“If the pandemic so terrified us that billions of us retreated into panicked cocoons for months, what can explain or justify our blindness and indifference towards the ten million lives ended each year by the repeated inhalation of smog?”
On working at Ozy.
On Eve Babitz.
Babitz thought she’d die at thirty; she’s now 78 and witnessing her own resurrection. Youth was not wasted on her, and she crammed her life into her sentences.
On fungi.
On Vladimir Nabokov.
On Glenn Gould.
A work trip to Turkmenistan.
‘Florida and Ohio, man,’ the barista at the local café said to my husband, when he asked about the tourist trade. ‘People here at least acknowledge that it’s real. But people from Florida and Ohio don’t even seem to think it’s happening.’ Having lived in both places, I believe him: I have long had a theory that the surrealism that has overtaken the political landscape in America can be traced back to the poisoned ground of Ohio Facebook.
On water scarcity in Mexico City.
The polar icecaps are melting. Is it OK to have a child? Australia is on fire. Is it OK to have a child? My house is flooded, my crops have failed, my community is fleeing. Is it OK to have a child? It is, in a sense, an impossible question.
No one can seem to agree on his surviving merits. He wrote like an angel, the consensus goes, except when he was writing like a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter.
On living with the internet.
Boomtown San Francisco, as seen from the Google Bus.
The AIDS crisis as it unfolded in America is an object lesson in the danger, the potential violence, inherent in organized prejudice.
“Electorates turned with special venom against parties offering what was in effect a milder version of the economic consensus: free-market capitalism with a softer edge. It’s as if the voters are saying to those parties: what actually are you for?”
A 60,000-word investigation into the Grenfell Tower fire.
On the work of Rachel Cusk.
“This isn’t an essay about clothes, exactly, nor is it about fashion, quite. It is about women and clothes and something that happens between them that we could think of as a kind of third rail of female experience.”
On Joan Didion.
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A review of several books on Rupert Murdoch first criticizes the authors for not grasping the many sides of their subject, then offers a thesis of its own. He’s “not so much a man, or a cultural force, as a portrait of the modern world.”
A critique of Facebook.
Satoshi Nakamoto was the mysterious creator of Bitcoin. Facing bankruptcy and jail, Craig Wright fled Australia knowing that he would soon be outed as Satoshi by multiple publications. Backed by a business group that hoped to sell his patents, Wright was due to show the proof that he possessed the original keys for Bitcoin, but did he?
Following a Cadbury factory to Poland.
The relationship between creative writing programs and modern fiction.
From Medusa to Merkel.
