New Certificates of Expertise
© Sam Potts
© Sam Potts
© Sam Potts
© Sam Potts
© Sam Potts
© Sam Potts
© Sam Potts
Odds and Ends
From the Magazine
Tick Tock
Southern California has always been a place confused about time. The people there escaped the dead hand of the past in municipalities that they conjured, ex nihilo, out of orange groves, and where they built—as Nathanael West mocked in The Day of the Locust—houses resembling ...
Three Cheers for George Scialabba
November 2015
John Summers
When the balance of trade between George Scialabba’s pension plan requirements and his age came to an agreement, and his long dreamed-of chance to break free of his day job at last presented itself, he retired from Harvard University, where he had served with ...
The Blue and the Gray Zone
Early on a Saturday morning in May, I pulled off a highway in northern Virginia and drove into an imagineered Civil War past. Across from a stately old plantation stood some reconstructed slave quarters, and just past them I found the designated encampment. On this particular ...
Captive Audiences
The social myths spurring on the American incarceration state all revolve around the vague, civically agreeable method of stigmatizing the offender, segregating the wrongdoer, and establishing a clear divide between “us” and “them.” We need to keep locking up criminals, ...
Live Nice (or Else)
“Mean Stinks!” is Procter & Gamble’s campaign to stomp out bullying, sponsored by Secret deodorant. Why deodorant? Why not? Cause-related marketing is at least as old as aluminium zirconium tetrachlorohydrex gly. And as Monica Lewinsky said in her TED Talk in March, ...