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Mad Man
Dick DeBartolo’s first piece for Mad was published in 1962, when he was still in high school, and his work has appeared in every single issue since June 1966. He has written for sections throughout the...
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Always on Display: An Interview with Joshua Ferris
Photo: Beowulf Sheehan/Hachette Brown Group “The mouth is a weird place,” says the dentist-narrator of Joshua Ferris’s new novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. “Not quite inside and not quite out,...
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Over There
R. Ferro, Cupidity - Greed Lately I’ve been listening to the excellent BBC documentary World War I, which you can download and then listen to, incongruously, while waiting on line at the grocery store....
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His Own Wavelength
Talking to Weird Al about his process. From the promotional poster for UHF, Al’s 1989 film. It’s not that there wasn’t a self-referential pop culture before “Weird Al” Yankovic; it’s just that those of...
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Life After the Bench, and Other News
Garry Winogrand, World’s Fair, New York City, 1964 Catching up with two subjects from a 1964 Garry Winogrand photograph—that one, up there—fifty years later: “I never saw a photographer, or anyone...
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Insure Yourself with Faulkner
From December 1921 until October 1924, William Faulkner enjoyed a famously disastrous tenure as the University of Mississippi’s postmaster. He’d arrive late, leave early, play bridge, and work on his...
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A Kind of Sleaze
The New York Observer has an excellent new interview with Robert Crumb, whose response to the Charlie Hebdo attack appeared in Libération this weekend. Crumb has lived in France for a quarter of a...
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Letter from New York, 2005
Adventures in tastelessness at The Onion. Photo: Casey Bisson, via Flickr I used to be an editor at The Onion. This was in 2004, when most of the original writers were still there—just a handful had...
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The Law of Jante
How an irritable Danish author left an enduring mark on the national character. Aksel Sandemose in 1963. Photo: Leif Ørnelund Your modern-day Dane is not what you would call a God-fearing creature. The...
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Four Poems by Richard Milhous Nixon
Abraham Lincoln, John Quincy Adams, and Jimmy Carter all published collections of poetry—and I don’t mean to diminish their stately, often tender contributions to arts and letters by what follows. But...
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Don’t Be an Author—Be an Authorpreneur! and Other News
“Please read my book.” From a 1917 poster for The Traveling Salesman. “People don’t want moral complexity. Moral complexity is a luxury. You might be forced to read it in school, but a lot of people...
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Terry Pratchett, 1948–2015
The T-shirt Pratchett wore to conventions. Image via Fashionably Geek The BBC has just reported that Terry Pratchett has died at sixty-six. Pratchett wrote more than seventy books, most of them part of...
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That Old Goat!
Robert Walser’s scrupulous art of translation.Robert WalserToday is International Translation Day, an occasion of particular piety among the few who observe it. Translation, that glorious service to...
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The Nose
An operator treating the carbuncled nose of an obese patient, James Gillray, 1801. Image via Wellcome LibraryA lot of things are a century old this year: Boeing, Roald Dahl, the Professional Golfers’...
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I Spent $300 on a T-shirt Last Week, and Other News
Simon Hanselmann. Photo: Fantagraphics, via the Guardian.Need a morning pick-me-up? Say it with me: “I am full of impulses to shove animal matter into my poorly designed facial rot hole … I must...
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My First Visit to an Editorial Office
Teffi.Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, born in Saint Petersburg in 1872, used Teffi as her nom de plume. (“It sounds like something you’d call a dog,” she wrote, explaining that she wanted “a name that was...
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Attack of the De-Constructivists, and Other News
Rusakov Workers’ Club in Moscow by Konstantin Melnikov, 1927–28.Borges, who died thirty years ago this month, led a life as tangled in riddles as his fiction is. One burning question: How did he pay...
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Snorri the Seal
What a vain little seal!It’s Banned Books Week, and everyone is rallying around the classics: your Gatsbys, your Catcher in the Ryes, your Mockingbirds and Lady Chatterleys. No one is giving any love...
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Poor Richard
Philip Guston’s drawings of Nixon have transcended their subject. Philip Guston, Untitled (Poor Richard), 1971, ink on paper, 10 1/2″ x 13 7/8″. “A lot of work after the election looks very...
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Puppets Are Doing Just Fine, and Other News
Look at ’em go! One fun thing you can do with art is: use it to tell people what assholes they are. This is easy to try, but hard to master. Shahak Shapira, an Israeli-German writer, has the knack...
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