Selected Writing
Mother of Invention
On Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation for BookForum. In 1999, Jenny Offill published her first novel, Last Things, written in the voice of a girl caught between her passive scientist father and her mother, an increasingly unstable fabulist who takes her daughter on the run to nowhere in particular. Startlingly assured in inhabiting a child’s…
Read MoreBring Up the Bodies
On Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies (BookForum) Hilary Mantel’s 2009 novel, Wolf Hall, was an extraordinary achievement, a work of historical and artistic integrity that nonetheless managed to be a hit across genders, generations, and sensibilities. I know a twentysomething male worshipper of Thomas Bernhard who loves it, and I know a retired female…
Read MoreAre You a Boy or a Girl?
It starts with a gender-reveal celebration, and it culminates at the door of a bathroom in North Carolina.
Read MoreIvanka Trump Makes Donald Even Scarier
Ivanka Trump achieved her status as the best reality television character the genre has ever produced on her father’s NBC program Celebrity Apprentice. This was an arena in which the likes of Tom Green, Dennis Rodman, Andrew “Dice” Clay, and other reanimated wax figures from the Museum of Déjà Vu would vie to create a…
Read MoreThe Kim Kardashian Game Is So Good I Had to Stop Playing It
It’s not surprising that the mobile game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is expected to generate $200 million in annual revenue, because Kim Kardashian generates money the way that most people generate carbon dioxide. She earned $28 million in the past 12 months simply by showing up at events, showing up on TV, and showing up (albeit…
Read MoreI Want to Live in Spike Jonze’s Future
Great pants. A reassuringly familiar undertone of melancholy. Warning! This piece contains spoilers for Spike Jonze’s new movie, Her. The near future is usually an appalling place, where designer babies are delivered via drone and preschoolers learn Java via brain wave–reading headbands and private security forces of headless mechanical boars stalk our office parks at…
Read MoreYou Really Should See the New Mandela Movie
Though it has already broken box-office records in South Africa, the new biopic Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom has gotten mostly middling reviews, or worse. Scott Tobias of the Dissolve wrote that this “dull, glossy, and uncomplicated film” provides “a lesson in how not to make a historical biopic.” Writing in Variety, Scott Foundas called…
Read MoreDo animals know they are dying?
I Am Convinced My Cat Told Me She Was Dying. Am I Crazy?
Read MoreStephen Colbert: America’s Catholic.
Move over, Antonin Scalia. Stephen Colbert is now America’s Catholic.
Read MoreWhat If Your Mother Had Aborted You?
Well, since Rick Perry brought it up, I’ll answer.
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