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Author: Ed Burmila

Columns

Death on the Beach
September 25, 2019
With apologies to House of Sand and Fog, the single most depressing read in the English language is Nevil Shute’s 1957 Cold War classic On the Beach. A nuclear war has created a radioactive cloud slowly working its way around the planet that exterminates all human life it ...

We Can’t Go on like This
August 15, 2019
The Mike Gravel presidential campaign, which shut down last week, will probably be remembered as a curiosity singular to the late 2010s, when American politics spun out of orbit for good, and the solemn, useless rules of the spectacle were discarded. The campaign, often and ...

Labor of Love
July 24, 2019
A few years back, women started foisting babies on to me and then wandering away to do something else—take a nap, cook dinner, watch TV. It had been at least two decades since my last babysitting gig—years during which, by most accounts, I had become something of a “bad ...

Market Values
July 03, 2019
On a snowy, sleety evening last November, inside the auction room at Phillips on Park Avenue, Henry Highley was waiting at a lacquered podium. Potential buyers filed in slowly, closing their umbrellas, unzipping their parkas, and making their way to their seats with their ...

Apply Directly to the Forehead
May 29, 2019
Like many preteens prescribed heavy-duty amphetamines, I had difficulty sleeping. This manifested in a variety of ways, but the most common was sneaking out of my room to watch my favorite late-night channel, The Weather Channel, until I passed out from exhaustion on my ...

Choosing Battles
May 24, 2019
In a March 29 article in The Cut, politician and former Our Revolution board member Lucy Flores alleges that during her Nevada Lieutenant Governor campaign, Joe Biden put his hands on the back of her shoulders, smelled her hair, and kissed the top of her head. Former Connecticut ...