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The Science of Swill
It’s patio season! Perhaps you’d like to split a pitcher of beer? That’s a trick question. Of course you want to split a pitcher, because who doesn’t this time of year? But you might reconsider when it...
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Miraculous, Life-Saving Medicine: Friend or Foe?
When he first demonstrated the possibility of vaccinating children against smallpox, you’d think Edward Jenner would have been hailed as the next best thing to Jesus at Lazarus’ tomb: if we can’t bring...
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(Not) Defending Shakespeare, Murder Homes, and Black is Still Beautiful
Turns out there’s very little to protect Canadian home buyers from “stigmatized property,” aka murder homes.Speaking of twee, here is what happens when twee and pure human evil get into a hot tub...
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How to Dress for the Financial Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Juicy Couture
In 2008, hip clothier Juicy Couture launched what might have been one of the most ill-conceived advertising campaigns ever. Plastered all over its flagship Manhattan store and inside nearly every...
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Bear Re-imagined
“Bear is a strange and wonderful book, plausible as kitchens, but shapely as a folktale, and with the same disturbing resonance.” Those were the words of Margaret Atwood, in praise of Marian Engel’s...
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There’s More to ‘Bear’ Than Bear Sex
Tocelebrate Bear, we asked five illustrators to reimagine the novel’s startling 1976 cover.The first thing you need to know about Marian Engel’s 1976 novel Bear is that it is about a woman who has sex...
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See-Through Mice And Talking Horses
How to deal with the “powerlessness and … utter lack of recourse” upon realizing you’ve been fictionalized.The great John Jeremiah Sullivan provides annotations to “Upon This Rock,” his wonderful GQ...
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The Nefarious Future of the Focus Group
In a Super Bowl commercial from 2012, an adorably shabby rescue dog is trained to retrieve Bud Lights on command. He brings his owner a beer. Then he drags over a couple of cold ones for the owner’s...
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A Reliably Fun Thing I’ll Do Every Other Year Or So
Fort LauderdaleWe are way down here on America’s Wang.A Chili’s Too is not a real Chili’s, and the worst time to find this out is when you’re shuffling into the restaurant after a redeye flight....
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What’s Public Transit For, Anyway?
Streetcars seem to drive some people around-the-bend crazy. In Toronto, the National Post recently filled a few pages with a back-and-forth about whether they are unquestionably the worst or merely...
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Clown Conventions And A Burning Pile Of Garbage
“When you drive through West Virginia, you are flipping a coin. If you win, you’re in for a drive that winds through valleys and up mountains, full of breathtaking, gorgeous scenery. If you lose, Satan...
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Good god I’m gorgeous, open on the operating table, so impeccably pink pearl you could drape me on a hotel heiress, make a mint. It is a costly transformation:girl to goddess, curve to cosmic pin-up,...
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In Defense of Danish Tourists
My history of international travel is relatively limited, but it never occurred to me that, upon visiting a place and finding it didn’t quite meet my expectations, I should write an open letter to...
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Is American Ninja Warrior Too Fun to be a Sport?
There has to be something to the fact that almost every even mildly successful made-up athletic-ish game-show-y spectacle that shows up on American television contains more than a whiff of the...
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What Happened to Dick Tracy?
On October 4, 1931, Dick Tracy proposed to his girlfriend, Tess Trueheart, at her father’s delicatessen. It was a happy day at the deli—Tess’s father, Emil Trueheart, and mother, Mary, had finally...
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Drawing Vaginas, Worrying About Ebola, and Not Writing Your First Novel
How many people have you blocked today?James Corden might replace the impossible Craig Ferguson as the host of CBS’ The Late, Late Show. But who is James Corden?Perhaps the biggest advantage of working...
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Shakespeare Means Nothing
The uber-twee radio show This American Life, hosted by Ira Glass, runs on formula: human interest stories told in equal measures of irony and sincerity, in which obstacles are overcome in ways that are...
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World War I: A Bad Time for Monarchs
If you’ve opened a newspaper, a news website, listened to news radio, or spared more than a passing glance at news television in the last few months, you may have gathered it’s the centennial of the...
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