Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library

"Humility the acceptance that being human is good enough is the embrace of ordinariness." underlined by David Foster Wallace in his copy of Ernest Kurtz's The Spirituality of Imperfection. "True…

Diary

We met every afternoon for two weeks in N’Djamena. After the midday prayer, I would pick him up in a taxi at the shop he hoped to turn into a laundry. We ate fish and rice in my hotel room…

Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man

Killing Field The open space between two squatter camps where Farai Kujirichita was beaten to death by vigilantes. The mob, desperate for vengeance, had found an unlikely guide to lead them into…

My Summer at an Indian Call Center

Lessons learned: Americans are hotheads, Australians are drunks and never say where you're calling from. By Andrew Marantz on Tue. July 5, 2011 3:00 AM PDT "We were asked to hate everything Indian,"…

The Man Who Sailed His House

Later, lost far at sea, when you're trying to forget all you've left behind, the memory will bubble up unbidden: a village that once lay by the ocean. Here are the neatly packed homes with…

Murder by Text

O ne night around dinnertime, Kruse Wellwood sent an instant message to Kim Proctor. Hey, I thought you had babysitting, he wrote. Did you finish early? Gawky and boyish, 16-year-old Kruse had…

Rendezvous in the Ramble

From the July 24, 1978 issue of New York Magazine. Picture Central Park—without a sailor, Picture Mister Lord, minus Mister Taylor. —Cole Porter's "A Picture of Me Without You," 1935.…

Alone at the Movies

Essays - Winter 2008 Print My days in the dark with Robert Altman and Woody Allen By Mark Edmundson For a year or two during the mid-1970s, living in New York, I was a moviegoer. I was in my early…

Cathedral By Raymond Carver, Weekend Short Story

A very well-known and good short story by one of my favorite short story writers, Cathedral by Raymond Carver. Since you mighthave more time to read stuff on the weekend- AF This blind man, an old…

Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi

18 November 2011 Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi Linda P.B. Katehi, I am a junior faculty member at UC Davis. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and I teach in the…

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

Chapter 1: This Is Emo 0:01 No woman will ever satisfy me. I know that now, and I would never try to deny it. But this is actually okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either. Should I be…

Rodrigo Rosenberg’s Murder in Guatemala

Rodrigo Rosenberg knew that he was about to die. It wasn t because he was approaching old age he was only forty-eight. Nor had he been diagnosed with a fatal illness; an avid bike rider, he was in…

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests

November 10, 2011 8:00 AM ET TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street. The first few times I went down to Zuccotti Park, I came…

The Rolling Stone Interview

Eddie Murphy Photo: Mark Seliger It's a glorious thing, hearing Eddie Murphy say "fuck" again. Few people ever said it better – and down here in the basement of the stone-and-marble mansion he…

My Second-Rate Red Carpet

When I moved to Los Angeles to write for “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien” in 2009, I was careful not to offend the locals. I’d heard many stories of New Yorkers…

Columbia Journalism Review

The Typekit Blog

Type study is an ongoing series of guest posts about typography on the web. In this article, Ethan Marcotte dishes up advice on font size. Yes, it’s true. This is a blog entry about sizing…

Legal Affairs

July|August 2004 Want Your Kid to Disappear? For $1,800, former Atlanta police officer Rick Strawn will make that problem child someone else's problem. He even makes house calls. By Nadya Labi Louis…

The Ongoing Mysteries of the Elizabeth Smart Case

Joy Gough/Zumapress.comTemple Square attracts religious wackos like moths to a flame. They stand outside the wall yelling condemnations, calling for repentance, quoting from the Bible. Or they pose…

The Movie Set That Ate Itself

The rumors started seeping out of Ukraine about three years ago: A young Russian film director has holed up on the outskirts of Kharkov, a town of 1.4 million in the country's east,…

INSIDE 'SCIENTOLOGY HIGH'

CLICK TO VIEW MAP Welcome to Scientology High, where students imagine they re in a Harry Potter book, make lots of clay models, look up the in the dictionary and learn the ethical principles of L.…

The Turnaround Men

J ust after dawn on a cool morning in September 2008, two FBI agents and a police officer walked into the Bellagio Casino in Las Vegas and took the security elevator up to the twenty-third floor,…

Capital New York

You live in Manhattan below 125th Street, or gentrified Brooklyn, or a quiet part of Queens. You want Chinese food. You re not following some recommendation from an old Sam Sifton column or a food…

A mind dismembered: In search of the magical penis thieves

No one is entirely sure when magical penis loss first came to Africa. One early incident was recounted by Dr. Sunday Ilechukwu, a psychiatrist, in a letter some years ago to the Transcultural…