profiles
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Personal Essays
The Querent
Fortunetelling is easy to ridicule, frequently misunderstood, and, for some people, extremely powerful. Unfortunately, what’s very tough to predict is what reading futures will do to the person with the cards.
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Not Rocket Science
Behind the Pulse
When I collapsed in public two weeks ago, I could hear everything happening around me, but could barely respond. Making sense of it all was even more difficult.
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Portraits by Other Means
Tweeting Into Oblivion
Gene Sharp, Intellectual In this era of Twitter revolutionaries, the Internet holds little allure for Mr. Sharp. He is not on Facebook and does not venture onto the Einstein website. (...
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Personal Essays
The Crap in My Head
Little things people say can get stuck in your brain and become triggers, forcing you to relive moments you’d rather forget. Well, for aspiring linguists, it’s much, much worse.
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Portraits by Other Means
Trials, Triumphs, and What They Wore
Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State The pantsuit is Clinton’s uniform. Hers is a mix-and-match world, a grown-up land of Garanimals: black pants with gray jacket, tan jacket with...
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Crushes on Strangers
The Barista
I sighed when people said his name. I had taken to needlessly applying lip gloss before I got my morning coffee and again when I stopped by for an afternoon...
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Birnbaum V.
Jim Shepard
Our man in Boston and Jim Shepard, the author most recently of You Think That’s Bad, discuss whacko projects, researching short stories by jet, and how much gold it takes for a writer to dump Knopf’s Gary Fisketjon.
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Portraits by Other Means
Our Better Halves
Pearl I, II, and III, Shorthaired Pointers [Robert Parker] preferred staying in and watching baseball games with his German shorthaired pointer, Pearl. Mr. Parker had three German shorthairs named Pearl;...
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Portraits by Other Means
The Diets of Others
The Terrorist Diet [In Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden] no longer slaughtered a lamb every day to serve his guests; now he rarely ate meat, preferring to live on dates, milk,...
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American Letters
The Man Behind the Window
Allan Seager was a student at Oxford when he contracted tuberculosis. What happened next made him one of America’s greatest writers—declared the heir to Anderson and Hemingway—ever to be forgotten. Yet one of Seager’s short stories endures in ways that none of Hemingway’s can match.
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Profiles
Defenders of the Faith
We live in the golden age of all-female tribute bands, from Sheagles and Blonde Jovi to AC/DShe and Cheap Chick. Here we present an anatomy of a scene, with Judas Priestess—from women who pioneered stoner/doom rock to teenagers playing Alice Cooper drum solos at Philadelphia’s rock academy.
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Birnbaum v.
Arthur Phillips, Redux
Our man in Boston sits down with the extremely likeable Arthur Phillips to chat about everything, including his latest novel.