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There is a satirical story by Edgar Allan Poe, called “How to Write a Blackwood Article”, in which the editor of the notorious Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine reveals to an ambitious young journalist

If Lena Dunham undresses on TV and no one is around to watch her, does she still make an impact? On a recent episode of Girls, Hannah Horvath poses nude, George-Costanza style, in a makeshift photo-studio in the back of a coffee shop.

As Facebook increasingly becomes the site of work-related activity, alongside what's left in this degraded age of true amical interaction, I've come to think of it as a sort of cloaca, through which both the shit and the joyous stuff of life pass indiscriminately.

Our brains are lazy; we are reluctant to remember things when we can in effect delegate the task to someone or something else. You can observe this by listening to couples, who often consult one another’s memories: “What was the name of that nice Chinese restaurant we went to...

Today I ran without music. When I run this way my head boils out, matter shooting everywhere like water on hot oil. Phrases reach me and mostly move away before I can trap and extend them into actual thoughts.

For some women, menopause is no big deal. Some say they barely notice it. My mother, long ago, described her menopause this way: “My periods just started gettin’ lighter and lighter, and my harmones settled down, and then one day … pfft! It was over.”

In a popular Woody Allen joke about a moose, Allen, playing a schlemiel from New York City, recalls how he went hunting and shot an animal in Upstate New York. After shooting the moose, he brought it back to the city.

For most of the last century, newspapers were a licence to print money. Sports car-driving sales people boasted of turning down clients because the paper was too full; they couldn’t take another ad.