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Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia | by Colson Whitehead

Grantland

I have a good poker face because I am half-dead inside. My particular combo of slack features, negligible affect, and soulless gaze had helped my game ever since I started...

Quentin Blake by Lee Konstantinou In a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called “Why We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading,” Alan Jacobs argues that “‘deep attention’ reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit.” The inevitable minority status of deep reading “has...

Photograph by Rowland Williams by Samuel Jay Keyser Ed Schein, one of the foremost authorities on organizational structure—he coined the term “corporate culture”—sent me an e-mail commenting on my book, Mens et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows: When visiting CEO’s would tell me how badly MIT was run,...

by Julia James When Stanford visiting scholar Li Cong thinks back to her recent stint surveying villagers in the Anhui province of China, one interviewee in particular springs to mind. He was a middle-aged man, not too rich, who was so desperate to finally wed that he’d spent years...

by Justin E. H. Smith When I spend, as I often do, several days in a row without human contact, it starts to seem to me that the principal function of language is to describe, in written form, the contents of commercially available food items. This is more alienating...

Talky Tina, aka the Living Doll, from The Twilight Zone, CBS, 1959-64 From The Paris Review: I’m waiting for the elevator in a medieval-themed hotel in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, when the elevator doors open to reveal a heated exchange between a bald man in a Hawaiian shirt and a puppet...

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in The Trip, BBC From The New York Review of Books: With his fetishistic parochialism, supreme literal-mindedness, and rancid bourgeois complacency, Partridge was a parody not just of English talk show hosts but of contemporary England itself. As with Basil Fawlty of Fawlty Towers...

They Live, Universal Pictures, 1988 by Justin Lewis Advertising is everywhere. Media that were once largely commercial free – from movies to the internet – now come replete with commercial messages. Not so long ago, most musicians were reluctant to see their work used to endorse shampoo or sneakers....

Punishment of the Panderers and Seducers and the Flatterers, Sandro Botticelli, c.1480-c.1495 by Elif Batuman Forward-thinking readers! You don’t need me to tell you that our language is a living, growing organism. So, in an effort to stay with the times, I recently attempted to use the word “douchebags”...

Knowing animals more fully will prompt us to treat them better...

Fellow Prisoners | by John Berger

Guernica

The wonderful American poet Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent lecture about poetry that “this year, a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics finds that one out of every 136 residents of...