Coming to terms with eating disorders.

On July 2017, a visitor to the Museum of Capitalism contributed a watch (from here on referred to as 'our watch') to the museum’s artifact drive. In his form, he noted that Folsom & Co., a supposedly San Francisco-based company, used Instagram to offer the watch 'free,' but with $7 shipping.

Midtown Manhattan. The highest concentration of showbiz havens and hangouts in the whole entire world. The Chorus Girls. The Drunk Newsmen. The Jazz Hepsters. The Mob. They converge with the force of a fly against a windshield. This is where American popular culture is born. Its influence permeates the nation. Walk the streets and weave through the hustlers, the gangsters, the bookies, the rummies... and somewhere among that crowd - you'll walk past a nondescript artistic genius or twelve, indiscernible from the dregs, biding time until they transform the American landscape. And high-above the loud, syncopated beat of Midtown you can hear... The Comedians.

“It’s insanity to kill your father with a kitchen knife. It’s also insanity to close hospitals, fire therapists, and leave families to face mental illness on their own.”

Justin Vivian Bond found downtown fame as Kiki DuRane, decrepit drag chanteuse and comedic prophet of gay rage born out of the AIDS era. Then he killed Kiki to try to become the woman (and man) he always wanted to be.

From a childhood in the Kremlin to a trip to New Delhi carrying the ashes of her Indian Communist lover, defection at the U.S. Embassy… “finally to decades of obscurity, wandering and poverty.”

How a bid to unseat Senator Thad Cochran led to an illegal photo in a nursing home, a flurry of arrests, and the death of the man who brought the Tea Party to Mississippi.

A nonconformist pastor sent a colony of Welsh people to Argentina to try to preserve the language in 1865. 150 years later, the traces are still there.

An oral history of the disaster:

Someone said to me, or maybe I read it, that the problem of Chernobyl presents itself first of all as a problem of self understanding. That seemed right. I keep waiting for someone intelligent to explain it to me.

The women would walk 10 miles from the village to the meat packing plants. Their pay supported drunk husbands and hungry children. When they were told to stop, they broke with tradition and went to the law.

They were an ordinary pair of small-time criminals in the UK. Then they figured out how to blow up an ATM.

In 1965, Wheat was sentenced to death for armed robbery and murder. When his sentence was commuted, he decided to devote the rest of his life to helping people.

In March of 1991, Vanilla Ice had the #1 album in the country (To the Extreme), a movie about to be released (TMNT II: The Secret of the Ooze), and a dogged belief that his 15 minutes weren’t about to end.

“The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side.”

Kate del Castillo, the actress who brought Sean Penn to Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, tells her side of the story.

“The tragedy of Dorothy Parker, it seems to me, isn’t that she succumbed to alcoholism or died essentially alone. It was that she was too intelligent to believe that she had made the most of herself.”

In bleak farmlands of East Anglia, the first wave of Eastern European migrants learned exploitation and extortion from their own experiences with day labor. Then they began to prey on fellow immigrants, luring in them into debt and then forcing them to commit crimes to pay it off.

After two months in the hospital, a mother finally got to take her premature baby home. Then she spent five years trying to convince him to eat.

Camille Billops abandoned her four-year-old to become the artist she knew she was meant to be. Twenty years later, her daughter wanted to know: why did you leave me?

“If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long.”

In 1995, the Chicago Reader profiled a little-known professor (and lawyer and philanthropist and author) who had decided to run for office to get back to his true passion: community organizing.

For many immigrants coming through Arizona, it’s not enough to pay a coyote to shepherd you across the border. You also need to pay the ransom demanded by your kidnapper after you arrive.

His wife murdered his mother, tried to do the same to him, and was prepared to orphan their 8-month-old child. The attempt left him blind. Then he defended her in court.

A visit to Tokyo’s first co-sleeping cafe, where one can pay a set fee to sleep next to a woman in 20 minute increments, though spooning, being patted on the head, and a change of pajamas are extra.