I just wanted to tap. But in the mid-Eighties and early Nineties, in the well-to-do suburbs of New Jersey, the price of flapping, winging, and shuffling off to Buffalo was… ...

Shia LaBeouf and I were born six days apart in June 1986. I see him as the representative of my nanodemographic—as if my week’s cohort of white American males emerged from a brief huddle to announce, ...

From Wildcat Dome, which will be published in March by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda. She gets off the bus and walks for about twenty meters along the ...

William Dean Howells called it his “Uneasy Chair.” Lewis H. Lapham thought it “a column always grotesquely misnamed.” Bernard DeVoto simply wanted to do something else—a books section—and tried to fob ...

From 9-1-1 calls made in September by Patricia Upton, a resident of Kitsap County, Washington. operator: 9-1-1, what are you reporting? patricia upton: Yes, I need a officer to come out to my property ...

From a series of 144-word essays on Untitled Thought Project, Lacey’s Substack newsletter. This entry was published in October. I’ve been doing paperwork in Mexico City, signing thing after thing.

From scientific findings awarded Ig Nobel Prizes since 2014. Fake medicine that causes painful side effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side effects.

From a manuscript in progress. I used to think my grandmother peed pink.

From Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact and Fiction, which will be published next month by W. W. Norton and Company. Waste seemed like all I knew when I was a child. My parents didn’t get along, and ...

How to explain to her daughter. Back when she was in college, she had taken a literary seminar for which she’d had to read Kafka’s “Letter to His Father.” After the class had discussed it, the teacher ...

Is civil commitment rehabilitating sex offenders—or punishing them?