey
I thought that raising an only child would be the norm in New York, but I’m pretty sure my daughter is the only child in her class without a sibling. All over Manhattan, large families have become a status symbol. Four beautiful children named after kings and pieces of fruit are a way of saying, “I can afford a four-bedroom apartment and a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in...
7 tags
Porn Machete Murder →
by Michael Albo
Hill, whose screen name was Steve Driver, used to say his signature was “monster hands.” According to set photographer Gia Jordan, Hill “would wear these hands, like, from a Halloween costume. That was his shtick. He’d jack off on the girl with the hands and when he’d come he’d yell, ‘Monster hands!’ It was ridiculous.” Alana...
9 tags
Opium Made Easy: One gardener's encounter with the... →
By Michael Pollan
Last season was a strange one in my garden, notable not only for the unseasonably cool and wet weather - the talk of gardeners all for its climate of paranoia. One flower was the cause: a tall, breathtaking poppy, with silky scarlet petals and a black heart, the growing of which, I discovered rather too late, is a felony under state and federal law. Actually, it’s not...
10 tags
Gidget on The Couch →
The “boys” all had nicknames like the Big Kahuna, Tubesteak, and Da Cat (more on him later). Kathy—five feet tall, and ninety-five pounds when wet—was evidently a girl and, in the estimation of the surfers, quite small: hence, Girl-Midget, or Gidget, a name that reeks of both schoolyard taunts and Freudian condensation (the trick of the dreamwork that yields the equation girl + midget = gidget)....
8 tags
Waiting For The Bad Thing →
DESPITE HIS NOTORIETY AS A BLASPHEMOUS, WORLD-CLASS PROVOCATEUR (AND COUNTLESS QUADRUPLE ESPRESSOS), MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ SEEMS VERY, VERY SLEEPY.
by Sam Lipsyte
Back in the city limits we pass some low brick buildings that Tom says are leather bars. We pass an OfficeMax and I make a dumb joke about that being the biggest leather bar of all. Houellebecq’s eyes light up but not for any...
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The Killer Elite, Part 3 →
The Battle For Baghdad
by Evan Wright
Later on, several Marines in another unit gather in a dark corner of the stadium to drink toasts to a one-armed Iraqi man who’s been selling locally distilled gin for five American dollars per fifth. Generally, it doesn’t require any alcohol to lower the young Marines’ inhibitions. When they bring up the topic of “combat...
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The Killer Elite – Part 2 →
by Evan Wright
The destruction continues after sunrise. Slow-moving A-10 Thunderbolt jets circle the northern fringes of Al Hayy, belching machine-gun fire. The airframe of the A-10 is essentially built around a twenty-one-foot-long seven-barrel machine gun — one of the largest of its type. When it fires, it makes a ripping sound like someone is tearing the sky in half. The A-10s wrap up...
11 tags
The Unsolved Mystery of the Notorious B.I.G. →
by Randall Sullivan,
When LAPD officials tried to explain how the murder of Notorious B.I.G. had gone unsolved for eight years, one excuse they could not offer was a lack of witnesses. Dozens of people had been on the street at forty-five minutes past midnight on March 9th, 1997, when B.I.G. was shot to death. At least seven people, including two of those who had been in the car with B.I.G.,...
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The Ecstasy Of Influence: A Plagiarism →
by Jonathan Lethem
Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her...
5 tags
M →
The History of M-Company in the Vietnam War, by John Sacks
(Warning: the writer is awful comfy with the word ‘negro’. It was the seventies.)
That night M lay on its taut canvas cots and listened to noises — o-o-o-o-o things going over, b-o-o-m exploding, ta-ta-ta-ta machine guns, and automatic rifles, dive bombers, a-a-ark tropical birds, lions and tigers, banshees, the...
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Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes: A Mid-Western... →
by David Foster Wallace
Tennis-wise, I had three preternatural gifts to compensate for not much physical talent. The first was that Ialways sweated so much that I stayed fairly well ventilated in all weathers. Oversweating seems an ambivalent blessing, and it didn’t exactly do wonders for my social life in high school, but it meant I could play for hours on a Turkish-bath July day and not...
