I got the first email at 10:54 a.m. on a Friday.

Donald Trump is horrible and disgusting, and the menagerie of melting, gelatinous creatures surrounding him are also horrible and disgusting, but they’re not really new. The behavior they’ve exhibited over the last three years came into focus, in Facebook and before long silences at family dinners, during the years…

The horses had all the hay they needed, the random bucket of water had been emptied into the wash trough, the cook had his sacks of grain or flour or whatever, and there were no more logs to split. The menial morning chores were done. And I thought, Shit, I guess now I gotta go have a thrilling Old West adventure. I…

Recently my wife told me I would enjoy meeting a friend of hers, who she described as “a big Halloween person.” When I asked what made this friend a big Halloween person, she told me this friend made her own superhero Halloween costume from scratch this year. And I, a punctilious dickweed, skipped right past being…

This piece is part of a recurring series that aims to be a complete guide to the laws of war. You can read previous entries here.

On Leap Day several years ago, Bold, the hardcore band, played the East Village coke den Lit Lounge’s packed basement in front of a hundred or two hundred people. The band, well into their middle age, hadn’t released a record since 1989, and are best known for punk songs they wrote as teenagers. Singer Matt Warnke…

Presumably this Heidi Cruz profile, by Elaina Plott at The Atlantic, was written in an effort to provide some sort of human element to Ted Cruz’s re-election campaign, as he is incapable of doing that himself. Instead, it came off as a dire warning of what will happen to a person’s life if they fuck and fall in love…

Andy Knox, a student at Da Vinci Charter Academy in California, told KRCA-TV how he came across the dead grandpa cookies. “Two weeks ago, I was just about to go into my sixth-period class, environmental science, and a girl who was also in the class stopped me and asked me if I wanted a cookie. And I knew her, so I…

There are no circumstances under which you should feel bad for Chris Christie, but here’s the one that seems closest. Heading into the primary campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, Christie had a brand that worked for him. He wasn’t a great or even terribly good governor of New Jersey—he was…

Here is a good technique: anytime this or that Trump stooge or Republican or conservative (they’re all the same thing, really) makes surprising headlines, and you find yourself wondering if they might have done it for reasons you can respect or admire or at least in which you might possibly vest some hope or optimism,…

I was alone in a hotel room on the East Side of Manhattan last week (PRO TIP: Never stay on the East Side of Manhattan during the UN General Assembly, unless you enjoy endless traffic barricades and the overwhelming stench of cologne in elevators), when I had a really bad nightmare. Like all dreams, the particulars of…

This piece is part of a recurring series that aims to be a complete guide to the laws of war. You can read previous entries here.

If you have read anything about the NBA 2K series in the past couple years, then you know that its centerpiece “MyCareer” mode, in which you guide a custom-created fledgling NBA player to stardom, is a hyper-branded, microtransaction-choked nightmare all but explicitly designed to pressure human players into spending …

It’s both a truism and true that politics is about power, how it’s used and who it’s used against. But politics are also about the business of pain—about which individuals and which communities bear how much and at what cost, and so implicitly whose pain is worth more than others. Everyone lives in and with this…

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh spoke many words at today’s confirmation hearings. Probably you know this already, but his opening statement, and the responses that followed, were an overlong fever dream, taking surreal detours into calendar hygiene, workouts with some now-legendary Tobin, his own principled…

That all of this—the unalloyed and dovetailing lust for power of one white male sociopath and the aggregate of white men, the future of the highest judicial body in the country, that country’s total failure to assign any kind of consequence to sexual violence, America’s marrow-deep hatred and fear and distrust of…

I have never left a job in a huff. I have never stormed out. I have never flipped my boss the double bird. I have never quit a job with proud disregard for the potential consequences. The closest I ever came to such a fever dream was when I quit a legal ad firm after just three weeks on the job, because I had gotten…

Shit’s real weird now.

Summer is almost over. But the sweet memories of those last months remain: Sweating through your clothes, forgetting to correctly apply sunscreen and getting burnt, getting so drunk you embarrass yourself, forgetting your sunglasses and not being able to see. And also some good things, too, presumably.