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The Grisly Bear Burlesque: Must We Treat Animals Like Circus Acts?
The moral underpinnings of a zoo in the modern world are tenuous. When we got our first zoos in the collectors’ society of the 19th century, they were used to bring exotic things to us. Occasionally,...
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Why Was Nymphomaniac Made?
One of the questions at the heart of Nymphomaniac is: Why does this movie exist? The film is not a political statement, it’s not particularly titillating, it’s not humane; it’s not even a character...
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Bisexuals, Wu-Tang, and Sarah Thomson Returns
Grantland published a gazillion word feature on the Wu-Tang Clan, featuring some choice quotes from Raekwon on their upcoming album: “It’s like getting the United Nations to all agree on one fucking...
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The Nightmares That Spark Our Humanity
For all of humanity’s collective awfulness—our vindictiveness and stupid hats, humblebrags and genocides—there have nonetheless been moments in which we’ve proven capable of genuine decency and...
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Death By a Thousand Cuts: The Week in Rob Ford
Rob Ford’s lawyer Dennis Morris would like us all to remember who the real victim is in the last year of scandal: Rob Ford. Just the other day, after a judge unsealed more Toronto Police documents...
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Neneh Cherry Doesn’t Need to Fill in the Blanks
Civil War obsessives wonder what would’ve happened if some tactical maneuver at Vicksburg went another way; pop nerds can indulge themselves in alternate histories while listening to Neneh...
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Terrible Ledes, the Names of the Year, and the Death of Oderus
“There is no evidence that black people are less responsible, less moral, or less upstanding in their dealings with America nor with themselves. But there is overwhelming evidence that America is...
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Fred Phelps, The Marcel Duchamp of Hate
I am expectantly awaiting the NOWITCANBETOLD! press release following the Rev. Fred Phelps’ death, which will announce that the entire 58-year existence of his Westboro Baptist Church has been an...
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History Doesn’t Lie: The Failure of Imperialism
Last Thursday night, four men with firearms started shooting at the Hotel Serena in Kabul, killing nine and wounding two. (The dead included two Canadian nationals.) One of the direct effects of the...
View ArticleCasca’s Beasts
The dancers move as if pursuedby Casca’s beasts – lionsleaving hesitation marks,bruises remembered the waywe remember faceson money, or smokethat’s inhaled but isn’t free.Everyone I’ve lovedloved me...
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The Legend of Zelda (According to Zelda)
You can tell a lot about a person by their tell-all confessional essay.F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote several of them—the Crack-Up essays, published in three parts in Esquire magazine in 1936, were an...
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Designing The Grand Budapest Hotel And Being Mean To Yoko Ono
This is what it sounds like to be denied your right to vote.A rare conversation with the designer of just about everything in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Over at The Millions, Christine Fischer Guy...
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Animals as People You Kill
In Noah Strycker’s new book,The Thing With Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human, Stryckler occasionally pauses to contemplate the “problem” of...
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Why We Turn Suicide Toward Ourselves
I was, as far as I know, the last person to talk to my friend Ross. I know we spoke on the phone, but I don’t really remember about what. I think I told him to take care—I assume I told him to take...
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Have We Finally Invented Technology That Can Teach Us How to Feel?
Of the many reasons Star Trek: The Next Generation appealed to my nerdy teenaged mind, the holodeck was perhaps the most significant. Granted, like most adolescents, my imaginings about what I’d do...
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It’s the End of the World As We Know It, and You’re Reading Gawker With No...
What if you survive the apocalypse,but only have one pair of contact lenses?Fervent defenders of the “Redskins” name seem pretty cool. #tcotWoody Allen is causing a new controversy over a song called...
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‘I Felt Nothing’: An Interview with Blake Bailey
In his acclaimed biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates and Charles Jackson, Blake Bailey planted his flag in some very specific literary territory: the messy, furtive life of the alcoholic,...
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Big Airports Have Their Place, and It’s Usually Not Downtown
Most of the great 20th-century mistakes in urban policy start with the word “ought.” Generations of planners have wrestled with what they thought a city ought to be, instead of recognizing it for what...
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Edgar Wright, Ben Wheatley, and Wyrd Olde England
In Edgar Wright’s Cornetto trilogy—Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End—a recurring theme, beneath all that self-reflexive genre fiction, is the fundamental awfulness of small English...
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