My mom runs fast for a 65-year-old. She’s small — 5 ft even — and clocks in at just over 100 lbs. Her compact frame slays in the juniors section of American department stores. I see her sprinting toward me as I stand on the corner of Austin’s busiest intersection, on its busiest fortnight — the two…

Maybe it’s unfair to set down this kind of pressured utterance in print. But cable news generates verbiage in this hollow mode, minute after minute, hour after hour, when people are forced to speak even though they have nothing to say. It’s inherent in the enterprise. In most of what it does,…

AP Photo/Charles Krupa T he Boston Globe has been through a tough year, or ten. The New York Times Company announced in February that it is putting the Globe up for sale. By shedding the New England Media Group from its holdings—which includes the Globe ’s online presence and the Telegram & Gazette…

As many of you may know, Michael Schur, the co-creator and showrunner of the one great remaining network sitcom, is a huge fan of David Foster Wallace’s masterwork “Infinite Jest.” He wrote his undergraduate thesis on Pynchon and DFW, owns the film rights for Infinite Jest, and has even directed a…

After volleys of applause at my grandmother’s book talk, my twin brother, sister, mother and I pile into the car and lock the doors. “What a dyke!” My sister yells. We burst out laughing. We had, of course, all been thinking it. The book she wrote is a biography of her Holocaust Literature…

I’M pretty certain it was six years ago. I know I was in a restaurant. I know, too, that I was a little tipsy — that’s the only way the impulse could have come to me, the only way I would have acted on it. I went through the names programmed into my cellphone, looking for moms. Tina. She was one, so…

It’s the day after Christmas 2011. I’m at gate D49 0f Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. And I am crying. Back home, my two daughters are snuggled on the couch watching “Bambi,” still wrapped in the cocoon of new toys and visiting grandparents. The smell of leftover turkey and mashed potatoes warmed in the…

It was a perfect Sunday morning, clear and invigoratingly cold. It was the Sunday morning I’d had in my head every single day for the past six months, a day that had informed how I’d eaten and slept and run and watched my toenails grow black. A once in a lifetime day. But as my teammates from…

(This is a big jumbled mess of thoughts that I may not fully believe come an hour from now. It’s just easier to type it out and come back to it later. Expect lots of edits.) Edit: changed some stuff, added some ideas. Also: if you have comments, suggestions, reactions, please send them my way .…

Let’s quickly deal with the safety issue first. People will adapt easily enough. We’ve adapted to numerous successive modes of transport in the past without the need to artificially increase the noise that mode of transport generates (though the first automobiles required a man with a flag walking…

Illustration by Tom Gauld Very early in the morning of Memorial Day, 1995, the children’s author Lois Lowry was awakened by a telephone call from Germany. It was still dark outside the windows of her little brick house in Cambridge, Mass., when she heard her daughter-in-law explain that Lowry’s son…

The flâneur began in the 6th. Les Deux Magots—coffee—then next door to Café de Flore—hot chocolate. I cut southwest, along the edge of the Luxembourg Gardens, then down Rue de Fleurus. Gertrude Stein’s old apartment appeared suddenly, anonymous save a small plaque. I paused, snapped a photo, and…

Double Act Adam Smyth Buy A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel by Tom Phillips Thames and Hudson, 392 pp, £14.95, May 2012, ISBN 978 0 500 29043 9 On a Saturday morning in November 1966, Tom Phillips picked a book at random from a pile of novels at a house-clearance sale in Peckham Rye. Phillips…

Grey Villet/Getty Images Merle Miller speaking to activists, January, 1971 If you were born after 1970, I think it is nearly impossible to imagine how it felt to open up The New York Times Magazine on a Sunday morning in January 1971 to discover “What it Means to be a Homosexual,” a deeply personal…

Quartz , the new business news site from Atlantic Media, launched today. It’s one of the most high-profile launches the online news business has seen this year, and that’s because of what it promised: a tablet-first mindset; a digitally appropriate structure; an app-like interface; a new-world…

I'm here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don't know about you. Maybe you're from here, too, and sooner or later it will come out that we used to live a block away from each other and didn't even know it. Or maybe you moved here a couple years ago for a job; maybe you…

John Lanchester’s recent novel, “Capital,” is full of sharply drawn characters, men and women living at different points on the class spectrum of modern England, whose lives intersect in a series of increasingly fraught episodes. Yet one of its most memorable characters isn’t a person at all, but,…

21st Century Gestures Clip Art Collection 1. A text file For some years I’ve been collating a list in a text file, which has the banal filename “21st_century_gestures.txt”. These are a set of gestures, spatial patterns and physical, often bodily, interactions that seemed to me to be entirely novel.…

Henry Cabluck/AP Images Texas State Board of Education members Cynthia Dunbar, Barbara Cargill, and Gail Lowe discussing curriculum standards, Austin, May 2008. Cargill, who was appointed chairwoman last year by Governor Rick Perry, has expressed concern that there are now only ‘six true…

Y U NO guy used to sell… investing!?! ads advertising google ads internet culture investing meme y u no rage comics y u no guy 21 notes vice.com A Co-Creator of Know Your Meme Explains What the Hell a Meme Actually Is | VICE Kenyatta Cheese, one of the founders of the world's foremost meme website,…

Following three years of research in an Indian slum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist discusses what language can’t express, her view that nobody is representative, and the ethical dilemmas of writing about the poor. Photo courtesy Bettina Neuefeind While covering poverty and social welfare for…

Julie Salamon is the author of “Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein.” I GREW up hating secrets. At age 10 I learned from my cousins that my father had been married before and that his first wife and their little girl were killed in Auschwitz. When I was a senior in high…

When you spend all your time in a book, you think you know it. All the editors at Merriam-Webster know the Third , but now that we’re undertaking a revision of the beast, we’re ears-deep in it, drowning in stuffy single-statement definitions. Each of us breathes a bit shallower when we start futzing…

Essays He Hit Send: On the Awkward but Necessary Role of Technology in Fiction By posted at 6:00 am on August 8, 2012 1. “Can the hoary trope of mistaken identity still play in the age of Google images?” asks Alex Witchel in the New York Times Book Review . Witchel is talking about the premise…

I really wasn’t expecting the Secret Service. Maybe an email, or a phone call from Apple. Instead, my first indication that something was “wrong” was a real-life visit from the organization best known for protecting the President of the United States of America. They rang the doorbell a few times.…

David Ives’ Venus in Fur opens on a sparsely furnished audition room in New York City. Poorly lit by fluorescent lights, frustrated, and talking on his cell phone, the play’s male lead Thomas Novachek (played by Hugh Dancy in the show’s Broadway production this year) complains that there are no —…

If money is a matter of possible futures, the book with the most to tell us about the present moment is one in which money hardly figures at all: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go