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Odds and Ends

From the Magazine

Possibility of Infection
I remember going to the British museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to ...

Against Merit
The National Lottery of Mexico is a government institution that organizes drawings for cash prizes. Introduced in 1770, the lottery was once a monopoly that sold tickets in even the smallest of cities. It fell into decline when casinos were legalized, and now it loses money, but ...

Nerds on the Knife Edge
Silicon Valley is not an entirely new phenomenon. What’s new is the rise of a sterile nerdiness as a dominant personality. It’s almost an eschatology: the world is a giant program that we’re optimizing, and we’ll make ourselves obsolete as part of that—the grand ...

God’s Game
It’s sadly easy to forget all the good Christian work football does. Leaving aside the divine manifestation of a career-ending hit (how else to interpret a pregame prayer that ends in a gametime fractured spine?), there are numerous other examples of the marriage of Jesus and ...

Brown Noser
Amid all the renewed attention that Monica Lewinsky has won from a pundit class unable to wean itself off the lubricious soap-saga of the Clinton years, a weird, um, lacuna in the record has escaped notice. According to Lewinsky’s 1998 deposition, she orally “stimulated” ...

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 ...