Readings

A Brief History of Prince Not Doing Things

Oh, like you've never cancelled an album because of a bad ecstasy trip.

Better in Hindsight

Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person, like Christopher Nolan's Memento, is about the selection of memory; perhaps we're much worse than we recall.

There Has Never Been Another Time To Be Alive

How Marvel, Netflix, and others harness the past and future to keep us immersed in an anticipatory, amnesic, spectacular now.

Is Lenny Bruce Funny?

Lenny Bruce, First Amendment crusader, broke ground for arguably every significant comic in his wake. Laughing at his material can seem like a civic duty. But does it hold up?

‘The Novel Is Like a Room’—an Interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard

The author of My Struggle talks about memory, translating the Bible, and his most epic of autobiographies as an act of “re-staging something that is inside of me.” 

The Adult-Free Utopia

The Maze Runner depicts a world without adults: a giant maze beset by giant monsters. Is it a utopia?

Radical vs. Radicalized

What does one former member of a terrorist group—"the last of the big-time dreamers," as he's called in Claire Holden Rothman's new novel, My October—have to say about civil liberties?

Chasing Ghosts via Wikimedia Commons
The Sad Lives of Famous Ghosts

Not everyone's lucky enough to escape their haunts.

The Secret Lives of Dead Pigs

Our corpses react unpredictably when left underwater. Luckily for researchers interested in such things, humans and pigs decompose in remarkably similar ways.

The Internet's First Family

MetaFilter began in 1999 as a sort of humane proto-Reddit. Why did a site for sharing "best of the web" links become a place where strangers help each other in real life in extraordinary ways?