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Odds and Ends

From the Magazine

Zapped by the Invisible World
At some point in my predawn walk—not at the top of a hill or the exact moment of sunrise, but in its own good time—the world flamed into life. How else to describe it? There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. ...

Earth Liberation Stunt
“The Crying Indian” (1971) was one of the first television commercials to forge the link between advertising and authenticity. Toss a Styrofoam cup out of your car as you speed down the interstate, and you will make an Indian cry. Only he’s not crying, and he’s not an ...

Soak the Rich
This exchange is from a conversation in Paris between David Graeber and Thomas Piketty, discoursing on the deep shit we’re all in and what we might do about climbing out. It was held at the École Normale Supérieure; moderated by Joseph Confavreux and Jade Lindgaard; edited ...

The Code
I. The Code You need to know how to talk to these small nations. At the recent Bosnian and Croatian premieres of her film In the Land of Blood and Honey, Angelina Jolie gave a master class in how it’s done. As a film star, Jolie could’ve done as she pleased, yet she ...

The Head Office
The Head Office knows everything better. The Head Office has the overview, the belief in overview, and a filing system. In the Head Office men are busy with never-ending disputes but they slap you on the back and say: “Dear Friend, you can’t judge from your individual ...

Maze of Doom
February 2014
Issue No. 20
Creating an L.A.-based television show is a strange enterprise. In certain ways, it’s like every other creative endeavor that begins with an idea in someone’s head. If the head belongs to a writer, there is the blank screen, the medium for realizing the idea in words. For a ...

A Bad Day in Brooklyn
February 2014
Issue No. 20
If the financial industry operates in our society like a ruthless drug dealer, then the book publishing industry is like a superannuated old biddy, once grand and imperious, now losing her faculties and prone to ill-advised dispensations of large sums of money. She sort of means ...

Smells Like . . .
Yosh Han, a perfumer in San Francisco, got her start a decade ago managing 826 Valencia’s retail arm, the Pirate Store. She began making scents for her then-boss Dave Eggers and his friends and associates at McSweeney’s, including authors JT Leroy (whom she describes as ...

My Own Little Mission
Fatal Attraction An acquaintance of mine was into fly-fishing. I wouldn’t have had a clue what it was all about had he not shown me his resplendent collection of flies, their miniature beauty enchanting. I could easily imagine a dazzled salmon in a shady Scottish stream, an ...

Disposable Hip
January 2014
Issue No. 19
Once upon a time the iPhone was to digital photography what Steve Wozniak was to the samba: it could perform, but it wasn’t pretty. But then Synthetic, LLC, a tiny design consultancy turned app maker, released Hipstamatic. Recognizing that the iPhone could never go ...

Buncombe
America is a country made possible by hucksterism and carnival buncombe. It is the birthplace of both modern PR and advertising, the first place on earth to apply techniques of commercial marketing to politics, and a country where, for at least thirty years, the economy has been ...

The Flight of the Creative Class
Dear Mayor Billings: Provo needs a premier literary magazine. In order to succeed in the twenty-first century and flourish economically, cities today must attract and retain the vital group of individuals that experts call “cultural creatives.” Only by doing so can cities ...