I was in a yellow cab in high summer when I saw it. Twenty-three at the time, I sometimes skimmed articles about politics on my clunky BlackBerry while…
Read more Vinson Cunningham on Barry Blitt’s Obama “Fist Bump” CoverDuring the 1959 session of the Louisiana state legislature, Governor Earl Long, the less famous younger brother of Senator Huey Long, “went off his rocker,” as the tickled…
Read more Lawrence Wright on A. J. Liebling’s “The Great State”He had his own world: a place where the funny and the horrific crossed paths. Roz Chast Source link
Read more Roz Chast on Gahan Wilson“Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that as the reason I went to China.” Thus begins “The Big Smoke,” Emily Hahn’s…
Read more Ariel Levy on Emily Hahn’s “The Big Smoke”As girls, we may find it difficult to picture our mothers—especially if they are stern Caribbean mothers—as anything other than the poised ladies they’re so determined to mold…
Read more Edwidge Danticat on Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl”I have very little interest in Elvis Presley’s music, and I have even less interest in the mythology of Elvis as a Towering Figure in American Music. What…
Read more Hanif Abdurraqib on Ellen Willis’s Review of Elvis in Las VegasThe shortest magazine pitch of Nick Paumgarten’s life actually took place in an elevator, which the writer was sharing with an elevator-phobic editor, and consisted of a single…
Read more Ed Caesar on Nick Paumgarten’s “Up and Then Down”The badge of maturity, for a literary genre, is the anxiety of influence—the compulsion felt by an aspiring writer to pee upon a fire hydrant that an earlier…
Read more Gideon Lewis-Kraus on Rebecca West’s “The Crown Versus William Joyce”