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Manufacturing Confection: A People’s History of Candy
Last month, on Halloween, I went to a dive bar to celebrate my friend Kate’s birthday. As someone better at thinking of costumes than actually making them, I was glad for a reason to go out sans guise...
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What Went Wrong This Week For ... Lady Bosses
Welcome to Well, That Sucked, our weekly compendium of exactly what it sounds like. Thrown in this week’s garbage: chicks in pantsuits.Women are good for certain tasks: wearing tall shoes, having soft...
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Anger, aubergine, apricot syrup,transform the first to the thirdto the sound of the automobileoutside in autumn with theangering noise of the bodegaidlers, again, in September.Think of August and...
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China Still Has a Long Way To Go
Earlier this month, Justin Trudeau suffered from a minor case of political foot-in-mouth disease when he said—in response to a question at a friendly fundraising function—that he respected the People’s...
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Let’s Put An End To Eating Pussy
Not that I ever really enumerated it, but I was pretty surprised to find that, on my personal list of phrases I don’t ever want to hear my mayor say, “Yes, I smoked crack cocaine” ranked considerably...
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Women on the Edge of a Conspiracy Theory
The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy opens up the most pernicious of black holes, theories on top of theories grasping to explain and assign guilt for what happened on November 22, 1963....
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Farewell to Doris Lessing’s Rage and Restlessness
Doris Lessing has died. Lessing, who in 2007 greeted the news that she had won the Nobel Prize with a sigh and an exasperated “Oh, Christ,” was not one for hoopla. As David L. Ulin put in it the LA...
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Sympathy for the Devil: Remembering the Age of Assassination
Commemorations of historic milestones tend to come in two modes: first in a major key, the fanfare that tells us our lives still are defined by the event; then in a minor strain, the elegiac air that...
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Who Will Rise Up Against Batkid’s Tyrannical Liberal Politics?
The best online comments on the stories that matter, selected and annotated by Michael A. Balazo.SNL Does Rob FordIt was a big week for Toronto mayor Rob Ford. After being spoofed by Jon Stewart,...
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I Buy Video Games Because I Don’t Want to Die
We do not come with tree rings. Instead of punctuated markers of age, our bodies ship with incremental evidence of the Oncoming Old. Trembling hairlines. Skin the pallor of #nofilter. I think of aging...
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Georgia Webber on Discovering Comics’ Potential
Shelf Esteem is a weekly measure of the books on the shelves of writers, editors, and other word lovers, as told to Emily M. Keeler. This week’s shelf belongs to Georgia Webber, the cartoonist behind...
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The Chaos of Bubbles May Be Our Only Economic Hope
Larry Summers has a remarkable ability to say the things other economists are thinking but haven’t quite crystallized yet. (He legendarily dismissed the notion of omniscient markets by writing “THERE...
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On Whether Doris Lessing Was a Feminist—and Why She Was Right Not to Care
When the news came on Sunday that Doris Lessing had died, a YouTube video began making the rounds on social media. It was footage of the moment in 2007 when Lessing learned she’d won the Nobel Prize....
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The ‘Girl Who Reads’: Just Another Text to be Read
Date a girl who reads: whether said as a plea, a command, a suggestion or an aspiration, it’s become a routine truism in certain corners of the Internet. One might assume that, in a modern industrial...
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If We Forget About Rob Ford, Did He Ever Really Exist?
Perhaps I’m no better than Will Ferrell, because for the past few weeks it seems the first part of this column has been given over to Rob Ford. It’s not because I’m promoting anything, or because I...
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The Godfather of Gonzo Porn
We open with a view of San Francisco by night from a limousine window. Jamie Gillis is squeezed into the back seat, flanked on his right by a dark-haired vixen in a bustier and on his left by a...
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All of Our Politicians Will Be in Jail Soon Enough
If you’re reading this, the odds are good that at least two-thirds of your government is under criminal investigation. Between Toronto, London, Montreal, Ontario, and, as we learned this week, Canada,...
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‘Bound 2’: 12 Ways of Looking at a Black Skinhead
Kanye’s ridiculous, wonderful music video for “Bound 2” came out several days ago, but I can’t stop watching or thinking about it. Here are a dozen quick cuts.1. Between the oversaturated wildlife and...
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