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Outbursts

From the Magazine

The Bimbo’s Laugh
“You’re breaking up with me because I’m too . . . blonde?” Elle Woods drives up to the Harvard campus in her Porsche convertible wearing a hot pink leather suit and a Bottega Veneta bag. Chihuahua in tow, she looks like the fever dream of all the blondes who came before ...

Miraculous Feelings
The exclamation “You’re obsessed,” no matter how it’s uttered, amounts to a layman’s diagnosis or charge, a way of saying something’s wrong with you, and thus a spur to recognition and betterment by the one exclaiming, since the knee-jerk assumption is always that ...

The Short Story Priesthood
When George Saunders first arrived at Syracuse University in 1986, he had three hundred bucks, an aging pick-up truck, and a prodigious, blond mustache. His proletarian look and habit of sleeping in the beater’s camper extension only added to the mystique of being the only ...

Far from the Maddening Crowd
In the spring of 1973, the Italian writer Guido Morselli returned from vacation to his home in rural Lombardy, where he lived alone, to a fateful letter from the publisher Mondadori. Before departing for a foray into the mountains, he sent off the manuscript of his most recent ...

California Elegy
This year much of California was ablaze, the skies in San Francisco a warm, fire-and-brimstone orange. More than four million acres burned, in fires that included five of the six largest conflagrations in the state’s recorded history. One of them, the August Complex, stretched ...

Grief’s Anatomy
I have found myself having a hard time with all of the talk about eras. The ability to rewrite history—to forget the past and pretend that the present is a unique experience, to talk about a particular moment’s violence and upheavals as if they’ve just arrived, floated in ...

The Kindness of Strangers
At the end of Moby-Dick, after the Pequod is splintered by the white whale, a coffin bobs up from the sinking wreckage, and Ishmael, treading water in the South Pacific, climbs on top of it. Over the next day, as sharks glide peacefully by, Ishmael floats “on a soft and ...

The Prosperity Hoax
November 2020
Issue No. 54
No one denies that a large number of people worldwide live in drudgerous poverty. But it would appear that we are in the midst of a historic transformation. In recent years, a spate of articles in the anglophone press and academia have suggested that global poverty has entered ...

Monsoon Dread
November 2020
Issue No. 54
In the late eighteenth century, in the Indian town of Deeg, in the desert state of Rajasthan, there was a palace garden where it rained all year round. Even on still, shimmeringly hot summer days, you could get caught in a downpour: the Jat rulers had installed copper pipes in ...