Late Sunday nights, with the workweek looming ahead of me, I find myself lying awake, mentally buzzing through the streets of Baltimore, puzzling out motives, means and opportunities, trying to think like ''a natural police.'' What has me so wired (forgive me) is ''The Wire,'' the newest HBO…

E arly in my freshman year of high school, I came home to find my mom sitting on her bed, crying. She had snooped through my e-mail and discovered a message in which I confessed to having a crush on a male classmate. “Are you gay?” she asked. I blurted out that I was. “I knew it, ever since you were…

There’s a particular process that I’m fascinated by, and I tell people about it all the time, but I realized I’d never actually written about it— so here you go. Let’s start with a definition, and then I’ll show you some examples. the flip-flop (n.) the process of pushing a work of art or craft from…

For many of us, the riots were a schooling in color and class. Our household, run by two working-class parents, was consumed by frantic arguments and phone calls about race, cities, and the distribution of wealth. There was talk of structural, large-scale discrimination, not merely individual…

My writing: hard-boiled. My life: scrambled soft. • The cud of thinking: by the evening my jaw aches. • An elderly poet called me “the most beautiful woman in the world” because he could not recall my name. • There are moments when I feel the universe expand. • Mandelstam: “Poetry is the certainty…

Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen have an unusually devoted platonic relationship. Credit Photograph by Gabriele Stabile Asmugly enamored couple sit in a restaurant, their hands clasped as they fret over the menu. The chicken, for instance: can the waitress tell them a little bit about its…

Around the time someone started spray-painting “Clapton is God” in an Islington Underground station, rock fandom took a turn towards what Ellen Willis described as a “tedious worship of technical proficiency.” Willis condemned this art-snob model of fandom, and in Out of the Vinyl Deeps she largely…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. In his contribution to The Stone last week, Alex Rosenberg posed a defense of naturalism — “the philosophical theory that treats science as our most reliable source of knowledge and scientific…

OK, deep breath. For more thorough refutations of the latest tinny aria from Camille, please read these fine entries by the queer theorist Jack Halberstam at the blog Bully Pulpit and by columnist Alex Needham in the Guardian . But I'd like to quickly point out what's really unnerving about Gaga's…

The greatness of Dirty Dancing was not lost on me in my near-daily viewings as a child and preteen, re-enacting every dance with my sister. What I learned a little later: it's a great, brave movie for women. That it was a wildly successful, commercial film, widely seen as "ugly duckling gets the…

In March 1970, the poet Ted Hughes found himself in a tricky real estate situation. There was a charming seaside house he wanted to buy, in Devonshire, but the necessary funds weren’t at hand. Of course he could have sold one of his two other homes, but one was the home he had shared with his now…

Tom Gauld Every time I hear someone use the term “strong female character,” I want to punch them. The problem is, I hit like a girl. Before I go further, here’s an anecdote that might help set the tone for what I’m about to try to say, which I worry has the potential to come across all wrong unless…

My Calvin and Hobbes anthologies sat unread at home on the highest shelf of my parents’ living room bookcase for almost ten years. My father sent them to me last week, and when they arrived in a beat-up box lined with tennis ball cans (don’t ask), I couldn’t even think of the last time I flipped…

"I usually maintain a fairly even temper about Hollywood because I couldn't do my job otherwise," Manohla Dargis told me today. But the formidable NY Times film critic has fighting words for Hollywood and how it treats women. Dargis' "fuck them" - the first of several - refers specifically to a fact…

Last winter, I reported on a religious festival in Pakistan, attended by thousands of worshipers. There were no women, at least that I could see. As I waded through the crowds, I held my breath, looking behind me every few seconds, warding off gropers, pushing them away with my hands. Crowds can be…

Two new first-person accounts about coping with the loss of a loved one are Joyce Carol Oates’s “A Widow’s Story,” about the death of her husband, Raymond Smith, (published earlier this month), and Meghan O’Rourke’s “The Long Goodbye,” about mourning her mother (to be published in April). Their…

Shared from Adequate Man Let's Make Some Minestrone, And Accept Autumn Like Grown-Ups 45 minutes ago 9 Go to permalink Shit, man. Autumn is officially here. Life sucks now. Shared from Screengrabber This Is Probably Unhealthy Timothy Burke Today 1:20pm 17 Go to permalink Have something you think we…